The Coffee Trailer Across From the Diner

How She Came to Be There

Burt is my father’s older brother. He has owned that diner on the street across from the old lumberyard for close to thirty years, and his name is painted on the front window in letters that are starting to flake.

When my folks split up eleven years ago, it was not a friendly thing. Dad took a job driving for a feed company down near Joplin and remarried within the year.

He and Burt had a falling out over it that neither one of them has ever explained to me.

Mom was fifty-one then. She had kept house and raised me and done the books for Dad’s little body shop, and when the shop went with him, she had nothing on paper that said she could do anything.

Burt came over to her house the week after Dad moved out. He sat at her kitchen table and drank her coffee and said he needed a counter girl, and that family takes care of family.

I was twenty-five that year and already gone most of the summer. I remember being grateful to him. I remember shaking his hand in the driveway and telling him I would not forget it.

He started her at nine dollars an hour and called it the tipped rate. He said the tips would make up the rest, and in a town like ours, at a counter full of farmers and retirees and men from the grain elevator, the tips are not nothing.

What I did not know, because I was never there to see it, was that the tips never made it home.

Why I Was Never There

I run a coffee trailer. I bought it used when I was twenty-eight, a fourteen-foot white box on a single axle with a service window on one side, and I put every dollar I had into an espresso machine and a good grinder.

From May through October I work the fair circuit. County fairs, the state fair in Sedalia, a few steam shows and tractor pulls, a fall festival here and there.

I sleep in a camper behind the trailer and live on fair food and four hours a night.

In the off-season I park the trailer in a pole barn north of town that belongs to a friend, and I pick up whatever work I can find.

Some winters that is snow removal, some winters it is helping at the elevator during the late soybean run.

I would come home in November tired to the bone and eat supper at Mom’s on Sundays.

I would stop at the diner now and then for coffee. But I was never there on a weekday afternoon when Burt came for the jar.

That Thursday was only luck. The elevator had laid off the extra help a week early, and I had a free afternoon and a sweet tooth.

In the Truck

When Mom’s shift ended at three, I was waiting for her in the parking lot.

I had the heater going in my truck, and I told her to leave her car and sit with me a minute.

She climbed in with her purse on her lap and her coat still unbuttoned.

She looked at me sideways, the way she used to when I was ten and had come home with a note from the teacher.

“How long has he been doing that?” I asked her.

She did not pretend not to know what I meant. She just looked out the windshield at the diner and said, “Since the start, Toby. Since the first week.”

“Every week?”

“Most Fridays. Some weeks twice, if it’s been slow.” She smoothed her purse strap flat against her knee.

“He says the diner has lost money for years. He says the tips are what keep the lights on.”

I sat with that. I knew the diner was not doing well.

Half the stools were empty most mornings now, and the new place out by the highway had taken the young families. I could believe Burt was in trouble.

But being in trouble does not make another person’s money yours. Mom had earned every one of those quarters with her feet and her back and her memory for how every man in town liked his eggs.

“You know that isn’t right,” I said.

“I know it.” She said it quietly. “I knew it the first week. But he gave me a job when nobody else would, and he’s your father’s brother, and I didn’t want to be the one who made trouble.”