The Coffee Trailer Across From the Diner

What I Did Not Do

I want to say plainly why I did not walk back into that diner and have it out with my uncle, because I thought about it.

I sat in that truck with my jaw so tight my teeth hurt, and I thought about it.

But I know my mother. If I had gone in there and made a scene, she would have spent the next week apologizing to Burt for me.

She would have felt she owed him even more for the job, and the jar would have kept getting emptied.

A fight would have been about me feeling better. It would not have put one dollar in her pocket.

What she needed was not someone to yell at Burt. What she needed was somewhere else to stand.

There is a state office she could have written to, and somebody at church told her that once.

But that takes months, and it would have meant standing up against her husband’s brother in front of the whole town with nothing to fall back on.

“How much do you have saved?” I asked her.

She did not answer right away. Then she said, “About four hundred dollars.”

Eleven years at that counter. Four hundred dollars. Her car had more than two hundred thousand miles on it, and she had been nursing a bad left foot for two winters because she could not afford the shoes the doctor told her to buy.

“Quit,” I said.

She laughed, but there was no fun in it. “And do what? I’m sixty-two, Toby. Nobody is hiring a sixty-two-year-old woman to do anything.”

“I am,” I said. “Come work for me.”