The Waitress Who Knew Every Order
She crossed the kitchen and put her arms around Reuben Moody, who is a head taller than she is, and held on to him with the dish towel still in one fist.
Hank looked at the ceiling. Orville put the fork down. Ollie, who had come halfway down the stairs and stopped, went back up as quietly as he’d come.
At about half past midnight my mother finally looked at the clock.
“Well,” she said, “I’m supposed to be at work in less than six hours.”
The room laughed, tiredly. Then Orville cleared his throat.
“Debbie, you’re not going in.”
“I know I’m not. I just keep thinking I am.”
“You’ve got 32 years of Christmases you worked,” Orville said. “How many did you sit down for?”
She thought about it. “Two. The years the kids were born.”
“Then tomorrow you’re going to sit.”
Nobody told Hank what to do about the Prairie Rose, either. He had eaten Christmas breakfast at the counter every year since his wife passed, a plate of eggs and then the pie, and he got up from the table, put on the red parka, and said, “I believe I’ll make my own this year. I’ve got a skillet.” That was the whole of it. Orville said he had a skillet too. Reuben, who had been looking at his hands, said he did not own a skillet but he had a can opener.
I did not say anything. I had said one thing on the phone, that my mother had been let go, and the rest had come out of them like water finding the low part of a field.
The Prairie Rose Cafe opened at six o’clock on Christmas morning, as it had for 25 years, with the sign turned and the lights on and the coffee made.
I wasn’t there. Hank and Orville had come back to Poplar Street before seven, each carrying a skillet like a man reporting for duty, and I was in my mother’s kitchen with two children in pajamas tearing into stockings and Orville Jarvis at my mother’s stove in my mother’s apron, burning toast with great dignity. So I only know the Rose the way I know the rest of it, from Lamar, the cook. He told me later that Levi had made a full pot at half past five and set out clean cups, and that at noon he was still pouring it into the sink.
There were two customers all morning. A trucker off Highway 20 and a man from the next county who didn’t know.
At seven, Doc Elliott came up the walk with the coffee cake, took a notepad from his pocket, tore off a sheet, and wrote across the top in his shaky vet’s hand: Debbie B. Table for one. He held it out ceremonially.
“Your order, ma’am,” he said. “One cup of coffee. One slice of pie. One day off.”
My mother put her hand to her chest.
She sat in her own kitchen on Christmas morning, in her good robe, while a retired grain man poured her coffee and a hardware man burned her toast and a pastor, who had come at half past seven with a thermos and his own folding chair, set a plate in front of her, and a waitress of 32 years was waited on for the first time since she was a girl.
“Well,” she said. She cut into the pie. “This could use salt.”
Everyone roared.