The Saturday I Poured Her Father’s Coffee

It was the third weekend of pheasant season and we were full by six fifteen. Orange caps on every hook by the door. Dogs waiting in pickup boxes out front, whining at the window. I went through eleven pots before eight o’clock, and Linda’s caramel rolls were gone by seven thirty.

About ten it thinned out, the way it does once the hunters have gone to walk the shelterbelts. Then it was just town.

Roger and Jim at the end of the counter, where they have sat since the Carter administration, arguing about the price of beans. Marlene’s mother in the window booth with her one poached egg. The Lutheran quilting ladies, four of them, splitting two caramel rolls Linda had held back for them.

At a quarter past twelve the bell over the door rang, and I did not have to look up.

Don has come through that door every Saturday for nineteen years. I could tell you the sound of his boots.

He farms eleven hundred acres of corn and beans four miles north of town, on the place his grandfather homesteaded, and he runs about sixty head of Angus besides. He is sixty-one. He is not a talker. He has a face like a fence post that has been out in the weather, and I have seen that face cry exactly twice.

He hung his seed cap on the hook, kept his chore coat on, and sat down on the third stool from the register. His stool.

I turned his cup over and poured.

“Tammy.”

“Don.”

“Hot beef.”

“I know it.”

I called it back to Linda, though I did not need to. She had started it when she heard the bell.

I have to tell you about nineteen years ago, or none of this will mean what it ought to.

Nineteen years ago, in the fall, Don’s wife Jean found out she had cancer. She was thirty-six. It went away for a while, and then it came back, and then it went away again, and then it came back for good. It took seven years, all told. She had her treatments in Sioux Falls, three hours each way, on Thursdays. By Saturday she could not lift her head off the pillow, and the smell of anything cooking in that house would send her to the bucket.

So on Saturdays Jean’s sister came out to sit with her, and Don got the little girl out of the house so her mother could sleep.

He brought her to the Chatterbox. There was no place else to bring her.

Brooke was seven years old. She had her mother’s fair hair and nobody at home with the strength to comb it. The first Saturday they came in, she had a rat’s nest at the back of her head the size of my fist, and a milk mustache from the day before.

Don sat down on that third stool and looked at the menu like it was written in another language. He did not know what his own daughter liked to eat. Jean had always done that part.

So I asked her.

Pancakes, it turned out. Silver dollar, with the syrup on the side so she could dip. I cut them for her the first year. After she ate, when it was slow, I took her to the back booth with a comb and a cup of water and I worked that snarl out a little at a time, and I braided her hair so it would hold till church the next morning.