The Mason Jar by the Pie Case

I started to stand, and Gunnar reached out and, very gently, put his hand over mine, the one holding the check. His hand was dry and light. He had never touched me before.

“Gail, I am eighty-two years old,” he said. “I have eaten your food more than twenty thousand times. I have never once seen you take a thing you didn’t earn, and I have never once seen you ask for a thing you did.”

“That’s not true.”

“It’s true. So listen. This isn’t a gift. It’s the other half of the tip. It’s thirty years of quarters. If I die owing you, I’ll do it in booth four with my cap on, and I will haunt the pie case.”

“He means it,” said Ione.

“I know he does.”

“You can say no to a gift,” Gunnar said. “You can’t turn down your own wages.”

I sat back down on Sig’s stool. I looked at the check, and the jar, and the room. Twenty-three people had gotten out of bed at four o’clock and parked behind the dumpster pen so I would not see their trucks.

I will not tell you I cried. Ione did that for the room. What I did was hold on to the counter with my free hand and look at the old Formica, at the scar beside the napkin dispenser where I dropped a cast-iron skillet in 2003. I had stood at that counter thirty years, and it never once occurred to me that it was holding anybody up but me.

“Okay,” I said. It was the only word I had. “Okay.”

“Okay,” said Gunnar. He nodded and put his cap back on, and I saw how tired he was, and how long he had been standing.

“Now would somebody please start the coffee,” said Harvey Quam from the back. “We open in forty minutes, and I’m not paying to look at this many sad people.”

Forty minutes

I washed my face in the back sink. I put on my apron and tied it twice, because my hands were not working right.

Darlene lit the grill. Harvey started the pots. The twenty-three people in my cafe scraped their chairs and filed out the door and around the building to their trucks, and at 5:58 they filed back in through the front as if they had never been there, and took their stools, and opened menus none of them has needed since the Carter administration.

“Morning, Gail,” said Sig.

“Morning, Sig. Coffee?”

“You know how I take it.”

I did. I do. I put the pot down and poured, and Sig Skarie watched the coffee come up the cup like it was the only thing in the world.

By nine the whole thing was just a Monday. Ione ordered tea and a slice of pie, and I charged her for the tea, and she looked at me over her glasses, and I said, “Habit.”

She said, “Well. Break it.”

I charged her for both. It was the first time in thirty years anyone in that building asked me to take their money, and it felt like putting a hand into warm water.