The Coffee Pot at the Feed Store

The coffee can

I did not tell anybody. That was the rule I set for myself. I was not going to call around or ask anyone to come.

I only told Dale. But Dale buys his supper at the Casey’s most nights, and he talks to everybody who comes through his door for chicken feed, and by Sunday night I would guess half the 5 AM table had heard there would be coffee at the feed store.

I found an old Folgers can in our garage, the big red one, and washed it out and taped a piece of paper on it. The paper said “4-H” and nothing else. Whatever anybody put in it would go to the county 4-H club, which my kids were in, and their kids, and probably someday their kids.

I set my alarm for four. I did not need it. I was up at three-thirty, sitting at the kitchen table in the dark with my shoes already on.

Rick came out in his sock feet around four, poured himself a cup from our own pot, and stood there looking at me.

“You going?” he said.

“I’m going.”

He nodded. He did not say anything else. But when I went out to the car, I found he had already scraped the frost off my windshield, and I had not even heard him go out.

Monday

At 4:40 in the morning I unlocked Dale’s side door with the key he had given me and turned on the lights.

The fluorescents buzzed and flickered and caught. The whole store smelled like ground corn and molasses and the rubber of new boots. The feed sacks were stacked shoulder high against the far wall, and the cat was asleep on a sack of oyster shell.

I filled Joan’s urn at the utility sink in the back, carried it out, and plugged it in. I set out a stack of heavy white mugs I had bought at the Goodwill in Mason City for a quarter apiece, and the sugar, and a quart of half-and-half, and a glass carafe for pouring refills so nobody had to get up.

I had put my old cafe apron on over my red flannel without even thinking about it. Twenty-three years will do that to you.

Dale came in at a quarter to five with two boxes of donuts and set them on the end of the counter without a word.

The urn started to perk. If you have never heard a big church urn start up, it sounds like a slow rain on a tin roof, and then it gets faster, and the whole room fills with the smell.

At five o’clock, across the street, the lights came on in the cafe right on schedule. I watched Ryan unlock the front door and flip the sign. I watched Brooke tie on her apron behind the counter. Kaylee came in a minute later with her hair still wet.

At 5:02, Dale’s bell rang.

It was Harlan.

He had parked the Buick in front of the cafe, out of habit, I think. Then he had crossed Main Street in the dark with his walker, the one with the tennis balls on the back feet, one wheel at a time down the curb and one wheel at a time back up.

I do not know how long it took him. I only know I watched it through the window and could not breathe the whole time.

He came through the door. He stood there in his seed cap and his old brown chore coat, breathing hard, and looked around at the feed sacks and the cat and Joan’s urn, and then at me.

I already had his mug. Two sugars, stirred. The handle turned toward his right hand.

He came up to the counter and wrapped both his hands around that mug. They were shaking, and the coffee shook, but he held it.

He did not say anything for a long time. Long enough that Dale found something to do with the register.

Then Harlan said, “There she is.”

That was all. He said it to the mug, not to me. And I had to turn around and pretend to check the half-and-half for a minute.