The Sign at Vera’s Restaurant

by T.M. Wright

At last, the road is quiet.
Too much traffic for a town so small—
It’s like a myth in the making; why all
the traffic? Where's it going?
People passing through, I think, heading
somewhere else; who can
blame them? I don’t believe anyone
stays here—what would be
the reason? To buy overpriced

bread at the village grocery, chat
with the postmaster (he’ll ask
what you got in the mail),
nod at folks staring
from porches,
compress time into long, hot
afternoons, dissolve
in the steamy dusk?

But it doesn’t matter
where the day is—I’ve learned that much,
at least, after so many. What matters are
cool nights passed in dreaming (any dream
will do, as long as it travels), and learning
to live
despite the steamy afternoons
and the yellow haze of morning, the squat
houses, the flat streets, the big

mongrel dogs
barking in a
dutiful way, mostly
disinterested rural folk driving slowly
to breakfast at Vera’s (“Still a buck and a
quarter for eggs and toast!”). Chris

says, “There are so many obese people
in rural America.” I don’t think it
matters, neither does she; we’re
just talking, it’s better than dwelling
on the heat, the cranky neighbor (he’s
grown old here, plays golf
in his back yard, sells
used bicycles at the end of his
driveway),
the beginning of the end
of another summer, another year
down the tubes. Who, I wonder,

will come to this place in fall, when the trees
are dressed and ready
for visitors? Slim people, people
with money, people whose trees are not
so well-coifed, perhaps, or so
numerous, or maybe they’ll come

to see the running deer, the Amish
moving their poor mares along, the church
with its truncated steeple. Or perhaps
they’ll simply pass,
on their way
to country
garage sales, or
roadside stands (“These
really are the best peaches
I’ve ever tasted!”),
farmers plowing their fields under,
people moving without hurry near
squat, gray houses, lifting heavy boxes
into trucks, pausing
to watch autumn traffic.
“We need rain,” Chris

says, and I agree. It’s easy
to agree about
such things. “Let’s walk
to Vera's,” she says,

and we start walking
and find the picked-over remains
of an opossum
by the roadside.

“He was whole,” I say,
“just the other day. Pretty
tri-colored ears.
Fat.”

The traffic
drones past. It
almost never
stops in this wayside village, this place caught
between somewhere
and somewhere else—a
phrase I share

with Chris, who winces and says
it’s cliché,
and when we’re
at Vera's, sipping coffee (“Strong
coffee!” a sign proclaims, but it
isn’t), I look out
at the bright sunlight, past the other
people eating here, and talking
(“We’re patriotic, at
least; I’ll say that much.”), into the dense blue
rural sky, and I imagine
nothing, I feel the warm coffee cup against
my palms, smell
bacon frying, hear words
scrambled around me, and Chris says,

“Look at that sign.”
I look at her.
She’s nodding; and I look where she’s nodding,
at a sign which reads

OUR CUSTOMERS MAKE IT POSSIBLE
FOR US TO BE HERE.

“So many philosophical possibilities,”
Chris says, “in that,”
and I say,

“No, I don’t think so. Not in this burg.”

Our breakfasts arrive. I
eat hungrily.
“Damned air conditioning’s
too high,” I mutter as I eat. “What are
these people—Eskimos?”

Reprinted from “The Devil’s Wine,” edited by Tom Piccirilli, Cemetery Dance, 2004