The Booth Bench On Moms Porch

Mom looked at the bar. The bar is where men go after a funeral. She has never once sat on a stool in her life.

“No,” she said. “That’s all right.”

She turned around. She walked the whole length of the dining room, past forty-one tables of people who knew her, and nobody said a word, because nobody could think what to say. Cindy said it was the longest walk she ever watched.

At the door Mom stopped, and she said to Cindy, not to Derrick, “Tell Adam I’m sorry I missed him.”

Then she got in her Buick and drove six miles home to a house with no one in it, and she did not turn on the porch light.

I called her the second Cindy hung up.

“I’m fine, honey,” Mom said. “I wasn’t hungry anyway. I made toast.”

My mother does not lie often, and she is bad at it. I could hear the toast was not real.

I should explain why I did not drive straight to the Lamplighter and make a scene. People ask that, and so did I, lying awake at one in the morning.

First, I called Derrick. I did it that night, calm, from my front step. He told me a booth is seating and not property, that the bus had paid fifty-two dollars a head, and that he could not run a business on sentiment.

“I’m sorry about Carol,” he said. “I really am. But I’ve got a note at the bank, Ashley.”

Second, I called Todd. Todd Jorgensen was my husband for six years and is Derrick’s uncle, and for forty years his family’s name has been over the door of that building.

“It’s Derrick’s call, Ash,” Todd said. “I’m not getting in the middle of a family thing.”

“I was your family thing,” I said, and hung up. It was not my finest sentence. It was true.

Third, and this is the one that matters: my mother. She would rather have eaten gravel than have anybody fight for her in public. When I told her I was going to talk to him, she said, “Ashley, don’t. It’s his place now.”

So I did not go in with my voice raised. I went home and made a list instead.

I waited tables at the Lamplighter from the time I was fifteen until I was eighteen. I know that building down to the floor drain. I know where the good silver lives, and I know what the place looks like when it is full, and I know what it looks like when it is not.

That Saturday morning I stopped at the feed store for dog food. The corkboard by the register had a new flyer on it, bright orange.

Lamplighter Remodel Sale, it said, and I will tell you I read it twice, because I am not sure I have ever been so angry at a piece of paper.

Everything must go. Saturday, ten to two. Booth benches eighty-five dollars each. Bar stools twenty-five. Relish dishes, a dollar. Cash only. Bring a truck.

Derrick had told my mother her booth was just seating, and that was true, and now he was selling the seats.

I called my cousin Scott. He has a flatbed Ford and a bad back and a good heart.