Coffee at Seven Across the Loop

When I told her, she did not say anything for a long time. Then she asked, “Can I bring my table?”

“That’s the whole point, Mom.”

She went to the closet and came back with her yellow windbreaker, the bright one, the color of a school bus.

Dad bought it for her at the farm store in 2009 so he could find her at the county fair. She held it in her lap and smoothed the sleeves.

“All right then,” she said.

Moving day was Sunday the 31st.

My husband hitched Mom’s little travel trailer to his truck after church and pulled it out to the lake with me following behind in the car with the folding table, the camp stove and the blue enamel pot riding in a laundry basket on the back seat.

Kendra had already moved her camper into site 3. Mom’s old site. She was standing out front by the little host sign with a clipboard of her own when we came around the bend.

She saw where we were turning. I watched her understand it. She stood very still with that clipboard and watched my husband back Mom’s trailer into site 14 in one clean try, the way he does.

She did not wave. Neither did we.

Mom did not say much while we set up. She leveled the trailer with my husband and hooked up the water hose and checked the electric.

Then she went to the back seat of my car and got out her folding table.

She carried it to the very front of the site, right where the gravel of the pad meets the gravel of the loop.

She opened the legs one at a time and set it down square, facing across the road.

“Same as always,” she said.

That afternoon a few campers drove past slow. One of them, an older man with a cane, rolled down his window and called, “Rosemary? What are you doing over there?”

“Just camping, Elwin,” Mom said. “Coffee’s at seven.”

He looked across the road at Kendra, and then back at Mom. He nodded slowly and drove on without asking another thing.

I stayed the night on the fold-out couch in Mom’s trailer. I did not sleep much. I kept thinking that nobody would come, that people would be too awkward, that they would not want to pick a side.

I thought about Mom setting out that pot and nobody walking up, and Kendra watching from across the loop, and I almost could not breathe.

Mom was up at six. I heard her humming in the little kitchen, “Blessed Assurance,” the way she always did when she made coffee. By the time I got my gray hoodie on and came out, she had the camp stove lit and the blue enamel pot perking on the burner.

It was a beautiful June morning, cool for Oklahoma, the kind where you can see your breath for about ten minutes before the sun gets up over the trees.

The light came slanting through the pines and laid long stripes across the gravel.

She had her yellow windbreaker zipped to the chin. Her short silver hair was combed just so.

She had two dozen sugar packets in a coffee can and a jar of powdered creamer and a little stack of stir sticks.

I had brought a sleeve of fifty paper cups from the dollar store, in case people forgot their mugs. I tore it open and stood beside her and waited.