Raymond
I work as the secretary at the county extension office in Beatrice. I have spent thirty-one years answering questions about canning and 4-H record books and when to plant garlic, and the one thing that job teaches you is that most problems get solved by calling the right person and asking plainly.
So the next morning on my break I drove the twenty minutes down to Wymore and parked across from the cafe.
Raymond Uhlig owns it now. He is sixty-four, a big, slow-talking man with flour on his forearms most days, and he took the place over from his mother when she got too old to stand at the grill.
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He was wiping down the counter when I came in. The breakfast crowd was gone and the noon crowd had not come yet, and the only sound was the pie case humming.
“Corrine Saathoff,” he said. “You want coffee?”
“I want the front window,” I said. “On the seventh of November. At noon. For Mom’s ninetieth.”
He set the rag down.
“Billie’s ninety?”
“She will be.”
“My mother hired her,” Raymond said. “Nineteen fifty-three. Mom used to say Billie was the only girl she ever had who could carry four plates up one arm and still pour with the other hand.” He shook his head. “Ninety.”
I told him what Mom wanted. The card club, four ladies, plus me and my husband, and my brother’s family if they would come. The long table by the big front windows. Hot beef sandwiches, because that was what Mom served most in 1953 and what she still orders every single time.
I told him I was paying, and that I wanted it paid before the day so nobody saw a bill come to the table.
He wrote it on an order pad with a pencil stub, and he did not ask me why a woman who had been talking about paying for her own birthday lunch for two years was not paying for it.
That is the thing about a town of a few thousand. People know when not to ask.
“I’ll do the cake,” he said.
“I’ll pay for the cake.”
“You’ll do no such thing.” He tore the sheet off and stuck it on the nail by the register. “Mom would come back and haunt me.”