Done in Fifteen Years novel · Chapter 30 of 32
Chapter 30: Saturday Night
I stood in the gravel and read it four times.
RAYLENE'S AT VERNIE'S.
My name, in red, on a roof, with every bulb working.
Behind me on the porch, Vernie said, "Well? Is it spelled right?"
"It's spelled right."
"Then quit standing there with your mouth open. There's flies."
On Saturday, October 17, I lit both pits at four in the morning.
Vernie's husband's.
Darrell's daddy's.
Two columns of thin blue smoke went up side by side through the cypress trees.
The night pitman worked one and I worked the other, and we didn't say a word to each other for six hours.
We didn't need to.
At eleven the twins opened the doors.
The line was already down the steps, across the gravel and out to the road.
The river people.
The tubers, in jackets now, because it was October.
The church van from Leakey.
The football coach and half his team.
The two waitresses from Kerrville, the old man with the bolo tie, a dozen families from Cypress Flat I'd fed for fifteen years and never met.
Macey ran the register with her steel cash box open beside it.
MACEY on the lid.
"Brisket plate's twelve. Two meats sixteen. Bread's one slice, this is a business. Next."
Vernie sat at the front door on a barstool with her broom across her knees, taking the cover charge.
"Ten dollars," she told every single person. "Twenty if you were mean to me in the eighties."
A lot of people paid twenty.
I cut the first brisket off Darrell's daddy's pit at noon.
The bark was black as a skillet.
It jiggled when I pressed it.
I laid the first slice on a paper plate with white bread and an onion.
I didn't send it out.
I walked it through the swinging door and across the hall to Vernie at the door.
She looked at it.
She looked at me.
"Off his pit?"
"Off his pit."
She ate it with her fingers, right there on her stool, and didn't say anything.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–16 of Done in Fifteen Years are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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