The Waitress Application at Dot’s Cafe

The Thermoses

Saturday, the regulars did something I will never forget as long as I live.

They did not quit coming. That would have been the easy thing, and it would not have been like them.

Instead, Lyle Bauer pulled his Silverado into the angled parking out front at 6:00 like he had every morning for forty-six years. But he did not come in.

He sat in the cab with the engine running for the heater and poured coffee out of a green Stanley thermos into the lid. Dale Meyer pulled in beside him. Then Ed and Carl in Carl’s Ford.

By 6:30 there were six pickups nosed into the curb in front of Dot’s Cafe, every one of them with an old man in it drinking coffee out of a thermos, facing the front window.

Through the Window

Patty said Greg stood behind the counter and looked at them for a long time. Then he went out the front door in my apron with the spatula still in his hand and knocked on Lyle’s driver’s side window.

Lyle rolled it down about four inches.

“Lyle, the coffee’s on,” Greg said. “It’s fresh. Come in.”

“Coffee’s fine,” Lyle said. “I’ve got coffee. We’re waiting on the cook.”

Then he rolled the window back up.

No Signs, No Shouting

There were no signs. Nobody shouted. They just sat there, every morning that weekend, and Greg had to look at them through his mother’s front window while he scraped burnt eggs off the flat-top.

On Sunday the cafe is closed, so Monday morning they did it again.

Patty said by then there were eight trucks, and Pastor Neal from the Methodist church had parked his Buick at the end of the row with his own thermos.

Greg served eleven breakfasts that Monday. On a regular Monday we do about ninety.

Monday Night

At 7:30 Monday night, the dogs started barking, and headlights came up our gravel lane. Jim looked out the kitchen window.

“It’s Greg,” he said.

I had been rolling out pie crust at the counter, just to have something to do with my hands. I did not stop. Jim went out on the porch and met him at the bottom of the steps.

I heard them talking out there. I could not hear what. It was not long. Then Jim held the screen door open, and my brother came into my kitchen.

Jim

Jim poured him a cup of coffee. He set it on the table in front of him.

Then Jim said, “I’ll be out in the shop,” and put his barn coat on and went out the back door, and I heard the shop light come on across the yard.

I have been married to that man for thirty years. That is the most loving thing I ever saw him do. He knew this was not his to fix, and he knew I would want the room.

Greg sat at my kitchen table. He looked terrible. He had a burn on the inside of his left wrist, a fresh one, shiny and pink, from the edge of the flat-top.

I knew that burn. Every cook in America has had that burn.

The Keys

He took a ring of keys out of his coat pocket and set them on the table between us.

They were Mom’s keys, with the little plastic tag from the Farm Bureau on them and the front door key wrapped in red tape so she could find it in the dark.

“I’m sorry, Tammy,” he said.

I kept rolling the crust.

“I was wrong,” he said. “I was wrong about all of it. I don’t know how to run that place. I didn’t know there was anything to know. I thought you just cooked.”