The Coffee Pot at the Feed Store

Harlan takes two sugars. His hands shake now, bad enough that the spoon rattles against the mug, and the first week after June’s funeral I watched him spill sugar all over the counter trying to do it himself.

So I started doing it for him. Two sugars, stirred, the mug set down with the handle turned toward his right hand before he even got his coat off. We never talked about it. He would just nod at me and say, “Morning, Deborah,” the only person in town who calls me that.

On my first Thursday lunch shift under the new schedule, Kim Ahrens came in for a BLT and told me what had happened that week.

The new morning girl was a sweet high school kid named Kaylee, who had no way of knowing anything. Harlan sat down. She set a pour-over in front of him, black, and said it was three-fifty.

He tried to do the sugar himself. He spilled most of it. He tried again. Then he put three dollars and two quarters on the counter, got his walker, and went home without drinking any.

He did that three mornings running. On the fourth morning he did not come in at all.

I stood at the lunch counter holding Kim’s plate and could not move for a second.

“Somebody ought to say something,” Kim said.

“Somebody probably ought to,” I said, and I set her plate down.

Why I did not quit

People have asked me since why I did not just quit. Or march over to Brooke and give her a piece of my mind. Or post the whole thing on the town Facebook page, where it would have had two hundred comments by suppertime.

I had thought about every one of those. Here is why I did not do them.

That cafe was the only one we had. If it went under, there would be no place in town to sit down and eat a meal with a neighbor. The nearest restaurant would be eleven miles away, and half the men at the 5 AM table do not drive at night anymore.

And Brooke and Ryan were not wicked. They were scared. I had watched Ryan stand at the register at closing, counting the drawer twice and then a third time, chewing on his lip. You do not do that with money you can afford to lose.

If I posted about them, the town would have taken my side, because the town has known me since I was in pigtails. I knew that. They might never have recovered from it. I did not want to win that way.

But I could not stand the idea of Harlan sitting home in that quiet house with no coffee.

I did not want my people to have to choose between me and their cafe. I just wanted them to have somewhere to be at five in the morning.

And I needed those two shifts. Rick’s county paycheck is steady, but it is not much, and we still had our daughter’s last year at the community college to pay off.

So I kept the shifts. And I went looking for another counter.