The Christmas Breakfast at the Super 8

He did not take the empty chair at the end. I noticed that. Nobody had to tell him whose chair it was.

“Mom’s coming,” he said. “Maybe. She went to the nine o’clock service at church. She said she’d see how she felt after.”

Hal turned in his chair to face him.

“Travis,” he said, “how much rent do you pay your mother?”

Travis blinked at him. “What?”

“It’s a plain question, son. How much rent do you pay to live in my basement?”

Travis looked at me. I looked at my coffee. I had not said one word to Hal about Travis, and I am glad I did not have to.

Hal did that arithmetic on his own, the way he does everything.

“Nothing,” Travis said. “You know that. Mom said I didn’t have to. Not until I got back on my feet.”

“You’ve been on your feet six years,” Hal said. He did not raise his voice. “Your sister paid two hundred dollars for one night in her own old bedroom. With her boy. Cash.”

Travis went red from his collar up to his hairline. He looked at me, and I could see he had not known. “She charged you? Kels, she charged you to stay at the house?”

“It’s done,” I said. “It’s all right, Travis.”

Owen came back carrying a paper plate with a waffle on it, a little dark on one side. He set it in front of Hal with both hands. “It stuck a little,” he said. “You have to flip it right when it beeps.”

Hal looked at that waffle like it was the best present he had gotten all year. “That is a fine waffle,” he said. “Thank you, Owen. I’ll eat every bit of it.”

“I’ll start paying in January,” Travis said finally. “Rent. Three hundred a month. That’s what my buddy pays for his place over in Murray, and it’s worse than the basement.”

Hal nodded. That was all, one nod. From Hal, that is a whole speech, and Travis knew it.

Then Travis rubbed his face with both hands and said, “There’s something else. About my truck. I think somebody ought to know.”

He told us. He had bought the black truck a year and a half earlier. His credit was bad, so Mom co-signed the loan. The payment was $612 a month.

He got behind over the summer, when the shop cut his hours. Three months, maybe four.

The bank started calling Mom, because her name was on the loan. She told him not to worry, she would handle it.

“Handle it how?” Hal asked.

Travis looked down at the table. “I figured she had it. I didn’t ask her. I should have asked her.”

Hal sat very still. I watched him put it together at the same moment I did.

The envelopes turned face down on the kitchen table. Well, all right, on the phone in October. Two hundred a night, cash.

“She does the bills,” Hal said, mostly to himself. “Always has. I never once looked over her shoulder. I never thought I needed to.”

That was when the lobby door opened for the third time.

It was my mother. She was still in her church coat, the long camel wool one she has worn to the Christmas service as long as I can remember, with her good purse on her arm and snow on her shoulders.