The Coffee Trailer Across From the Diner

Spring

In the middle of March, on a bright windy morning when the snow was finally going off the fields, I saw Burt come out of his diner and stand on the curb. He stood there a while. Then he crossed the street.

He waited at the end of the line like everybody else. He was wearing his white apron and a jacket over it, and his hands were in his pockets. When he got to the window he did not order anything.

“Marguerite,” he said.

Mom set down the cup she was filling. “Burt.”

He looked at the menu on the chalkboard, at her handwriting, at the little heart on the bottom. He looked at the tip jar on the counter, which was about half full already at that hour.

“I could use you back,” he said. “I’d pay fifteen. And the jar would be yours.”

There was a little quiet in the line behind him. Eldon was sitting in one of Clancy’s lawn chairs, and he lowered his coffee and did not drink it.

Mom looked at Burt for a long time. Her face was not angry. It was not anything, really. It was just a woman’s face looking at a man she had known for thirty years.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

Burt nodded. He stood there a second more, like he wanted to say something else and could not find it. Then he turned around and crossed back to his side of the street.

After

In May I hitched the trailer to my truck and took it back out on the fair circuit.

Mom came with me for the Missouri fairs that summer, the county ones close enough to sleep in her own bed, and she ran the window while I ran the machine.

She bought new tires for her car in June. She bought a winter coat in August, on sale, a good one.

She put money in a savings account for the first time in her life, and she showed me the little book like a girl showing off a ribbon from the fair.

When I set up across the street from the diner again the next November, the regulars were waiting on the gravel the very first morning.

Eldon was at the front of the line at five minutes to seven, in the same tan barn coat and the same feed cap.

She never did go back. When I asked her once, she said she had finally found out what her feet were worth.