The Waitress Application at Dot’s Cafe

Why I Did Not Walk Out

Mom opened Dot’s Cafe in 1979 with a loan from the bank on the square and a used grill out of a truck stop that closed near Kingdom City.

I was four. I grew up on an upturned milk crate behind that counter, coloring on the back of guest checks.

Greg was seven. He did not like the cafe. He burned his hand on the flat-top when he was twelve, and after that he did not come back into the kitchen except to get pie.

He played baseball, got the grades, went to the university in Columbia, and settled in Jefferson City.

I waited tables there in high school. Then I married Jim Kroll, raised two boys, and worked at the school cafeteria for a lot of years.

Fourteen years ago, when Mom’s knees gave out and she could not stand on the line anymore, I came back to run the kitchen.

I had run it ever since. I ordered the food, ran the grill, made the gravy and the pies and the Friday cinnamon rolls.

Mom sat at the register and did the books and talked to everybody, and that is how it went until the morning in February she did not come down to open.

The Paper That Gave It to Him

Two years before she died, Mom had gone to a lawyer in Fulton and put the cafe and the building into a trust.

I knew she had done some paperwork. I did not know what it said until after the funeral, when the lawyer read it to Greg and me in his office.

The cafe and the building went to Greg. Her house and what was in her savings went to me, which was not much, and the house needed a roof. That was it. No note. No explanation.

I cried in the truck afterward, and my husband, Jim, held my hand in the parking lot and did not say anything, because there was nothing to say.

Then he drove me home and I went in at five the next morning and made the gravy, because people were going to come in for breakfast whether my heart was broken or not.

The Obvious Thing to Do

So there in the booth, I could have untied my apron, laid it on the table, and walked out the front door. A lot of women would have.

But it was my mother’s cafe. Her name, Dot’s, was still painted in red on the front glass. The regulars on those stools had been coming in since before I could see over the counter.

And Patty was sixty-six, with a husband on disability and no other job in a town of four thousand that would let her start at six in the morning and be home by three.

If I walked out, I was not only walking out on Greg.

Jim was out on a line call for the electric co-op that morning. The ice had pulled a line down on a county road by the river, and he had left at four.

I thought about calling him. I did not. This one was mine to answer.