Approval is not what he is after in a room. He takes a reading off it, the way I take one off a cooler, and every motion he makes is aimed at bringing that reading down. In this house, whatever would raise it simply never gets said.
The night I closed Cyril’s I got home at nine and my husband made me a plate.
“There’s the pierogies from your mother’s.”
“Gene.”
“I’ll heat them. Sit down.”
I sat down at that table and did not eat, and I told him what had been in that cooler, and the temperatures, and what the walk-in gasket looked like, and how many times I had been in there since 2016, and I told it the way you tell a thing when you are trying to get a person to say something.
He listened to all of it. He is the best listener in this city and I want that in early because it is not a compliment. When I finished he said, “That’s a hard one.”
“That’s it?”
“It’s Cyril’s,” he said. “People are going to be upset.”
“Are they right to be.”
And my husband, who has stood in a room with every grieving family in this valley for thirty-five years and never once been at a loss, picked up my plate and put it in the microwave.
I have been married to Gene Yuscavage for twenty-six years and in that time I have not gotten one ugly true sentence out of him. Not one. He has never told me I was wrong about anything. He has never said a bad word about his mother, his brother, the bishop, the man who backed into his hearse in 2011, or me. Every person in this city between the ages of thirty and ninety has an opinion about how good my husband is, and they will tell you, and they are not wrong, and I have spent a quarter of a century married to the sound of a man taking a reading and lowering it.
Ask him what he thinks and he will tell you what you need. That is the sentence I built. I used it for about nine years.
Forty-One
I inspect food service for the district. Restaurants, church kitchens, the two hospitals, the fire hall breakfasts, the ice cream stand out at Paxinos that has been getting a thirty-day paper since Nixon.
The number in my work is forty-one. Cold holding. Anything that can grow something has to sit at forty-one degrees or under, and I carry a thermocouple now but I came up on a dial stem and I still say the needle. You put the needle in the middle of a pan of chicken salad and you watch it settle and it either settles under forty-one or it does not, and that is all the conversation there is, and nobody in a kitchen has anything to say to me about it.
People hate me. I want that understood as a working condition and not a complaint. In a city this size, going in a back door with a clipboard means the cook stops talking and the owner comes out from wherever he was and calls you honey, and then you go and find a bus tub of ham sitting on the prep table since ten in the morning at seventy-one degrees, and there is a moment, in every one of those kitchens, where the owner has to decide whether he is going to be furious with you or charming to you, and about eight in ten pick charming.
Last March I was in a place on Shamokin Street at ten of a morning with a bus tub of ham sitting out on the prep table.
“That just come out.”
“How long ago.”
“Just now.”
I put the needle down into it and set the tub between us on the table and we both stood there and watched it settle at seventy-one.
He looked at it a while. Then he said, “That thing right?”
“I calibrated it in your ice water on the way in. You watched me do it.”
He stood there some more. Then he said, “I got a daughter getting married in June,” which answers nothing whatever and is what comes at me half a dozen times a year, and I wrote it up, and he called me honey holding the door for me on the way out, which is what men do once they have settled which way they are going and still have to walk you to your truck.
I write it up either way. I have written up the church I was baptized in.
My father drove a coal truck and my mother worked at the shirt factory in Kulpmont and neither one of them was ever charming to anybody, and I did not come out of that house with the equipment for it and never wanted it. When Gene took me to his class reunion the second year we were married I watched him cross a VFW hall in about forty minutes. It would have taken me a night.
What They Say About Him
At the second viewing for my aunt in 2019 a woman I had never met took my hand at the door and said, “You are so lucky.”
She said it with tears standing in her eyes. She meant it kindly and it was kind.
That is the thing about Gene and it never changes. This city calls him at two in the morning. He has carried the same yellow legal pad to the same kitchen tables for thirty-five years and let people tell him about their dead in whatever order it comes out, and he does not hurry them, and he remembers the order they said it in. Men who will not say a word to a priest will say it to Gene in a driveway. He has done funerals free and never told anybody, and the only ones I know of are the ones the families told me about.
One time only have I watched him work from close enough to hear it, which was my own aunt, in her daughter’s kitchen in Kulpmont, with the legal pad.
“Now, Aunt Vi wanted the blue one,” my cousin said. “She said so.”
“She did say so.”
“Ma says the blue one’s too much for a woman that age.”
Gene did not take either side of it. He turned the pad around so both of them could see the page and he said, “Let me put both of them down here and we’ll come back to it in a minute,” and then he asked what parish the great-grandmother had been buried out of, which nobody had asked in that kitchen in fifty years, and my cousin started in on it and her mother corrected her and inside of ten minutes the two of them were laughing about a car.
They picked the blue one at the door on the way out and nobody remembered that there had been a disagreement about it.
