Coffee at Seven Across the Loop

That was 11 summers ago. She never missed one.

If you have never camped at a county lake, a camp host is a volunteer who lives at the campground all season.

In exchange for a free site with water and electric, you put in about 20 hours a week.

Mom checked people in when the gatehouse was closed. She swept the bathhouse twice a day.

She sold firewood bundles out of the shed for $6 apiece and kept the money in a locked box for the county, every dime written down.

She raked out fire rings after people left. She knew which campers would be loud on Saturday night and which ones needed somebody to check on them because their husband had a bad heart.

And every morning at seven o’clock, she set that blue enamel pot on her folding table at the edge of the gravel and poured coffee for anybody who walked up.

She never charged a penny. She never missed a morning, not even in the rain.

That coffee table was the center of her year. People planned their trips around it. Grandmothers brought their grandkids to meet “the coffee lady.” Men who did not talk to anybody at home stood at that table and told her about their prostate surgery.

So when I tell you my sister took that from her, I want you to know what it was. It was not a campsite. It was the thing that got my mother out of bed after my father died.

Kendra is three years older than me. She has been a travel nurse for most of a decade, going wherever the thirteen-week contracts were, Amarillo and Joplin and a hospital outside of Shreveport.

She was good at it. She made good money for years. And somewhere in there, she bought a camper that cost more than my first house and started living in it full time.

Then her last contract in Tulsa ended in April and the next one fell through. She did not tell anybody how bad things had gotten.

She just pulled into the lake in the middle of May and parked in the overflow lot.

Mom was thrilled. She had both her girls close for the first time in years. She carried Kendra a plate of sausage and biscuits the first morning and sat on her camper step and talked for an hour.

I found out later what Kendra told Dwayne Kolb. She went to the ranger station on a Tuesday afternoon in her scrubs and said she was worried about her mother.

She said Mom had been leaving keys in the firewood shed. She said Mom had missed a late check-in the fall before and a family had sat at the gate for half an hour. She said, “I’m a nurse. I see this every day. I’m telling you as a professional.”

The keys were true, sort of. Mom had left the shed key on the hook inside the shed once in October, because the latch was broken and she was waiting on a new one.

Dwayne himself had been the one who never ordered it.

The missed check-in was true too. It was the night Mom drove to the emergency room in Norman because Fritzie Albers in site 9 had fallen in the bathhouse and could not get up.

Mom held her hand in the waiting room until two in the morning.