The Booth by the Window

The coat

The worst week of that winter was in January, when it stayed below zero.

Hal came in with his collar up, holding the mug in both hands without drinking, arms pulled tight against his chest. Then I saw why. The seam at his left shoulder had opened clear down the sleeve, and the wind was coming straight through.

“Sir, would you let my mother mend that? She does all the uniforms at the school.”

“No,” he said at once. “Thank you, Wade.”

I stood there feeling like I had stepped on something. He looked at the table. Then he said, “Sit down a minute.” It was the first time I had ever sat in that booth.

He unbuttoned the coat and held the front open so I could see the lining. Faded plaid flannel, sewn into the canvas by hand, small even stitches in a red thread gone brown. Along the inside edge the stitches spelled out the word Hal and a year, 1984, and beneath that, in another thread, a tiny crooked heart.

“My wife sewed that. Maryann. She said a man ought to have something of hers on him when he went out in weather.” He closed the coat. “The outside’s been tearing for years. I could have it fixed a hundred times. But to do it right they’d have to open the inside, and I won’t have anyone touching her stitches.”

I did not say anything. There was nothing to say that would not have been smaller than what he had told me.

“She passed last February. Forty-one years, and we were going to make it forty-two. She grew up here. Her people are in the cemetery on the hill. When she was gone I couldn’t stand the house in Salina, so I sold up and rented a little place in town. I thought I’d be near her.” He looked out toward the county road. “Every Thursday for forty-one years we had breakfast out. It’s a different meal with one.” He turned the mug a quarter turn. “Funny, in a room this size. The only good morning I get in here comes with the coffee.”

“Good morning, Hal,” I said.

“Good morning, Wade.”

Then, because I did not know what else to do, I got the heavy brown tape from the dish room and taped the outside of that seam shut against the wind, careful to touch nothing inside, while he sat very still and let me. It was an ugly patch. It held.

The next Thursday I brought my father’s old canvas barn coat, the one with the corduroy collar, still on its hook in our mudroom because nobody had been able to move it.

“No,” Hal said, before I had it all the way out of the bag. “I won’t wear another man’s coat, son.”

“He isn’t using it.”

“That’s the reason.” He pushed it gently back across the table, and then he softened. “Keep it somewhere handy. Case I change my mind.”

So it rode behind the seat of my truck from then on. I do not think either of us believed he would ask for it. I think we both liked that it was there.