And what I have gotten, for twenty-six years, is you are so lucky, from women at doors, and I have said thank you every single time and gone home to a man who would never tell me my hair was wrong.
There is a woman who does this same work two towns over, and what her town says about her is not lucky, it is she must be a saint to do that, said with an edge in it, and the vocabulary that lands on a woman who runs a room this way are a different set entirely and that account is not mine.
What They Do at Cyril’s
Cyril Rovito opened that place in 1961 and it is on Rockwell across from where the Acme was, and it has a counter and nine stools and a mural of the breaker that a man painted in 1974 for a month of lunches. Dominic Rovito runs it now. Every wake in this city ends up at Cyril’s. When my own father died in 2008 there were thirty people in there afterward and Dominic would not take money from anybody.
I closed it on a Thursday in October of 2023.
What I found was a walk-in running at fifty-two, a gasket you could put two fingers through, cooked rice held in a covered stockpot in that cooler at fifty-four, and a hand sink with a case of napkins in it. All of that is real and all of it is in the report and none of it is arguable and a person could get sick from any one of them.
Here is the part that goes in.
I had been in there three times since 2016 and written it up three times and every time it got walked back. Not fixed. Walked back. There is a councilman whose family has eaten in that building since the Eisenhower administration and things get handled a certain way in a city of seven thousand, and by the third time I had a file with my name on it and nothing in the world to show for it.
So when I went in on that Thursday I already knew what I was going to do. I put it on the page because it took me two more years to say it out loud even to myself. I went in there to close it and then I found the reasons, and the reasons were sitting right there where they always are, and every word of that report is true, and I did not go in that door as an inspector.
Dominic came back through the kitchen while I was writing and stood at the end of the line with a towel over his shoulder.
“How bad.”
“The walk-in’s at fifty-two.”
“I got a man coming Monday for that.”
“You had a man coming in 2019, Dominic.”
He looked at the floor for a second and then he looked up and said, “Regina. My father put that mural up there.” Which is not about a gasket, and neither one of us took it for a remark about a gasket, and I wrote the number of the code section down and signed it and handed it across the line.
He did not take it out of my hand for a good three seconds. Then he did.
It ran in the paper. There was a thing on the radio. Somebody put a sign in the window on Rockwell that said ASK YOUR HEALTH DEPARTMENT and left it up nine weeks. I got a call at the house at eleven at night from a man who did not give a name.
Nine weeks is a long time for a sign. I stopped going down Rockwell. I did my own shopping in Sunbury for most of a year, which is twenty minutes each way and which I told my mother was about the produce.
And my husband, who could have stood up in any room in this city and been believed, went right on being warm to every single person in it. He shook Dominic Rovito’s hand at the Knights breakfast in November. He said, when anybody brought it up in front of him, that it was a hard situation and that Regina takes her job seriously, which is a sentence that will keep you alive in a small city and means nothing whatsoever.
He never said I was right. Not in public, not to Dominic, not at that table.
That was the year the sentence I had went from a joke to a load-bearing wall.
Charmaine
Charmaine Bendinsky has done hair and cosmetics in that basement since 1994 and she is the only living person who talks to my husband the way I do.
She is sixty-eight. She keeps a radio down there that gets one station and she keeps it on the whole time she works and she has never told anybody why, and she does the hair of women she went to school with, and once a year or so it is somebody she was close to, and on those days she works with the door shut and comes up afterward and has a cigarette on the ramp and goes back down.
She calls him by his last name. She tells him when a suit is wrong. In March she told him, in front of me, that he had gotten cheap on the register books and that the paper felt like a phone bill, and Gene said she was right and ordered the good ones, and I stood there and thought about the fact that I had not seen him concede a point in my kitchen since the second Bush administration.
In March she told him, in front of me, that he had gotten cheap on the register books.
“This paper feels like a phone bill, Yuscavage.”
“It’s the same book.”
“It is not the same book and you know it isn’t. People are putting their names in that at the worst hour of their life.”
He ordered the good ones that week and never said a word about the cost, and I stood down in that basement working out that my husband had not given up a point in my own kitchen since the second Bush administration.
She is also the reason I know one thing about that building that nobody else knows.
A man in this city, whose name will not appear here, lost his wife in 2014 and who could not pay and would not say so, and Gene did the whole thing and wrote it into the books as a pre-need that had been paid up in 1998, which is not legal and is not the kind of thing a careful man does, and Charmaine did the woman’s hair and knew every bit of it and has never told a soul but me and told me by accident in a way that I will not set down.
Charmaine’s own husband dropped dead in the yard in 2011 and Gene took that call at twenty of four in the morning and Charmaine was back at work in nine days because she wanted to be, and down in that basement there is a picture of the pair of them from about 1996 that I have looked at a great many times.
