Coffee at Seven Across the Loop

At seven o’clock sharp by her wristwatch, she took the pot off the burner, poured herself the first cup like she always did, and set the pot on the folding table.

Then she sat down in her camp chair and waited.

Across the loop, Kendra came out of her camper. She was in jeans and a sweatshirt with her hair pulled back, and she had her own coffee in a travel mug.

She walked out and stood by the little host sign and looked over at us.

Nobody came.

One minute. Then two. I could hear a woodpecker somewhere back in the trees and the far-off whine of a bass boat on the lake. I was holding the paper cups so tight I bent the top one.

Mom just sipped her coffee and looked at the lake.

Then a screen door slapped somewhere back in the pines.

A man in a blue jacket came walking down the gravel from the far end of the loop, holding a big white mug.

He did not look at the host site. He walked straight to Mom’s table and held out his mug.

“Morning, Rosemary.”

“Morning to you. How’s that knee?”

“Still bad. Surgery’s in August.”

“I’ll pray on it. Here you go.”

Behind him came a woman in a gray fleece I recognized from last summer, and behind her, the retired couple from the end of the loop who came down from Kansas every year.

Then a young dad with a baby on his hip. Then two more.

By seven-fifteen, there was a line.

Mom poured and talked. She asked the Kansas couple whether their daughter had had the baby yet, and she had, a girl, eight pounds even.

She asked the young dad whether his dog had gotten over that sickness last fall. It had, mostly.

She did not miss one name. Not one.

I stood there with the paper cups and listened to her rattle off grandkids and surgeries and the names of boats, and I had to keep my face down so nobody would see it.

Then an old woman in a pale blue fleece came up the line, slow, with a mug in both hands. She stopped in front of the table and just stood there looking at Mom.

It was Fritzie Albers. She was 80 that summer. She had come every June for longer than Mom had been the host, and she always took site 9 because it was closest to the bathhouse.

She set her mug down on the folding table. Then she came around the end of it and put both arms around my mother and held on.

“Rosemary,” she said, into Mom’s shoulder. “When I pulled in last night and saw somebody else at the host site, I thought you’d died. I sat in my car and cried.”

Mom laughed and patted her back. “Not yet, honey. Not yet.”

“I said a prayer for you right there in the car.”

“Well, it worked. Here I am.”

Fritzie let go and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Mom picked up Fritzie’s mug and filled it to the very top, the way Fritzie liked it, and put in two sugars without asking.

Then Fritzie turned around and looked across the loop at Kendra for a long time. She did not say one word. She did not have to.

She had sat with my mother in an emergency room until two in the morning, and she knew exactly whose daughter that was.