The Pay They Docked For The Funeral

I have poured coffee at the Starlite Cafe on Main Street in Dunmore, Nebraska for twenty two years, and in all that time I only ever learned one thing I was truly good at. I could tell you what a person needed before they sat down. Vernon Pruitt took his coffee black and his eggs over hard, and he did not want to talk until the second cup. Dale Mettler, who hauled grain in a rig the color of a ripe tomato, wanted his chicken fried steak cut into small pieces because his hands shook now and he was ashamed of it, so I cut it in the kitchen where he could not see me do it and brought it out like that was just how we plated it. Katie Ambrose came in Tuesdays with a baby on her hip and a diaper bag she could never get zipped, and she needed somebody to hold that baby for four minutes so she could eat something hot with both hands. I was that somebody. For twenty two years I was that somebody for a whole town, and I never once thought of it as a job. I thought of it as my pew.

My name is Ruthanne Coyle. Most everybody calls me Ruth, and the ones who have known me longest call me Ruthie, and I am fifty eight years old. I started at the Starlite when my own kids were small and my husband was still alive, and I stayed after he passed because the Starlite stayed. That is the thing about a place like that. It holds still while the rest of your life comes apart and gets put back together. The booths are the same cracked red vinyl I slid into as a girl. The pie case still hums the same crooked hum. There is a water stain on the ceiling over the third stool that has been shaped like the state of Texas since the Carter administration, and every new busser we ever hired got told it was a map to buried money, and every one of them looked up at it at least once when they thought nobody was watching.

The man who owned the Starlite was Earl Dillard, and Earl was not a boss so much as he was the oldest tree in the yard. His daddy opened the place in 1961. Earl grew up wiping those same tables. By the time I came on he was already gray and already slow, and he ran the cafe the way you run a thing you love, which is to say badly, on paper, and perfectly in every way that mattered. He let the old men sit on one cup of coffee from six in the morning until nine because he knew that for some of them, the Starlite was the only conversation they would have all day. He kept the prices low because he said he would rather have a full room of his neighbors than an empty room with a better margin. He gave a free slice of pie to anybody having a hard week, and he decided who was having a hard week by looking at their face, and he was never wrong.