Beulah Irene Goins

Beulah Irene Goins died in Roanoke on September 5, 2026. She was seventy-nine. Born there on May 3, 1947, she grew up knowing the shops as a clock that did not sleep, and she learned a steam table before she learned a highway. A plate, she believed, should arrive complete even when the people eating it were arguing about a run. She spent thirty-one years in a railroad dining operation that did not look like the brochures. She would not let a widower be rushed toward a special he had not chosen. She would not let a vendor invent a discount that made the register a liar. After a bad afternoon she sat in the stairwell with the radio off until her hands were quiet. She kept extra coffee for the clerk whose morning had already been too long. She married Howard Goins in 1968. They raised a daughter in a row house that needed storm windows and a son who needed a ride to choir at hours no one should be awake. Howard drove a city bus. Beulah packed lunches and considered a Sunday pot roast a civic obligation. After he died in 2010 she still sat with neighbors who had to renew something and did not know where to start. Friends remember a woman who would stay seven minutes past closing for a person who had taken two buses, who hated a messy stamp pad, and who said "you're fine" in a way that actually meant the work would get done. She died in Roanoke, in the brick city she refused to apologize for. The window is someone else's now. The patience she practiced there is harder to replace than a procedure.