The Corridor
The corridor at Yuscavage runs about thirty feet, from the family room past the office to the door of the reposing room and there is a bench in it and a picture of Denis Yuscavage from 1958.
In February of 2021 a man named Klembara was killed on the interstate outside Danville and his wife Stella was in that family room with her sister and her boy, who was nine.
Gene’s rule, which he has had since before I met him, is that if a child asks to see, the child sees, with somebody’s hand on him and as long as he wants and not one second longer. He has said that in this house maybe twenty times over the years, always about somebody else. He told Stella Klembara that the boy should be allowed in.
She was not sure. Her sister was against it. And she came out into that corridor where I was standing, because I had brought Gene a coat, and she said to me, “Should I listen to him?”
And I looked at that woman and I said, “Ask him what he thinks and he’ll tell you what you need.”
The boy was on the bench in that corridor in a coat that was too big, with his shoes not reaching, and he had a package of crackers somebody had given him and he had not opened it.
I gave it to her in the tone that goes with it. I said it as a piece of wit about my own husband to a woman standing in a funeral home with her hand on a door frame, and she held my eye about a second, and then said thank you and went back in, and the boy did not go in, and they buried that man on a Saturday.
It did not come back to me for two years.
In the spring of 2023 Charmaine told me that Stella Klembara had been by, and that she had asked about Gene, and that she had said her son was having trouble and that he did not believe it, and that she wished now that she had done it the other way.
Nobody has ever been told by me that I was in that corridor. Not Gene. Not Charmaine. It has been mine two years and it is mine now, and I am setting it here because there is nowhere else for it to go.
What He Finally Said
The Cyril’s thing did not go away. It sat in this house eighteen months, a piece of furniture we walked around.
In April of 2025 I went at him about it the way I had never once gone at him in twenty-six years of marriage. I did not raise my voice. I sat down across from him at nine at night and I said I was not getting up until he told me one true thing about it, and that if he gave me that was a hard situation one more time I was going to go stay at my sister’s, and I meant it, and he could tell that I meant it.
He sat there a long while. That was new.
Then he said, “You went in there to close them.”
“I found what I found.”
“You found what was there. You always do.” He had both hands laid flat on the table. “But you went in that door knowing. Dominic knew it. Charmaine knew it. I knew it walking out of this kitchen that morning.”
“So you thought I was wrong.”
“No,” Gene said. “You were right about the cooler and you were right about the rice and you were right that it should have been shut in 2016. And you were not right about you.”
I said something ugly to him then and he took it.
And then he said the other part, which is the part I go back to.
“I wasn’t going to stand up at the Knights and say you did it clean,” he said. “Because you didn’t do it clean. And I wasn’t going to stand up and say you did it dirty either, because that’s not what happened and it would have finished you in this city.”
He stood up and set his glass in the sink.
“There wasn’t a sentence,” he said. “I looked for one for a year.”
The Pre-Need Packet
The vendor sends a box of aftercare material twice a year and it sits in the office and Gene hands it out with the pre-need packets, and there are pamphlets in there about the first holidays and about talking to children and one about what they call grief styles, which has four letters on it in a box on the third page.
I read it in that office in June while I was waiting on him, and it said something about how people of one type grieve out loud and people of another type go quiet, and it named the type on the box and the type on that box was my husband.
Then I went to the back of it looking for the citation, which is the only thing I know how to do with a document.
You cannot write a violation without a code section. You put down what you saw and then you put down the number of the rule it broke, and if there is no number you do not have a violation, you have an opinion, and an opinion does not close anybody. There is no citation anywhere in that pamphlet. Not a footnote, not a reference, nothing. So I went and found the underneath of it myself, on the computer at the district office, over about three evenings.
The first thing I found was how narrow the footing is. There is one retest study and only one. Two sittings, a month apart, somewhat over four hundred subjects. Two out of three still carried every letter at the second go; upward of one in four turned up changed on a letter. Every letter rides on a sliding measure much steadier than the letter, seeing as the letter is that measure cut in half at some agreed-on place, and whoever sits near the cut reads one way in June and another way in July. A pamphlet with nothing cited on it, resting on one month and four hundred subjects. I would not have written paper on that.
But I have also stood in a kitchen and had a cook describe to me what he does with a bus tub of ham, and known from the description that he was going to be trouble for the next twenty years, and no citation was needed for that either. So I kept going.
Behind the letters is a set of mental habits that comes stacked, top to bottom, the one at the top working every waking minute with nobody switching it on and the one at the bottom a stranger in the house, and how that stack sits for this type, and the damage the bottom of it does inside a marriage, is taken up where the type gets its own piece.
That top habit takes the condition of everybody in a room, without a break, and it will not stop at taking. It moves. Off it comes a level, not an opinion about people, and the hands are working that level before any sentence has formed anywhere in the man.
