The Coffee Trailer Across From the Diner

The Apron

She looked at me for a long time. I could see her doing the arithmetic in her head, the way she used to do Dad’s books at the kitchen table on Sunday nights with a pencil behind her ear.

“You park that trailer in November,” she said. “You don’t have any work in the winter.”

“I’ll make some,” I said. “I’ll pay you eighteen an hour, and every tip in the jar is yours. I mean every one. I won’t even count it.”

She shook her head. “That’s too much. You can’t afford that.”

“I’ve been doing that math since I was twenty-five,” I told her. “I just didn’t know I was doing it.”

She sat there a minute longer. The heater ticked. A grain truck went by on the street and rattled the windows.

Then she put her hand on the door handle, and I thought she was going to go home.

Instead she walked back into the diner. I watched her through the big front window.

She went behind the counter, untied her apron, folded it once, and laid it on the counter beside the register where the jar had been.

I could not hear what she said. I found out later it was only three words. “I’m done, Burt.”

Burt looked at the apron, and then at her, and he laughed. Not a mean laugh, exactly. More the way you laugh at a child who says she is running away from home.

“Where are you going to go at your age?” he said.

She did not answer him. She picked up her coat and her purse and walked out the front door, and she did not let it slam behind her. She just let it close.

Across the Street

The answer to Burt’s question, as it turned out, was about ninety feet.

Directly across the street from the diner there is a gravel lot where a man named Clancy used to sell and fix lawnmowers.

He closed the shop four years ago when his back gave out, but he still owns the lot and the little block building on it.

I have known Clancy since I was a boy. He sharpened the blades on our old push mower for free because Mom always brought him a plate of cookies at Christmas.

I drove straight to his house from the diner with Mom still sitting beside me. He was in his garage sorting nails into coffee cans, and he listened to the whole thing without saying a word.

When I asked if I could park my trailer on his lot through the winter, he looked across the truck at Mom. Then he looked back at me.

“Rent’s a coffee a day,” he said. “Black. And there’s a live outlet on the pole by the building. I never had it shut off.”

I had my white trailer pulled out of the pole barn and backed onto that gravel before supper, while there was still sun enough to see by.

I leveled it on blocks and ran the cord to Clancy’s pole and stood back and looked at it.

From the trailer step you could see straight into the front window of Burt’s diner. I had not planned it that way. It was just where the gravel was.