When Patty brought the pie, he said, “Could I get the pie on a separate check, please? I’m paying for the pie.” She looked at me. I shrugged. She said, “Sure, sweetheart,” and went to ring it up.
The pie came to nine dollars and nineteen cents with the tax.
When she brought the little slip back, Dylan took the gift card out of his hoodie pocket and set it on the slip.
“That’s five,” he said. Then he took out his wallet, the brown one he got for his birthday, and counted out four ones and a dime and a nickel and four pennies from his mowing money.
He mowed six yards that summer, all on our street and the next one over, for fifteen dollars a yard. He was saving for a truck.
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He had six hundred and twelve dollars in a coffee can on his closet shelf, and he knew the number to the penny.
He slid the card and the money across to Patty and said, “I’ve got the pie. My mom doesn’t pay for the pie tonight.”
Patty picked up the card. She turned it over in her fingers and looked at it for a long time, and then she looked at him, and then at me. I do not know what she put together. Something. Enough.
“Coffee’s on me tonight,” she said. “All of it. Don’t argue with me.” And she walked away fast toward the kitchen, with her hand up near her face.
That was when I cried. Not at the farmhouse, and not in the car.
At a truck stop booth on I-70, over a piece of cherry pie my son paid for with the only thing his almost-grandmother had given him.
Dylan pretended not to see. He looked out the window at the rigs in the lot and ate his pecan pie very slowly and let me be.
He learned that from me, I think. It is what I always did for him.
When I had pulled myself together, I said, “I’m sorry I made a scene, bud. On Christmas.”
He shook his head. “You didn’t make a scene. You didn’t even raise your voice.” He thought for a second. “It was kind of the quietest thing I ever saw.”
My phone was face down on the table by the sugar. It had been buzzing since we pulled out of Marilyn’s yard.
I had not turned it over once. I was afraid of what would be on it, and I was afraid of what would not.
It buzzed eleven times while we sat there. I counted. Dylan counted too, I think, because each time it went off he glanced at it and then at me.
“You should maybe look,” he said, around the ninth time. “It might be Brent.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll look in a little bit.”
We sat there an hour. Patty kept the coffee coming. The older man with the newspaper finished and left, and on his way past our booth he put a hand on Dylan’s shoulder for no reason I could see and said, “Merry Christmas, son.”
At twenty to eight the bell over the door rang. You could hear it all the way back in the cafe, a little brass bell on a spring, the kind every small-town store in Kansas has had since before I was born.
Dylan set down his fork. He looked past my shoulder toward the front of the store, and his face did something I could not read.
“Mom,” he said quietly. “Don’t turn around yet.”