Coffee at Seven Across the Loop

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

“Sure.”

“Is your mom all right? I mean, really? Your sister told me some things in May, and I acted on them. And I’ve been watching all month, and I can’t find a thing wrong with her. She remembered my daughter’s ear tubes. I didn’t even remember telling her.”

I thought about it for a long time. I could have told him everything right then. The broken latch. The emergency room. The camper payment. Every bit of it.

“I’m not going to tell you anything about my sister,” I said. “That’s between her and Mom. But you can ask anybody on Loop B about my mother. Ask Fritzie Albers where she spent the night of October the twelfth.”

He looked at me a while. Then he nodded and carried the garbage bags to the dumpster, and I went back to the trailer.

I found out later that he did. He walked down to site 9 that same evening, while it was still light, and sat with Fritzie on her camper step for almost an hour.

The middle of July was hot the way only Oklahoma can be hot.

Mom moved the coffee to six-thirty so people could get their walks in before it got bad. She hung a little battery fan off the trailer awning.

One morning in the third week of July, I was stacking cups when I looked up and saw Kendra standing at the end of the line.

She had a mug in her hand. Mom’s mug, actually, an old brown one with a chip in the handle that Mom had given her years ago.

She was standing behind the Kansas couple, and she was not looking at anybody.

The Kansas couple stepped up and got their coffee and went on. Then it was Kendra.

She held out the mug. Mom looked at it. Then she looked at Kendra, and for a second I could not breathe.

Mom filled it to the top. She put in one sugar without asking, because that is how Kendra has taken her coffee since she was sixteen years old.

“Morning, sweetheart,” Mom said.

“Morning, Mama.” Kendra’s voice cracked right down the middle.

She did not walk away. She stood off to the side by the trailer and drank her coffee while Mom served the rest of the line.

When the line was gone, she came over and sat down on the cooler beside Mom’s camp chair.

I picked up the empty sugar packets and pretended I was not listening. I was absolutely listening.

“I’m $11,000 behind on the camper,” Kendra said, looking at the lake. “The contract in Tulsa ended in April and the next one fell through, and I didn’t have anywhere else to park it. I was going to lose it. I was scared to death.”

Mom did not say anything. She just held her own cup in both hands.

“I knew you’d give me the site if I asked,” Kendra said. “And then you’d have slept in your car all summer and called it fine. So I didn’t ask. I did the other thing instead.”

“You told Dwayne I was losing my mind,” Mom said. Not mean. Just plain. Just setting it on the table where everybody could see it.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“In front of strangers. With your nurse voice.”