The second habit is a stock of particulars. Every kitchen table, every order things came out in, every name. That is what the top one runs on. You cannot bring a level down in a room unless you have the room written down somewhere.
And this, for twenty-five years, is the thing I had been calling vanity. A man built like that does not experience being liked as a goal. He experiences a room the way I experience a cooler. There is a number on it and the number is either coming down or it is not, and everything he says in that room gets chosen for what it does to the number. He is not trying to be liked. Being liked is what falls off the back of the work.
Which means the one thing that cannot get said, ever, in any room, is the sentence that would put the number up.
I sat in the district office with the door shut and the pieces went over on me one at a time.
That night in my kitchen after Cyril’s, when I asked him were they right to be upset and he put my plate in the microwave. There was no sentence available. Every true one raised it.
The Knights breakfast, and Dominic’s hand. He had not chosen this city over me. He was doing the one motion available to him.
And the corridor. Stella Klembara asked should I listen to him, and the woman she asked was standing there with a coat over her arm holding twenty years of a sentence, and I handed it to her, and what I would like somebody to understand is that my husband would have died before he handed a woman in that corridor anything at all that made it worse.
He has plenty of company. Off the 1998 national sample of three thousand and change, this type runs about seven or eight men in every hundred, so call it two or three on any block in this city, and in a place built like this one they wind up at the front of the church.
I sat there until the cleaning man came through at half past six and asked was I locked in.
The Two Minutes After
I was not fit to live with through last summer.
Some of that was Cyril’s and most of it was Stella Klembara, and neither one would go down and neither one would come out of my mouth, so what came out of me was aimed at Gene and had no business landing on him. In July I told him a man who never says a hard thing has not once in his life been in a room with a person, he has only been in rooms with the temperature. He said, “That might be right,” which is the closest he has ever come to fighting me, and it was worse than a fight.
In August I told him about the corridor.
What he did with his face is not going to appear here. He asked me two questions, both of them about Stella and neither one about me, and then he was quiet the better part of a minute. Then he said, “She was going to ask somebody. If she hadn’t asked you she’d have asked her sister and her sister was already no.”
That is not absolution. I know what it is. It is a man taking a reading and bringing it down, on me, in my kitchen, using the only equipment he has, and I let him, and I am not sorry that I let him.
Now for the part that has got to come out right, since a piece written this way gets lifted by people needing it to mean what it does not. A man who will not say the hard thing can be a decent man with no channel for it, and he can just as well be a man who figured out that a house runs easier if nothing difficult ever gets said in it, and from a doorway those two are identical. My test is a plain one. Watch whether the silence runs in both directions. Gene has never told me a comfortable lie either. Nor has he ever told me a dress looked fine when it did not. He says nothing whatever about the dress. If the pleasant untrue sentence shows up whenever it is useful to him, then you are looking at a method rather than a temperament, and four letters do you no good at all there, and I would not take a set off anybody offering one.
Two of these are not settled and I do not look for them to be.
I do not know what happened to the Klembara boy. He is thirteen now. I have driven past that house on Delaware Avenue and I have gotten as far as the mailbox twice, and I have not written and I have not called, and every argument I have for not doing it is an argument that suits me.
And I still think I was mostly right about Cyril’s. I have said that word to myself two hundred times and I cannot get it out of the sentence, and I know precisely what it is doing in there, and it has not come out.
He has, in the basement of that funeral home, every city directory from 1902 to 1974, which he bought in a lot at an auction in Sunbury before I knew him. He reads them. Not looks things up in them. Reads them, in a chair, in the evening, the occupations and the addresses of people who are all of them dead, and he has never got out an answer for why, and nothing in what I read that June has one word to say about it.
The pamphlets went back in the box. I put them where they go, on the shelf in that office under the pre-need forms, and there are probably nine hundred of them in that building and my husband has handed out most of them and I would bet the house he has never read past the picture on the front of one.
There is a thing Gene calls the two minutes after. He means the two minutes after you tell a family the thing you came to tell them, when everybody in the room finds out what kind of thing it is going to be, and he says that whatever happens in there is the thing they will still have in twenty years.
I never used to have a two minutes after. I would write the report and hand it across and go to the truck, because in the truck nobody is hating you.
In September I shut down a taproom kitchen out at Ranshaw, a good one, a woman about my age who has had it eleven years and did nothing wrong except trust a nephew with the walk-in. I gave her the paper and she read it and she put her hand over her mouth.
And I stood there. I did not go out to the truck. I stood in that kitchen with my clipboard against my leg and I let it be quiet, and after a while she said, “How long,” and I told her, and then I told her who to call at eight in the morning and I wrote the number on the back of my own card.
I did not say it was going to be all right.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.