I was waiting on the wife of one of my regular customers today. She’s always super sweet, & I’m invariably glad to see her. “Yankee,” I began, “her daddy was one of my regulars when I first started working down here. I didn’t know what to think of him. He used to say, ‘who’s your momma?’ All the time & tell me when I got married I was gonna hafta wash the skidmarks out of my husband’s drawers!” Yankee’s eyes got rounder. Clearly, she wouldn’t have known how to take him, either. I smiled at Miss Tammy, his daughter. “But I came to love him. He was a nice man.” She nodded. “Daddy was. I remember too, you & another girl from down here came to his funeral.” I paused. I had forgotten about that. “Yeah, me & Skeeter came. It was probably the first funeral I attended on my own.” (Meaning, without my family) I recall Shanea & I talking ourselves into going. We felt that we needed to. “My husband says I go to more funerals than anybody he knows,” I told Tammy. “But he understands now that my customers are like my family… They’ve seen me grow up, in a way. I don’t necessarily like to go, but I need to.” “…
