The lot fills up
Word travels fast in a town like Millbrook. By seven-thirty the Hendersons were out on their porch, and Mrs. Dunphy had come out to complain about the parking and then had gone quiet when she saw all the faces, and old Pastor Wells from the Methodist church had walked down in his shirtsleeves to see what the commotion was, and had ended up standing in my yard with his hand on a stranger’s shoulder, praying quiet with a man who had lost a son.
Somebody, I never did find out who, called Dot down at the Bluebird, the diner on the corner of Main and Second where I have eaten breakfast on Saturday mornings my entire life. Dot has run that place for twenty-some years, and Dot does not do anything halfway. By eight o’clock she had propped open the Bluebird’s doors and started making coffee by the gallon and pancakes by the stack, and she sent her nephew driving up and down the streets to tell the riders that anybody with the Long Road Riders ate free that morning, on the house, come on down.
And so the whole thing moved, slow and rumbling, three blocks over to the Bluebird, two hundred motorcycles idling down Main Street past the feed store and the hardware and the shuttered old movie theater with the busted marquee, and the whole town came out to watch, because you do not see a thing like that in Millbrook, you may never see a thing like that again. Kids on bicycles. Farmers who had come in for parts. The ladies from the Methodist quilting circle, who took one look and went home and came back with three coolers of lemonade because that is what those women do.
Dot would not take a dime. I know because I tried to leave one on the counter and she slid it right back at me and said, “Honey, in twenty-two years I have never once had a reason to feed two hundred angels breakfast, and I am not about to charge them for the privilege.” Then she went back to the griddle and cried into the pancake batter where she thought nobody could see her, and I let her think so.