The Booth by the Window

Hal

I asked on the fourth Thursday.

By then I was filling his mug before he reached for it. He took no sugar. He read the weather page first and the obituaries second. He squared his silverware to the edge of the table before he did anything else.

And he wrote his own order. I carried a pad in my apron, but he took the guest check and printed on it in tall, square, perfectly even letters, like a man who had spent his life drawing things that had to be right. The check came out looking like a blueprint.

“I’m Wade, sir,” I said.

“I know. It’s on your shirt.”

“I was wondering what I ought to call you.”

He considered it a good while. A pickup passed on the road. The grain elevator caught the early sun.

“Hal. That’ll do.”

“Hal what?”

“Just Hal. It’s plenty.”

“All right, Hal,” I said, and I refilled his coffee.

It was a very small thing. But I saw his shoulders come down about an inch.

Thursdays

By Christmas the Thursday booth was a fact of life. Donna walked over at 6:30 each week and moved a salt shaker to hold it. Once Marlene started to sit there and Donna said, “That’s Hal’s,” in such an ordinary voice that Marlene said, “Oh, sorry,” and moved. It never occurred to her to ask who Hal was. They were simply not used to there being a person they had not known for forty years.

He did not say much. What he said, I kept. Watching me carry eight plates up my forearm: “You know where your weight is. Who taught you that?”

“My dad. He could take a diesel apart on a kitchen table and put it back with no parts left over.”

“Then you’ve got good hands.” He looked at me over the mug. “What do you want to do when you aren’t doing this?”

So I told him. The program in Salina. The year I deferred. The tool list. I had not told anyone how much I still thought about it, not even Mom. But he asked plainly, as if the answer would be interesting.

He listened with his big scarred hands flat on the table. The tip of his left index finger was gone, cut clean at the first knuckle.

“What happened to your finger?”

“A lathe. Nineteen seventy-nine. I was in a hurry.” He turned the hand over. “It taught me patience.” Then, after a while: “Tools are the cheap part, son.”

“Nineteen hundred dollars doesn’t feel cheap.”

“No. But a boy who shows up on time and keeps his hands clean and pays attention, that’s the expensive part. A tool list you can fill. That other, you can’t buy.”

I said, “Yes, sir,” and went for the pot. He did not offer me anything. I think he knew I would sooner starve than take a hand I had not earned.