The Secret Friday Gift at the Diner

Before I tell you what happened in that alley, I need to go back further than Otis Kimbrel’s tab. I need to go back to when I was nineteen years old, still learning the register from my father, and there was a boy who used to come in with thirty five cents in his pocket and ask for a glass of water.

His name was Denny Hollis. His family had a small dairy operation out past the county line, and the year I am thinking of, the bank called their loan and took the herd along with most everything else. His daddy, Jim, started drinking more than working, and his mother, Wanda, was pulling double shifts at the shirt factory in the next county just to keep the lights on. Denny was maybe ten years old that year, and he would walk two miles into town most afternoons after school and sit at the far end of my counter with his water and stare at the pie case like it was a stained glass window.

I do not remember deciding to do anything about it. I remember the first time it happened almost by accident. I had cut a pie wrong, the slice too thin on one side, and rather than serve a crooked piece to a paying customer I set it in front of Denny and told him the kitchen had made a mistake and it would go to waste otherwise. He ate it in about four bites and thanked me twice. The next day I made sure another slice came out “wrong.” And the day after that. I never called it charity, not even in my own head. I called it not wasting food, and Denny, bless him, never once let on that he understood exactly what I was doing, because I was letting him keep the one thing a hungry ten year old still has, which is his pride.