The Secret Friday Gift at the Diner

He told us that Tulsa birthday was also the year he had started going back to church after a long stretch of not, at the urging of his wife, Connie, and that somewhere in there the two things had gotten tangled together in his mind, the sermon about casting bread on the water and the memory of a diner that had fed him when nobody owed him a single bite. He said it felt less like a decision and more like something he finally got quiet enough to hear. He told us he does the same thing now at two other stops along his route, small towns where somebody once treated him better than they had to when he had nothing to offer back. He calls it his Friday list. He had never meant for anyone to catch him at it. He said the not being caught was part of the gift, that the moment folks started thanking him for it, it would start being about him instead of about the debt he felt he owed.

I asked him why Otis, specifically, and not some other kindness he could have named. He looked over at me like the answer was plain. He said Otis was the first grown man who had ever talked to him like his opinion on anything mattered, coat or no coat, pie or no pie, and that a boy remembers that kind of thing longer than he remembers being fed. He said feeding Otis felt like feeding all of it at once, the coat, the trotline lessons, the whole diner, me included, since I would not have let him thank me any other way.

Otis found out three days later, on the next Friday, when Sylvie and I finally worked up the nerve to bring him in on it over his eggs and toast. He set his fork down very carefully and did not say anything for a long moment, and when he did speak his voice had gone thick in a way I had not heard from him since his second wife’s funeral. He remembered Denny. Of course he remembered him, the skinny boy with the water glass and the questions about trotlines. He asked if we had a number for him, and when Sylvie found one, Otis sat right there in his booth and called Denny Hollis on her cell phone and thanked him for the candy bars, thirty five years late, and told him the loan was still not collected on and never would be.