The Saturday I Poured Her Father’s Coffee
“So I’m telling you. I’m sorry, Mom. I stood there and looked at the dishwasher. I’ve been sick about it for four days and I still didn’t pick up the phone and fix it. I called and asked if you were all right with it, so you’d say yes and I wouldn’t have to do anything. That’s the truth. That’s what I did.”
“I know that’s what you did.”
“I’ll pay you back the twenty-five hundred. Every dollar.”
“You will not. A gift is a gift. I didn’t give it to buy a chair at a table.”
“Then what do I do?”
“You eat your pie,” I said. “And you tell me why. Not why she said it. Why you didn’t say anything.”
He picked up his fork. He put it down again.
“Because she was crying before you got there,” he said. “She’d been crying half the afternoon. About her mom not being at the party. About how everybody at that office has parents who belong to that club, and she’s got a dad who’ll show up with a seed cap line across his forehead, and,” he swallowed, “and me. A mechanic. She said, I just want one day where I’m not the girl from the diner whose mother was dying.”
I stood very still.
“That’s what the smell is to her, Mom. It’s not you. It’s being seven and everybody in town knowing why she was in here.”
“And you thought if you kept quiet, she’d get her one day.”
“I thought I was looking after her.” He shook his head. “And I let her do the worst thing she’s ever done, to the last person who deserved it. That’s not looking after anybody.”
No, it was not. But it was the first thing he had said all week that sounded like his father.
I reached across and put my hand on top of his. His knuckles are scarred up from the shop.
“Do you remember second grade?” I said. “The boy who said I smelled like french fries?”
“Travis. I remember.”
“You asked me if it was true.”
“You said it was the light bill.”
“I thought that settled it for you.”
Kyle turned his hand over and held on to mine.
“Mom, you came in every night after close and checked on me. Every night. You’d lean over and fix the blanket, and I’d smell it. I used to wait up for it. I couldn’t go to sleep till I smelled it, because that meant you were home.” His eyes spilled over, and he let them. “I thought that’s what being tucked in smelled like. I never told you that. I should have told her that.”
Marlene’s mother, in the window booth, blew her nose into her napkin like a trumpet.
I came around the counter then. I have a rule about that, during a shift. I broke it.
He stood up and I held my grown son in the middle of the Chatterbox, flower on his pocket and all, and he put his face down in my hair, right where the fryer lives, and he breathed in.
“There it is,” he said.
Don came back at ten minutes to eight.
He had been home. He had done his evening chores, I could tell by his boots. He sat down on his stool, next to Kyle, who had not left. Kyle had eaten his pie, and then a hot beef, and then he had gotten up and bused the supper tables without being asked, in his good slacks.