The Cap At The Counter

Because I had been standing at that counter for thirty eight years thinking the counter was about coffee, and an old man in a VFW cap had been quietly teaching me that the counter was about salvation, and I had not even noticed the class was in session.

I started paying a different kind of attention after that morning.

I watched the two of them, the old Army man and the young Marine, fifty years and two wars apart, and I saw that it was not a one way street. I had thought Walt was carrying Eli. He was. But Eli was carrying Walt right back, and neither one of them would ever have said so.

Walt had a reason to get up now. You could see it in him. A man who has somewhere to be at six o’clock, somewhere that matters, that man walks different than a man who is just filling a day until it ends.

And Eli had a face at the counter. He had the thing Danny never got. He had an old man who was not surprised to see him, who did not want anything from him, who thought the eggs were good.

I decided that morning that whatever my part in it was, I was going to play it all the way out.

So I started keeping that stool. Walt’s stool, the end of the counter by the window. On the mornings the early crowd got thick, I would put a folded napkin on it and tell anybody who reached for it that the seat was taken. I never said by who. It was taken. That was enough.

I started making sure Eli ate. Not making a fuss, just sliding a plate across to his side of the pass when it was slow and saying I cooked too much, which was a lie he was kind enough to accept.

And I started doing a thing I had quit doing for a lot of years. I started praying over that counter.

I am a Methodist, and I am not a showy one. But I had let my own praying go thin over the years, the way you do, and watching Walt get up in the dark for somebody else’s son got me back to it.

I would come in at five thirty to open, and before I flipped the sign, I would stand at the end of the counter by the window with my hand on the back of Walt’s stool, and I would ask God to hold those two men through another day. I did it every morning. I still do.

Now I have to tell you about July, because July is where this story turned, and I did not know until it was over how close we came to losing it.

There came a stretch in July where Eli stopped sleeping altogether. I could see it. He had gone gray under the eyes again, and the flinch was back, and one morning he burned a whole order of pancakes because he was standing at the grill not seeing it.