The Saturday I Poured Her Father’s Coffee
I poured Don’s coffee. I had kept a pot on.
“I expect I made a scene,” he said. He turned his cup a little. “I’ve been sitting on that stool nineteen years, Tammy, and I never once said thank you. Not properly. I left a few dollars under a saucer and thought that covered it.” He cleared his throat. “Jean knew. She used to ask me every Saturday, what did Tammy do with her hair this week. She said to me, near the end, she said, that woman is doing the part I can’t. Don’t you ever forget it.”
I had not known that. In nineteen years he had never told me that.
“So that’s from Jean,” he said. “And the thank you is from me. It’s late.”
I had to go look at the pie case for a minute.
“Where is she?” I asked, when I could.
“Home. Her place. She wanted to come tonight. Wanted to drive straight out here from the clubhouse with her makeup running.” He shook his head. “I told her no. I said, an apology you make in the first hour is for yourself. You sit with it a week. Then you go say it where it counts.”
“Don, she’s young. She was hurting.”
“She’s twenty-six. I was farming on my own at twenty-six.” He drank some coffee. “I love that girl more than my own life. That’s why.”
She came the next Saturday.
Quarter past twelve. The bell rang, and it was Don’s boots, and then behind them a lighter step I had not heard following his in twelve years.
We were full. Last weekend the hunters had it, this weekend it was town. Roger and Jim. The quilting ladies. Both booths of the Catholic men’s club, who had been cutting wood for the church furnace. Marlene’s mother and her egg. Word gets around in nine hundred people. I am not going to pretend nobody knew.
Brooke had on jeans and a plain sweater. No makeup that I could see. She had her hair pulled back in a braid, and I do not think that was an accident, and it went right through me.
Don sat down on his stool. Brooke did not sit.
She stood at the counter, in front of the register, where she used to stand on the milk crate.
“Tammy,” she said. It was not loud, but the place had gone quiet as a church. “I’d like to say something, and I’d like to say it here.”
“You can say it in the back if you’d rather, honey.”
“No. I said the other thing where it was easy. I want to say this where it’s hard.”
“I told you that you smell like a fryer, and I asked you not to come to a party you paid for. I did it because I was ashamed. Not of you. Of me. Of where I’m from, and of being the girl everybody felt sorry for.” Her chin was going. “And you are the reason I was ever all right. You cut my pancakes. You fixed my hair. You went to the drugstore for me when I was twelve and scared to death. I knew all that, and I said it anyway, to your face, in front of your son. It was a hateful thing to do. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Tammy.”