The Diner That Kept Her Husband’s Seat Warm

“Morning,” I said, and then my mouth, which had not gotten the news yet that it only needed to order for one person from here on, said, “Two coffees, please. One black.”

I heard myself say it. I felt my face go hot right behind my eyes. I almost took it back. I opened my mouth to tell her, no, Katie, just the one, my husband is gone, we put him in the ground yesterday afternoon at Resurrection Lutheran with the whole county standing around in their good coats, and there will not be a second coffee at this table ever again.

I did not say any of that.

Katie wrote it down on her pad like it was the most ordinary order in the world, two coffees, one black, and she walked it back to the counter, and three minutes later she set two cups down in front of me exactly where they always went. The black one on the side where Carl’s hand used to be. The cream one in front of me.

She did not say a word about it. She did not look at me with that soft, careful face people get when they are handling something breakable. She just set the cups down, refilled my water, and said the special was biscuits and gravy if I wanted it, same as any Tuesday.

I sat there with two coffees going cold in front of me and I could not have told you, if you had asked me right then, whether what Katie had done was a mercy or a mistake. I only knew that for the length of one cup of coffee, Carl’s seat was not empty. It had a cup on it. That was something to hold onto, even if it was only steam.

I want to tell you about Carl first, because you ought to know who the second cup belonged to.

We married in June of nineteen seventy, in the same church we buried him out of, when I was twenty two and he was twenty four and neither one of our families had two nickels to rub together. Carl farmed wheat and milo on his father’s ground north of town, eleven hundred acres that his daddy had scraped together a quarter section at a time, and in the off months he drove grain truck for half the county at harvest because a man with a license and a steady hand was worth more than gold come October. He was not a man of many words. He proposed to me by asking if I thought the Hitching Post’s chicken fried steak was better on Tuesdays or Thursdays, and when I said Tuesdays, he said, well, we had better get married then, because he did not want to spend his whole life arguing about days with somebody he had not married yet.