Mom’s Ninetieth at the Front Window

Saturday

The seventh of November came in clear and cold, one of those bright fall days in southeast Nebraska when the sky is so blue it looks painted and the light comes in low and gold even at noon.

I picked Mom up at eleven fifteen. She had been ready since ten. Her hair was set in soft white curls from her Friday appointment, and she was sitting on the edge of her couch with her purse on her knees like a girl waiting for a date.

“How do I look?” she asked.

“Like the best waitress Main Street ever had,” I said.

“I was,” she said, and she was not joking.

The cafe has big plate glass front windows that go almost down to the sidewalk. At noon on a sunny day the light comes through them so bright that the old chrome on the counter stools shines like new.

Raymond had set out one long scrubbed wooden table by the window, the kind with painted legs, the best table in the place in fifty-nine years. There was a little jam sponge cake on a plate at the head of the table, with a ring of candles waiting.

The card club was already there. Four ladies in four cardigans, sitting along both sides of that table like birds on a wire.

They have played pinochle with Mom every other Thursday since the Carter years. They stood up when we came in, all four of them, which took some doing, and one of them started clapping and the rest followed.

Mom stopped in the doorway with her hand on my arm.

“Oh, my,” she said. “Oh, would you look at that.”

Raymond came out from behind the counter in a clean white apron and pulled out the chair at the head of the table, the one with its back to the kitchen and its face to the window and the whole of Main Street.

“Billie,” he said. “Your table.”

She sat. She smoothed the old wood with both hands, the way I have seen her smooth a hundred tablecloths at a hundred church dinners.

My husband came in from parking the car. Then we waited, and I watched the door, and I tried not to watch the door.

At twelve ten my brother walked in alone.

He was still in his work jacket. He had come straight from the elevator, where they were dumping the last of the soybeans, and there was dust on his shoulders and his cap was in his hand.

He went to Mom first and kissed her on the cheek and told her happy birthday, and then he sat down beside me, and he leaned over and said in a low voice, “Tiffani’s coming. She’s picking up Brooklyn at the store.”

I nodded.

“Corrine,” he said, even lower. “Brooklyn told me something last night.”

I looked at him. His face was red under the windburn.

“About a cookie tin,” he said.

I did not say anything. I did not have to. He looked at the little cake, and at Mom in her cranberry dress, and at the four ladies in their cardigans, and he put his cap down on the table and pressed both his hands flat on top of it.

“I didn’t know,” he said. “I swear to you I didn’t know.”

“I believe you,” I said, and I did.

“She told me Mom gave it. She said Mom wanted Brooklyn to have it.”

“Mom wanted her table,” I said. “That’s all she ever wanted.”