The Booth Bench On Moms Porch

“Booths aren’t assigned, Carol.”

That is what Derrick Jorgensen said to my mother, and I know the exact words because Cindy Rudolph told me three times that night, each time a little slower, like she was afraid I would not believe her.

Cindy has waited tables at the Lamplighter Supper Club for thirty-one years. She does not exaggerate. She also does not whisper, unless something is truly wrong.

She called me at ten after seven on Friday, October ninth, from inside the walk-in cooler, because it was the only place in the building where nobody could hear her.

“Ash,” she said. “Your mother just left. She didn’t eat.”

I was standing in my kitchen in my scrubs, holding a fork over a frozen dinner. I put the fork down.

“What do you mean she didn’t eat? It’s Friday. She eats at five.”

“She came at five. She went straight to six, like always. There was a bus in it.”

Booth six is the corner booth, back by the stone fireplace, under the mounted muskie that somebody’s grandfather caught in 1962. My parents sat in booth six every Friday fish fry for forty years. Not most Fridays. Every one.

They went the Friday after their wedding in 1986. They went the Friday after I was born. They went the Friday after their own thirtieth anniversary, and the Friday after they buried my grandmother.

They went in blizzards. Dad would idle the truck at the door and Mom would go in first and say, “Elwin’s parking,” as if everybody in the room did not already know.

My father died fourteen months ago, in August, of his heart, in the seed corn field behind the machine shed. He was seventy-one.

My mother kept going. Alone, in her good church coat, on Friday, at five o’clock. She sat on her side of the booth and Cindy set down two waters, and nobody ever said a word about the second one.

I am telling you this so you understand what a booth is. To outsiders it is a bench and a table. To us it was the one place in the county where my mother was still married.

I’ll tell you the rest the way Cindy told it to me.

My mother walked in at five exactly. A tour bus from Naperville, Illinois, had pulled into the gravel lot at four-forty, forty-four people on a fall color tour, and Derrick had put them all in the back, pushing three tables together in front of the fireplace.

Booth six was the head of that table. A woman in a quilted vest was already sitting on my father’s side, taking a photo of the muskie.

Mom stood there with her purse in both hands.

Derrick came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a towel. He is twenty-nine years old, he has nice teeth and a good haircut, and he was smiling the way you smile at a customer you have to manage.

“Carol,” he said. “Tonight’s a reserved party. I’d have called, but we’ve been slammed.”

“That’s my booth, Derrick,” my mother said. Cindy heard it. She said it was the quietest voice she had ever heard from a person who was standing in the middle of a room.

“Booths aren’t assigned, Carol,” Derrick said. “It’s seating. I can get you a stool at the bar. Ninety minutes, maybe less.”