The Chair I Saved For My Son

The Diner Where I Learned to Feed People

My name is Zelda, and for thirty one years I have set tables for people who were not always mine to feed. I started at the counter of the Colter Mill Diner the same autumn my oldest, Brent, was learning to walk, because my husband’s paycheck from the co-op never quite covered a family of five, and somebody had to make up the difference between what we earned and what three kids needed to eat, wear, and grow out of by spring.

I learned to read a whole town off what they ordered. The farmers came in before six for eggs and black coffee and left cash under the saucer without being asked. The VFW crowd took the back booth on Fridays and never once let me clear a plate before they’d finished arguing about whose turn it was to run the fish fry. The Baptist ladies came in after Wednesday night service smelling like casserole and hairspray, and they always, always asked after my children by name, Abigail, Blake, and Brent, like they were reciting a blessing.

That diner taught me the thing I built my whole life on. You feed people. You feed them when they are hungry and you feed them when they are grieving and you feed them on the good days too, because a table set with care is the plainest way a person in Colter Mill, Missouri, says I see you and I am glad you are here. I did not know, on the morning of my sixtieth birthday, that I would need to remember that lesson so hard it would nearly break me.

The diner sits on the corner across from the feed store, close enough that the men come in still smelling of grain dust and diesel, and close enough to the county road that you can watch the school bus go by twice a day and set your watch by it if your own watch has stopped working, which mine had, more than once, in those early years. I learned which regulars needed to talk and which ones needed quiet. I learned to carry three plates on one arm and a coffee pot in the other hand without spilling either, a skill nobody teaches you and everybody in that line of work eventually needs. I raised three children on tips folded into an apron pocket and on the particular kind of pride that comes from knowing your name is good on a check at the feed store even in the months when the account was thin.