The Booth by the Window

The first time I really saw him, he had been standing in the doorway of the Prairie Rose for six full minutes, and not one of the forty-one people inside had said a word to him.

It was a Thursday in October. I was nineteen, with a gray bus tub on my hip and a rag over my shoulder. A busboy watches the door. You watch for the people who will need something before they know it.

The bell had rung. A few heads had turned, the way heads do for a draft, and then turned back. Vern Hostetler was telling the round table about a heifer that would not take her calf. Marlene and another lady from the church office were splitting a cinnamon roll. Donna, who owned the place, was on the phone in the kitchen doorway with a finger in her other ear.

The man stood on the mat with his cap in both hands. Tall, thin, white hair combed flat with water. A tan canvas coat washed soft as a dishrag, torn at the left shoulder so the stitching hung down in a little tail.

He was not waiting to be rude. He was waiting to be noticed. There is a difference, and I knew it, because I had been waiting that way most of my life.

I put the tub down. “Morning, sir. Sit anywhere you like.”

He looked at me like he was not sure the sentence was meant for him.

“Anywhere?”

“Anywhere that doesn’t have dishes on it.”

He took the last stool by the pie case, the one that wobbled. I had been meaning to shim it for a month. I filled a mug, and he wrapped both hands around it and watched the steam.

That was all I did the first time. But once you see a person nobody else is seeing, you cannot go back. Vern Hostetler, who knew every man in the county by his first name and his father’s name and the make of his pickup, walked right behind that stool to get to the restroom and never slowed down.

The man ordered one egg over medium and wheat toast. The check came to $8.75. He paid with exact change out of a little snap purse and left a dollar bill folded under the saucer.

Then he put his cap on, and the bell rang, and the room did not look up.

The room

I want to be fair to that room, because I have thought about it a great deal.

They were not cruel people. The Prairie Rose sits on County Road 12 at the edge of Tipton Corners, Kansas, population nineteen hundred and some, and the people who ate in it were the same ones who showed up with hot dishes when the Hendersons’ barn burned.

But a ditch is a thing you can see. A quiet old man on a wobbly stool is not.

In a small-town diner everybody knows where everybody sits. The booth by the window, the good one, with the view of the county road and the grain elevator, went to whoever walked in first, and that was always Vern’s crew. A man nobody knew had no place. So he got none.

I knew how that went, because it was my place too. I made $11 an hour plus a share of the pooled tips. To the men at Vern’s table I was “bud.” “Hey, bud, more coffee.” Not unkindly. They said it the way you speak to a dog that fetches. When I tried to say anything about the weather or the Chiefs, they talked right through the end of my sentence like I was a radio left on in another room.

My mother had a name for it. “You get invisible when you’re carrying a tray, honey. It’s not you. It’s the tray.”

I had the tray. He had the coat. I think that is why I saw him.