The Booth Bench On Moms Porch

“What do you need hauled?” he said.

“A bench,” I said. “Seven feet, oak, red vinyl. I’ll pay you in fish fry.”

“Which bench?”

“Booth six.”

There was a long quiet on the line, and then Scott said, “I’ll be there at ten with the ratchet straps.”

Scott and I pulled into the Lamplighter lot at ten-twenty. It was one of those cold, bright October mornings that smell like woodsmoke and cut corn, with the maples gone the color of a traffic cone and the sky so blue it looked fake.

There were about forty people in the lot, which surprised me. Half of them I knew. Folks from town, some from the churches, a couple of antique dealers with clipboards and flat expressions.

Inside, the dining room looked like a house after an estate sale. The paneling was still up. The fireplace was still there. The muskie was gone, and it left a pale rectangle on the knotty pine like a missing tooth.

All the booths had been dragged out into the middle of the floor. Benches stacked on benches. Price tags on masking tape.

And there, on the end of a row, with a sticker that said Booth 6 in Derrick’s loopy handwriting, was my parents’ bench.

I had not planned to feel anything. I had planned to pay and leave.

I put my hand on the back of it and the vinyl was cold and cracked, patched in two places with red tape that my father had put there himself in 1998 when a salesman’s belt buckle tore it. Dad had asked Lars Jorgensen for the tape. Lars gave him the whole roll.

I looked at that tape for a long time.

“Ashley.”

Derrick had come up behind me with a cash box under his arm. He was wearing a quarter-zip with the Lamplighter’s new logo on the chest, a sleek little lamp that looked like it belonged on a hotel.

“I didn’t think you’d come,” he said.

“I’d like this one,” I said. “Booth six. The bench.”

He looked at the tag and then at me, and I watched him work out whether I was being sarcastic. I was not. I held out the money.

“Eighty-five dollars,” I said. “That’s what the sign says.”

“Ashley, look, about Friday.” He lowered his voice. “I felt bad. I did. I just had a bus.”

“I know you did.”

“You don’t understand what this place costs.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “We borrowed four hundred and ten thousand to do this remodel. Four hundred and ten. Uncle Lars carried a second note. I have a payment due every month whether I seat forty or four hundred.”

I let him talk, because he needed to. That is something my mother taught me. Let a man finish his whole defense, and then you know exactly how little is in it.

“The old crowd, they sit three hours on two drinks,” Derrick said. “They want the same booth, the same fish, the same price from 1995. I can’t build a business on that. I need new money in the building. Weekenders. People with a reason to come back.”

“New money,” I said.

“Yes.”

“That’s your reason.”

“It’s my reason,” he said, and to his credit he did not look away. “It’s not a bad reason.”