Tumbleweeds by Leila Meacham

Author:Leila Meacham [Meacham, Leila]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781455509256
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2012-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Three

A day after Cathy’s proposal, a sign was posted on the front of Bennie’s Burgers: CLOSED FOR REPAIRS. WILL REOPEN DECEMBER 1. The labor force set to work. Cars slowed on Main Street to observe the moveable furniture of Kersey’s only family-owned hamburger establishment piled on the sidewalk and a flurry of cleaning activity going on behind the large plate-glass windows. New menus were drawn up and encased in clean plastic folders. Booths, tables, and chairs were scrubbed down to the visible wood. An advertisement publicizing the additions to Bennie’s bill of fare was placed in the local paper alongside the editor’s interview with the owner, who was quoted as saying, “It was time for a change.”

Bennie surprised her with a new sign in the window—NO SMOKING. “For the sake of the baby,” he explained.

There were naysayers, among them Mabel Church. “Emma Benson, have you lost your senses? You know I’ve never been one to mind too much what people say, but this time they’d be right in thinking that the Bensons have succumbed to the lowest depths possible with Cathy working as a waitress and her grandmother slinging hash.”

“Now, Mabel, that’s not so,” Emma said. “The next level would be begging on the streets.”

“And who, pray tell,” Mabel went on, “will want to eat food from an eatery with Odell Wolfe in the kitchen?”

“Those who want to eat my hot-water corn bread.”

When the place reopened, a curious stream of customers were greeted with fresh scents of recent cleaning and table displays of poinsettias in honor of the season. Emma’s prediction to Mabel proved correct. Baskets of her hot, crunchy corn bread—“manna bread”—came standard with every meal and alone drew patrons who had never before been inside Bennie’s. By the end of January, the ledger books showed that the formerly named Bennie’s Burgers had enjoyed the best fiscal month in years.

Mabel’s concern that Emma would be “looked down upon” in her new line of work did not take into account the other side of the Panhandle character that deemed folks who worked hard to do their best with the hand they were dealt deserved respect. The Benson women found their stock gradually returning to their former heights in the eyes of Kersey County. The awkward situation of her nephew’s abandonment of the mother of his child prevented Mabel from having a baby shower for Cathy, but Paula Tyson, the sheriff’s wife, was bound by no such embarrassment. She hosted a Sunday afternoon party attended by classmates of Cathy’s still in the area, a sizeable number of the town’s elite, including Coach Turner’s wife, and Bebe and Melissa, who drove in from their colleges.

Trey had not come home to spend the Christmas holiday with his aunt. The town frowned over his neglect of the woman who had done so much for him. It did not matter that he had asked Mabel to Coral Gables to join the family whose invitation he had accepted. The feeling was that Trey’s place at Christmastime was at the fireside of his loving and lonely aunt.

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