The Coffee Pot at the Feed Store

Supper

Rick was home by five-thirty that night. He runs a road grader for the county, and in harvest he is out on the gravel every day keeping the roads fit for grain trucks, so he comes in tired and smelling like dust and hydraulic oil.

He washed up at the kitchen sink the way I have asked him not to for twenty-nine years, and sat down, and looked at me, and knew.

“What happened?”

I told him while I put the pork chops on the table. I told it plain. I did not cry, though I will be honest and say I had done some of that in the car, parked behind the Casey’s where nobody would see.

Rick listened all the way through. He cut his pork chop into squares, the way he does, and ate two of them before he said anything.

“You don’t owe that place your mornings, Deb,” he said. “You owe them your shifts.”

Then he went back to his pork chop, and that was the only thing he said about it for three weeks. Rick is not a talker. But when he says a thing once, he means it to last.

I thought about what he said all night. I lay there and listened to the furnace kick on and off and watched the clock go from two to three to four.

At ten to five, out of twenty-three years of habit, I sat straight up in bed with my feet on the cold floor before I remembered I had nowhere to be.

Two sugars

I want to tell you about the 5 AM table, because nobody who has not sat at one understands what it is.

It is not a meal. Most of those men could make their own eggs. It is the place where you find out whose combine broke down, whose wife is back in the hospital in Mason City, what the elevator is paying, and who needs a hand with a grain cart before noon.

In harvest it matters more. The men are up before light and in the field until midnight sometimes, running the combine while the moisture is right. Breakfast at five might be the last time they sit down with another human being until the next morning.

They had their spots. Leonard Pruitt at the end stool because of his hip. The Ahrens brothers in the second booth, never the first. Bill Fogel, who drank his coffee black and complained it was too strong every single day for nineteen years and never once sent it back.

And Harlan Voss, who is 88.

Harlan farmed the same quarter section north of town for sixty years. His wife, June, died four winters ago. He still drives his old Buick into town every morning at five, because he told me once that if he stays home the house is too quiet to stand.