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The True Story of the Southland Southland Recipes The Secret of Southland Mac and Cheese How to Make a Southland Club Sandwich Southland Stories Always be Nice to Your Waitress |
ALWAYS BE NICE TO YOUR WAITRESS Before anyone reads this story I need to point out that it has been at least fifty years since it happened and anyone who was directly involved is long deceased. My mother, who told me the story, is gone now. So are the police who investigated the incident, along with the coroner who signed off on the official cause of death. The probable shooter passed away years ago and the one who got shot went into the ground before he even got cold. Betty Lou waited tables at our restaurant for many years. She was sweet and patient and she did it so long it was hard to imagine that she had ever done anything else in her life but it seems that at one time she had been quite an adventuress. When she was a young lady in the 1950s she pulled up stakes and moved from Alabama to Las Vegas. Yes, that Las Vegas, all the way out in Nevada. I couldn’t tell you what Betty Lou did in those years but it had to have been fun to see a major American city bloom in a wasteland almost overnight and on top of that she got married. That's when her problems really started. It turned out her new husband wasn’t such a sure thing after all. After a taste of bad marriage she dumped him, left Las Vegas and returned to Alabama. This is the point when she went to work for my folks. For Betty Lou things seemed to go well enough, until she remarried anyway. Whatever her first husband's faults, they looked minor indeed compared to the second. It turned out that her second husband was a brut, a drunk and worse. Poor Betty Lou would sometimes come limping into work and wait tables wearing facial bruises that were only barely concealed by a pound or two of makeup. It was obvious to my folks that not only was Betty Lou cursed with lousy taste in men but that she was being abused on a regular basis. My folks offered to turn the jerk in for assault but Betty Lou rejected any offer to get the law involved. It had been her decision to marry him she said, and for better or worse she would live with the consequences whatever they were. As events developed, the consequences would be pretty severe but not in the way almost everyone anticipated. The call finally came about eleven in the evening, it was the chief of police who also happened to be our neighbor. There had been a problem at Betty Lou's house and he needed mom to meet him there and help get things cleared up. When she arrived, she found Betty Lou sitting in the back of a police cruiser sobbing her eyes out. Betty Lou's husband was dead, "He...h...he. Shot he, he had been drinking and we got to fighting and he just up and he…he shot himself", she stammered. After she got the near hysterical Betty Lou calmed down a little the police chief took Mom aside and told her that he wanted to take her inside and look at the scene of the alleged self-destruction of Betty Lou's husband. If my mother felt any revulsion at taking a look, it was overcome by curiosity and she soon found herself back in the small house's bedroom with the county coroner, the chief of police and Betty Lou's late husband. The victim was sitting in the corner of the bedroom with his back to the wall; eyes still open staring into eternity, there was very little blood. The pistol that he allegedly did himself in with was in a corner opposite where he had sat down to die. The coroner, who was still another Southland regular, pointed at the body in the corner of the room. "She claims that they were standing here by the bed having an argument when he suddenly pulled out his pistol, pointed it at the center of his chest, and pulled the trigger. Then he threw his piece over in the corner walked across to the opposite side of the room where he then sat down and died. And that’s pretty much the way it looks to me." He added, "A cut and dried case if I've ever seen one, wouldn't you agree chief?" The chief of police concurred with the coroner and then turned to mom and asked, "I suppose that’s the way it looks to you too isn’t it?" My mother was mortified, she told them that everything she knew about investigating a sudden death came from watching Alfred Hitchcock's TV show. Both the coroner and the chief thought this was sufficient and seeing how Betty Lou had no nearby relatives who were still breathing, they both suggested mom take Betty Lou home with her for the evening. Betty Lou's late husband was buried just a couple of days later. She dropped out of sight for a month or so and then was back working at the Southland where she waited tables for nearly thirty years before she retired. So take it from me, the next time you feel like busting a waitress's chops because your ice tea was too sweet or your onions are too done, you might want to temper your displeasure with a little kindness and understanding. It's probably not a bad idea to leave a decent tip too. |
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© 2007-2009 The Southland Restaurant.
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