Seventy Regulars Came to My Wedding

“If you’re not standing at this counter on the thirteenth, Kaylee, don’t bother coming in Monday.” Vern said it with his back to me, scraping the flat top with the long steel scraper he’d used since before I was born.

The thirteenth of June was my wedding day. He knew that. Everybody in town knew that. Half of them had already asked me whether we were doing brisket or ham at the community building.

It was a Saturday at the end of May, about ten thirty in the morning, the dead stretch between the breakfast crowd and the noon rush at the Corner Cafe.

I had a rack of clean coffee cups balanced on my hip and a pencil behind my ear.

I set the rack down on the steel table. I remember being careful about it, like if I didn’t rattle the cups, maybe I had heard him wrong.

“Vern,” I said, “you wrote those days on the calendar yourself. In January.”

He had. The calendar still hung on the nail by the walk-in cooler, a free one from the co-op with a picture of a combine on it.

June eleventh through the fourteenth had a line drawn through them in his blue ballpoint, and across the line he had written “Kaylee wedding” in his square printing.

“That was January,” he said. He still hadn’t turned around. “January, Arlene had two good hips.”

I want to be fair to him here, because I have had a long time to think about that morning, and being fair is the only way I know to tell it right.

Arlene Atchison had her left hip replaced the first week of May at the hospital in Salina. She had worked the register and made every pie in that cafe for thirty-one years.

When she went down, the whole place tipped sideways, and Vern was trying to hold it up by himself.

He had been in that kitchen alone since then, sixty-four years old, running the grill and the fryer and the dish machine, driving to Salina every evening to sit by her bed, then driving home to start the cinnamon rolls at four in the morning. He looked gray. He had stopped whistling.

So I understood he was scared. I still understand it. But understanding a thing and letting it run over you are two different animals, my grandma used to say.

“I can’t do a Saturday alone,” he said. “I can’t. You know what Saturday supper is in here.”

I did know. Saturday night was chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes, the busiest four hours of his whole week. Farm families came in from twenty miles out. The line went out the door some nights in summer.

“Then let’s find somebody,” I said. “Mandy Kessler’s girl is sixteen. I’ll train her myself. I’ll come in Wednesday and Thursday and work doubles, both days, no extra.”

“I’m not training some kid with my wife laid up.” He finally turned around, and his face was red from the grill and from something else.

“You want the days, take the days. Take all of them. But you’ll take them for good.”

I stood there long enough to hear the ice machine drop a load of ice. Then I asked the only practical question I had left. “What about my tips?”

That is how it worked at the Corner Cafe, and how it had worked since I was a sophomore in high school. Cash tips went in my apron pocket.