Coffee at Seven Across the Loop

Kendra looked down at her travel mug.

I want to be honest about how that felt. Part of me wanted to look right at my sister and make sure she saw it.

I did not. I turned around and handed the next man a paper cup, and I kept my eyes on my own side of the road.

The lake was glinting through the pines. The line was eleven people long.

Then I heard tires on the gravel.

Dwayne Kolb’s county truck came around the bend of the loop, slow, the way he always drove it in the mornings to check on things. It passed the bathhouse. It passed the host site.

It passed Kendra, standing by the little sign with her coffee.

And it stopped right in front of our folding table.

Dwayne rolled the window down and looked at the line, eleven people long, and then at my mother in her yellow windbreaker with the blue pot in her hand.

For a second nobody said anything.

Then Mom held up a paper cup. “Cream and one sugar, Dwayne? Like last August?”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he put the truck in park, got out, and got in line behind the young dad with the baby.

He did not cut ahead. He just stood there and waited his turn like everybody else.

When he got to the front, Mom handed him his cup. Cream and one sugar.

“How’s your little girl’s ear?” she asked. “She had the tubes put in, didn’t she? Back in March?”

Dwayne opened his mouth and closed it again. “February,” he said. “Yes, ma’am. She’s doing real good.”

“February. That’s right. You told me at the feed store in town. She was so scared of the doctor.” Mom smiled at him. “You give her a hug from the coffee lady.”

He stood there holding his cup. Then he said, “Thank you, Mrs. Satterlee,” and went back to his truck. He sat in it for a minute with the window down before he drove off. He went past the host site without stopping.

Across the loop, Kendra turned around and went back inside her camper. The door clicked shut behind her.

That was the first morning. There were 90 more of them that summer, give or take, and Mom did not miss a single one.

People started coming earlier. By the middle of June, there were folks lined up at a quarter to seven with their mugs.

A man from Loop A started walking over every morning. He said he could smell the pot from his site.

Somebody left a second folding table at the edge of site 14 one night with a note that said “For the overflow.” Somebody else left a box of donuts from the bakery in town on Saturday mornings and never said who it was.

And because people were at Mom’s table, they asked Mom things. Where’s the good fishing this week. Is the boat ramp open. Which way to the bathhouse with the hot water. Can my grandkids swim off the point.

Mom answered every one. She was not the host anymore, and she never once told anybody she was. But she was the one people walked to.

Across the loop, Kendra was doing the job. I will give her that. She checked people in and swept the bathhouse and sold the firewood. She was a nurse. She knew how to work.