The Glass Of Water At The Lobster Dinner

I raised Scott alone for the first six years of his life, before I married Gordon, after his father left town two weeks before Scott’s first birthday and never sent so much as a card again. I worked the register at a hardware store by day and waited tables at the Millhaven Diner three nights a week, and some winters I wore the same coat so long the cuffs wore through at the wrists before I let myself buy another one. When I met Gordon, a quiet man who fixed refrigeration units for restaurants and diners all over three counties, I did not fall in love with him quickly. I fell in love with him slowly, the way you trust a bridge after you have watched enough trucks cross it. He never once made me feel like a burden, not for one day, not even the day the doctor told us the truth about his heart.

Together we bought the diner where I used to wait tables, the summer Scott turned nine. We renamed it the Corbett Grill, Corbett being my name by then, and we ran it for thirty one years on the corner of Route 9 and Miller Street in Millhaven, Ohio, forty minutes from the kind of city that has restaurants with no prices on the menu. We served meatloaf and biscuits and coffee that never ran out, and we fed half the county at some point or another, including people who could not always pay, because Gordon believed a diner in a small town had a duty that went beyond the register.

Scott grew up in a booth in the back with his homework spread across the table, doing long division while I refilled sugar caddies. He never missed a meal. He never went without shoes. He went to college on money Gordon and I scraped together one breakfast rush at a time, and I wore my one good coat one winter too long so his tuition check would clear before the fall semester started.

When he brought Heather home the first time, I welcomed her the way I would have welcomed anyone he loved. I told myself every sharp glance around our small kitchen was just her getting used to a different kind of house than the one she grew up in. I told myself every clipped comment about the diner, about Gordon’s old truck, about the plastic tablecloths on our porch table, was nerves and nothing more. I told myself a lot of things, for a long time, because a mother wants very badly to be wrong about her son’s wife.