The Booth Bench On Moms Porch

It was not a bad reason. That was the whole trouble. He was not a cruel boy. He was a scared one with a lamp on his shirt, and he had decided the people who had kept his great-uncle’s lights on for thirty-eight years were now the problem.

“It’s just a bench, Ashley,” he said, taking my twenties.

“Then it’s cheap,” I said.

I counted them out into his hand. Four twenties and a five. Then I asked him for a receipt, and he wrote one on the back of a guest check, and I folded it into my coat pocket, where it stayed for the next three weeks.

I will confess something. I wanted to say more. There was a speech in me, a good one, with the number forty in it and the word shame. Standing there, I could feel every word of it.

But my mother did not raise a woman who makes speeches in a half-torn-apart dining room. She raised a woman who carries things.

So I took hold of one end of the bench.

It weighed, I would guess, a hundred and fifty pounds. Oak frame, a plywood back, foam and vinyl on the seat, built in 1979 when people made things to be sat on for a lifetime. Scott took the other end and nearly went to his knees.

“Lord,” he said. “What did they put in this?”

“Forty years of Fridays,” I said.

We got it six feet. Then a hand came down on the bench near my hand, a big knuckly farmer’s hand with a seed cap logo faded to nothing.

It was Eldred Krieger. He is eighty-one. He and Irma have sat in booth nine every Friday since they were married in 1966, and I had not even known he was in the building.

“Where’s that going, Ashley?”

“To Mom’s porch,” I said.

Eldred looked at the bench. He looked at me. Then, without a word, he looked over his shoulder and whistled through his teeth, the way a man calls a dog.

Lyle Rudolph, Cindy’s husband, put down a bar stool. Two of the Hanson brothers came off the wall where they had been pricing sconces. A woman I had never met, with a bus-tour lanyard still around her neck, who had come in to buy souvenirs, set down her bag.

Six people picked up the bench. Seven, counting Scott, who had stopped pretending his back was fine.

And that is how my parents’ booth left the Lamplighter Supper Club: not on a dolly, but on the shoulders of seven people walking slowly through a dining room, past Derrick Jorgensen standing with his cash box, and out the double doors to Scott’s flatbed in the bright cold morning, while forty strangers stood aside and let it pass.

Nobody clapped. It was too quiet for that. Somebody held the door.

I did not look back at Derrick. I did not need to. I heard the cash box close.

We strapped it down in the bed of Scott’s Ford with a moving blanket under it, and I rode in the back, one hand on the oak, all six miles out County Road K.

Halfway there I ran my hand along the underside of the seat to steady myself, and my fingers hit something rough.