The Cap At The Counter

I thought maybe Hank had asked him to keep an eye out. He had not. Hank did not even know Walt had changed his time until I pointed it out.

So one slow morning in May, when it was just the two of us at the counter and Eli had stepped out back to break down boxes, I did something I almost never do. I asked a man his business.

I topped off Walt’s cup, and I set the pot down, and I said, “Walt, can I ask you something, and you tell me to hush if it is none of mine.”

He folded his paper. He has gray eyes, Walt, pale and steady, and he looked at me with them. “Go on, Donna,” he said.

“Why six o’clock,” I said. “You kept seven for near forty years. The day that boy started cooking you moved yourself up an hour, and you have not missed a morning since. Why.”

He was quiet a long moment. He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer, which I have learned is what Walt does when he is deciding whether to let you in.

Then he said, “Did I ever tell you I had a son.”

He had not. In thirty eight years Walt had never once said a word to me about a family. I had him down in my head as a bachelor, a man who had always been alone the comfortable way some old men are.

“No,” I said. “You never did.”

“His name was Daniel,” Walt said. “Danny. He would be fifty five this year.” And then he told me, slow and plain, the way a man tells a thing he has carried so long it has worn smooth.

Danny Kessler was Walt’s only boy. Walt and his wife Marie had him late, in 1971, the year after Walt came home from his second tour.

Danny grew up in Weston, three blocks from where we were sitting. He was, by Walt’s telling, a good kid with a loud laugh, better with his hands than his books, the kind of boy who could fix a baler but could not sit still in church.

And in 1990, when he was nineteen, Danny went into the Marine Corps, and in the winter of 1991 the Marine Corps sent him to the Gulf.

“He was over there a few months,” Walt said. “Not long, as these things go. He came home in the spring of ninety one. And I will tell you, Donna, there was a parade.”

He said the word parade like it tasted wrong in his mouth.

“There was a parade down Main Street, and the band played, and the mayor shook his hand, and Marie cried, and everybody in this town said thank you, son, and welcome home, son, and God bless you, son. For about a week.”