The Waitress Application at Dot’s Cafe

His Answer

Greg laughed. It came out of him all at once, surprised, the first time I had heard him laugh since before Mom went into the hospital.

“Lyle Bauer,” he said. “That man will never forgive me.”

“Lyle Bauer has forgiven worse than you,” I said. “He forgave Dale’s daddy for running over his mailbox three times. Pour him his coffee in the brown mug and see what happens.”

Greg held out his hand across the table. I shook it. His hand was rough on the inside now, the way a cook’s hand gets. One week had done that.

“Partners,” he said.

“Partners,” I said. “Now go home. I have to be in at five.”

“So do I,” Greg said.

Tuesday Morning

He was there at 5:00 the next morning, standing in the alley by the back door in the dark with his breath steaming, before I even got the truck parked. He had driven up from Jefferson City at 4:00.

I unlocked the door with Mom’s key with the red tape on it. I turned on the flat-top first thing. “Forty minutes,” I told him. “Every morning. Write that down.”

He wrote it down. He had brought a little notebook. Of course he had.

I started the sausage for the gravy and sent him back to the office to find the order sheet for the Friday truck, because whatever he had done with it, it was not where Mom kept it.

The Office

The office at Dot’s is a closet off the kitchen with a metal desk, a filing cabinet, a calendar from the feed store, and about forty years of paper. Mom kept everything. Receipts, recipe cards, Christmas cards from customers.

I heard him opening drawers. Then I didn’t hear anything for a while. The sausage was browning. I was about to holler at him to hurry up when he came out of the office.

He was holding one of Mom’s composition notebooks, the black-and-white speckled kind she bought a dozen at a time at the Dollar General. She used them for everything: orders, phone numbers, prayer lists, what the weather was.

The Notebook

Greg’s face was wet. He did not even try to hide it.

“Tammy,” he said. “Turn that down a minute.”

I slid the sausage off the hot side of the grill. I wiped my hands. He held the notebook out to me, open to a page near the back.

It was dated two years earlier, the same week she went to the lawyer in Fulton.

It was in her handwriting, the round, slanted cursive the nuns had taught her in grade school in Jefferson City, a little shakier than it had been once.

What Mom Wrote

I am going to tell you exactly what it said, because I have read it so many times I know it by heart.

“Went to see Mr. Haskell about the cafe today. It goes to Greg. Not because I love him more. Lord knows I don’t love either one more.

“It goes to Greg because he has not come home in a long time, not really, and this is the only way I know to make him. He will have to come home now. He will have to stand in this kitchen.”