The Waitress Who Knew Every Order
“Call them,” she said finally. “Just tell them what happened. Don’t ask them for one thing.”
“I won’t.”
“And you do not call Levi Dressler.”
“I won’t do that either.”
She nodded once and sat down at the table beside her pie, and I sat across from her with the phone and the book, and I started to dial.
I called Hank Sorensen first, because he has been first in the door at the Prairie Rose since before I could drive.
He answered on the fifth ring. I could hear a television low in the background and the particular quiet of an old man alone in a house on a holiday.
“Hank, it’s Tess Dugan. Debbie’s girl.”
“Well, Merry Christmas, Tess.” His voice warmed. “Everything all right?”
“Mom got fired tonight. By text message. About an hour ago.”
There was a long silence. I thought the line had dropped.
“I’m not calling to ask you to do anything,” I said. “I just didn’t want to be the only one who knew. And I didn’t want her to be the only one, sitting in that kitchen.”
“Fired,” Hank said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Thirty-two years.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Who by?”
“The new man. Levi.”
I heard something set down hard. “I ran the scale at the co-op elevator for 35 years,” Hank Sorensen said slowly, “and I have weighed a great many men’s grain and a great many men’s words, and I have never once been told anything that made me want to put my boots on at nine o’clock at night. Where’s your mother’s house? Still the one on Poplar?”
“Hank, you don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to,” he said. “I’m asking where it is.”
I called Orville Jarvis next. He ran the hardware on Main for 40 years before his son took it over, and he sat at the end of the counter every day at 11:50, the one stool that was his. He didn’t say anything at all for a good ten seconds. Then he said, “Lana would have thrown that boy through the window,” and hung up on me, and I thought I had made a mistake until I heard his truck start up on his end before the phone clicked.
Kirk Pomeroy, who drives a county grader in the winter, said, “I’ll swing by tomorrow.” Doc Elliott, who is 84 and spent 50 years vetting everything from cattle to a cranky goose, said, “Tell Debbie I’m bringing the good coffee cake and she can’t stop me.” Pastor Logan Lund said, “Does she want company or does she want to be left alone? Because those are different visits.”
“I think she wants to want company,” I said.
“That’s the visit I’ll make.”
Loretta Quinn, who runs activities at the care center over in O’Neill, said a word I won’t repeat in front of the pastor. I called Reuben Moody last.
I almost didn’t. Reuben is 79, a widower, and he does not do anything out of the ordinary. He comes in at 6:10 every morning, sits in booth 4, drinks his coffee, and never says a word beyond hello unless he is spoken to first. There are two cups at his table. There always have been. Mom set the second one down the week after his wife Viola passed, four years ago, and never mentioned it, and he never mentioned it, and every morning she filled both.
The phone rang eleven times.
“Hello.” Rough, careful.
“Reuben, it’s Tess. Debbie’s daughter.”
“Is she hurt?”