The Lobby My Husband Built

It was not only Ollie. There was Marlys Teague, who had run the school cafeteria for thirty years and now cooked for one and hated it, and who started bringing a coffee cake to the Tuesday coffee just so she would have a reason to bake a whole one. There was a young mother, new to town, lonely in the particular way of a woman home all day with a baby and no people, who found out the coffee was open to everybody and started coming with the stroller, and the old women fell on that baby like it was the first child ever born, and she told me once she thought the Tuesday room was the only thing that had kept her from packing up and going back to her mother’s. That is the thing about a warm room. It does not check what kind of lonely you are at the door. Widowed, or new, or just old and quiet, it takes you the same. Preston watched all of it happen in a room he had been sentenced to, and somewhere in there he stopped serving his sentence and started keeping the room, which are two entirely different jobs done with the same coffee pot. Delmar, who had come the first weeks purely to watch the man squirm, allowed to me around Labor Day that the boy was not the worst he had seen, which from Delmar is very near a blessing.

He started learning the names after that. Not because Elgin made him. Because Ollie Sisk was the most interesting man he had met since he came to Fenmore, and there were forty more like Ollie in that town if you would only sit down and pour the coffee and shut up long enough to find out. By September he was staying past the hour. By October he had put the good chairs back in the lobby, on his own, no memo from anybody, and he had brought the urn back, and I came in one Tuesday and there were pink sugar packets in a little dish by the cups, and I looked at Lynette and Lynette looked at me and neither one of us said a word.