The Booth by the Window

The Thursday he didn’t come

The first Thursday in March, he did not come in at 6:40.

I told myself he was running late. At 7:15 I poured the coffee anyway and let it sit. By 7:30 Vern’s crew was standing at the register with their mugs, looking at the best table in the place with nobody in it.

“Son,” Vern said, with the patience of a man trying hard, “it’s a booth.”

“It’s Hal’s.”

“Hal who?”

I opened my mouth. And I realized, with the coffeepot in my hand, that I did not know. Five months of Thursdays. I knew he took no sugar and read the obituaries and wore his wife’s stitches. I did not know his last name. He had never offered it, and I had kept my word and never asked again.

“I don’t know who he is,” I said.

Vern looked at me a long moment. He was not a hard man. I watched something cross his face that was almost shame.

“Hold it till eight,” he said. “Reckon the round table won’t die.”

The next Thursday he did not come either.

That night Donna called the county sheriff’s office on the non-emergency line and I stood beside her at the dish station while she did it. A dispatcher took down “an old man named Hal, tall, white hair, torn tan coat” and was polite about it. Without a last name or an address, she said, there was nothing to run. Then Donna tried the two hospitals in Salina. The first put her on hold. The second said patient information was private. “I’m sorry, ma’am, we can’t say,” the woman told her, which was the same thing as telling her yes or no, and neither one of us could tell which.

I had no phone number for him. He had paid cash and signed nothing. I had once seen him turn up Elm Street after breakfast, and Elm Street has nineteen houses. After my shift I walked it, knocking, and nobody had heard of a Hal. A girl on a porch said the house at the far end had been empty since March. I knocked on that door too. Nobody came.

On the fourth Thursday I set the silverware at 6:30 out of plain stubbornness. At 6:55 the bell rang.

It was not Hal.

A man in his forties had come in, wide through the shoulders, in a pressed gray work shirt and boots with a dry mud line. He stood on the mat the way Hal always did, scanning the room. Then he looked at the window booth. Then at me.

“Are you the busboy? Wade?”

“Yes, sir.”

He took off his cap. “My name’s Dennis Reicher. Mr. Dressler asked me to find you.”

The drive

“He’s alive,” Dennis said quickly, as if he had read my face. “He’s at the hospice in Salina. His niece found my number in his address book on Sunday. He’s been asking for you since Monday and nobody knew who you were. All he’d say was ‘the boy at the Prairie Rose with the silverware.'”

Donna had already untied my apron. “Go on. I’ll pay you the day.”

“I can’t just-“

“Wade.” She took my face in both her big hands, which she had never done. “Go.”

It is thirty-eight miles from Tipton Corners to Salina. I rode in a three-quarter-ton Ford with Reicher Diesel Repair painted on the door, and for fifteen miles neither of us said a thing.

Then Dennis said, “You know what he did for a living?”

“No, sir. I never asked. I figured a plant. He had hands like it.”

Dennis laughed, a short surprised sound. “I’ll let him tell you. But in 1996 I was a sixteen-year-old with a record for stealing hubcaps. I walked into shop class at Lindell High and a man with a missing fingertip said, ‘Sit down, Mr. Reicher. I’m going to make you a welder, and you’re going to hate it.'” He shook his head. “I hated it for about a year. Now I run a diesel shop with six people on the payroll. And back in February that same man called me on a flip phone and said there was a boy at a diner I ought to keep in mind. He said, ‘Don’t make him ask twice.'”

I looked out at the wheat. It was coming up green on both sides of the road.