Seventy Regulars Came to My Wedding
“He did what?” Tyler is twenty-seven and the steadiest man I know. He weighs every word like it costs money. But I heard something go hard in his voice. “I’m off at seven. I’ll drive down there.”
“Please don’t,” I said. “Please. He’s by himself, and Arlene’s laid up, and you’ll say something and he’ll say something, and then it’s a thing between the two of you forever in a town this size.”
He was quiet for a long time. A truck horn went off somewhere behind him. “He kept your money, Kay.”
“I know he did,” I said. “I’m going to think about it. Just let me think about it.”
That night at my parents’ kitchen table, my dad wanted to know if I had it in writing.
My mom wanted to call Arlene. My cousin Jess, who works at the courthouse, said I should file a wage claim with the state.
“Tips belong to the server,” Jess said. “That’s not even a question. You file with the Department of Labor in Topeka and they make him pay.”
“How long does that take?” I asked.
She made a face. “Months. Maybe longer. They’re backed up. You’d fill out the form, he’d get a letter, he’d answer it, they’d investigate.”
I thought about that. I thought about spending my last two weeks as Kaylee Mott, and the first months of being Kaylee Klein, writing to an office in Topeka about six hundred and forty dollars.
About Vern opening an envelope from the state while Arlene watched from her recliner.
“No,” I said. “I’m not spending my engagement filling out forms against a man who taught me to make change.”
My dad looked at me over his reading glasses. My dad is a quiet man who farms twelve hundred acres of wheat and milo with my uncle, and he has a way of looking that says he heard you, and he also heard what you didn’t say.
“Then what are you going to do?” he asked.
I didn’t know yet. I went to bed in my old room, under my old ceiling, and lay there thinking about the cafe. Not about Vern. About the men at the round table by the front window.
They call it the liars’ table. Every small town in Kansas has one, and most of the ones I know are in a cafe.
Ours had eight chairs and on a good morning eleven men, because three of them pulled stools over from the counter.
Bud Hoffman was the head of it, if it had a head. He was eighty-two, a retired wheat farmer whose son runs the place now.
He came in at six fifteen every morning of my life at that cafe. Black coffee, two refills, a short stack on Tuesdays.
And every single morning, before he left, he slid a quarter under his saucer. Not a dollar. A quarter. The first week I worked there I thought he was being cheap, and I said so to Arlene.
Arlene laughed so hard she had to sit down. “Honey, Bud Hoffman has left a quarter under that saucer for every girl who ever poured his coffee since 1975. He tips the full amount on his card. The quarter’s for you to keep in a jar. He says that’s how his mother saved for her wedding.”