Seventy Regulars Came to My Wedding

Card tips went on the slip, and every night Vern counted them out and put them in a manila envelope with my name on it.

The envelopes went in the old black safe under the office desk. Every other Friday he opened it and paid them out in cash.

It was a habit from back when the card machine took a week to settle, and nobody had ever had a reason to question it.

My envelope that Saturday held two weeks of card tips. I knew the number because I wrote every slip in my order book, the way Arlene taught me when I was sixteen. It came to six hundred and forty dollars.

“We’ll settle up,” Vern said. He untied his apron, tied it back on tighter, and walked into the office and shut the door.

I took my apron off and folded it and laid it on the counter by the pie case, which was empty, because Arlene was in a recliner in her living room with a walker beside her.

Then I walked out the front door into Main Street at ten forty in the morning, with the bell jangling over my head the way it had jangled every day for nine years.

I sat in my car in front of the hardware store and shook. I didn’t cry yet. I just shook, like I’d come in out of a blizzard.

Our town sits up in north-central Kansas, along a two-lane highway with wheat on both sides as far as you can see. The grain elevator is the tallest thing for fifteen miles.

There are about nine hundred people, two churches, a school that consolidated with the next town over, and one place to eat breakfast. That was the Corner Cafe.

I started there the summer I turned sixteen, because my mom said I could get a job or I could pull weeds in her garden for free, and I am not a fool.

Arlene hired me on a Tuesday and had me rolling silverware in napkins by Wednesday.

She taught me to carry three plates on one arm. She taught me that the farmers like their coffee hot enough to hurt, and the farm wives like theirs with the cream already in it, and you never ask a man in a seed cap whether he wants a refill. You just fill it.

Vern taught me other things. How to tell when the grease needed changing by the smell. How to make change in my head faster than the register.

How to cut a pie in seven pieces, because that was what his mother did, and nobody ever counted.

He was not a soft man. He was a man who showed up at four every morning for forty years and never once let a hungry person walk out of his place without food, whether they could pay or not.

I saw him do it a dozen times. I loved him for it, in the way you love an uncle who never says much.

That is why it hurt the way it did.

Tyler was working the late shift at the elevator when I called him. In late May the bins are being swept and readied for harvest, and they had him up on the catwalks most of the afternoon.

He called me back on his break with the wind roaring through the phone.