Coffee at Seven Across the Loop

Kendra put her face in her hands. “I know. I know. I’ve been sick about it since the first morning. Since Fritzie looked at me.”

Mom set her cup down on the folding table. She reached over and pulled Kendra’s hands away from her face and held them, both of them, the way she used to hold ours to cross the street.

“You hurt me,” Mom said. “You hurt me worse than I’ve been hurt since your daddy died. I want you to know that. I’m not going to pretend you didn’t.”

Kendra nodded. Tears were running down to her chin.

“And I forgive you,” Mom said. “Because I’m your mother, and because the Lord tells me to, and because I don’t want to spend whatever time I’ve got left with my girls on opposite sides of a gravel road.”

Kendra cried then, really cried, with her head down on my mother’s shoulder in the middle of a campground, and Mom patted her back and looked out at the lake.

I went inside the trailer and washed the coffee pot for a long time.

I did not forgive Kendra that morning. I want to be honest about that. Mom could do it in one breath.

It took me most of the rest of the summer, and some days I am still working on it.

But I watched Kendra the next few weeks, and she did not just say sorry and go back to her camper.

She got up at six-thirty after her night shifts and came over and helped Mom with the coffee. She hauled the water jugs. She learned the regulars’ names.

She went to Dwayne on her own. I did not know that until later.

She walked into the ranger station on a weekday afternoon, still in her scrubs, and told him the truth about the key and the latch and the night at the emergency room.

She told him she had said what she said because she wanted the site, and that she was sorry, and that he should do whatever he thought was right about it.

Dwayne told Mom about it afterward, at the coffee table. He said he had never had anybody walk into his office and take something back like that in his whole career.

He said it took more nerve than he would have had.

Then he said, “And I owe you an apology too, Mrs. Satterlee. I took one person’s word about you without asking anybody else. I won’t do that again.”

“You were looking out for an old woman,” Mom said. “There are worse things to be guilty of, Dwayne. Cream and one sugar?”

The first week of August, Kendra got a new contract. Thirteen weeks at a hospital in Ardmore, starting the third Monday of the month, with a campground right in town that took long-term sites.

She came over and told Mom at the table, and Mom hugged her so hard her coffee spilled.

Two days later, Dwayne drove his county truck around the loop at seven in the morning and parked in front of Mom’s table.

He got out and stood in line. When he got to the front, he did not hold out his cup.

“Mrs. Satterlee,” he said, “when Kendra pulls out, the county would like you to take the host site back. For the rest of this season and next year too, if you want it. And I’d take it as a personal favor.”

Every person in that line went quiet.