The Coffee Trailer Across From the Diner

The Week Before

Friday morning I was at city hall when the doors opened. The clerk knew me from the fall festival.

I filled out the form for a mobile food vendor license, showed her Clancy’s signed note giving permission for the lot, and paid the fee.

The trailer already carried its health permit from the season, but I called the county health department anyway because I wanted it all done right.

A young inspector came out after lunch and walked through with a flashlight and a clipboard.

He checked the hand sink, the water heater, the three-compartment sink, and the temperature in the little cooler.

He asked where I was dumping my gray water, and I showed him the tank and told him the place I take it.

He signed off and shook my hand. “Coffee trailer in November,” he said. “That’s either brave or something else.” I told him I guessed we would find out.

Saturday Mom and I scrubbed that trailer from the roof vent to the floor mat.

She brought her own bucket and her own rubber gloves and a box of baking soda, and she would not let me help with the grill hood.

Somewhere around noon she stopped scrubbing and stood in the doorway looking across the street. Burt’s diner was open.

She could see the regulars on their stools through the window, and a young girl behind the counter that Burt had hired in a hurry.

“He found somebody fast,” she said.

“He’ll find out what he had,” I said.

She did not say anything to that. She went back to scrubbing.

That evening I sat at her kitchen table and filled out the hiring papers with her, the tax form and the state form, and set up her pay the proper way through the little payroll service I use in the summer when I hire a high school kid.

She watched me write eighteen dollars on the line. She put her finger on it and left it there a second, the way you touch something to be sure it is real.

Sunday

On Sunday morning she went to church like always. I went with her, which I do not always do, and sat beside her in the pew where she has sat since before I was born.

During the prayers she kept her head bowed a long time. I did not ask what she prayed for.

When we stood for the last hymn, she sang it all the way through, every verse, and her voice did not shake once.

After church we went straight to the trailer. I had bought a chalkboard at the farm store and a box of chalk, and I handed it to her and told her it was her menu now and she could write what she wanted.

She wrote it in the same careful hand she used on birthday cards. Coffee, regular and large. Hot cocoa.

A few of the espresso drinks I make on the circuit, with the prices beside them. Then she wrote at the bottom, in smaller letters, a thank you and a little heart.

I set an empty glass jar on the counter by the window, a big one I had washed out and peeled the label off. I told her that was hers and nobody else would ever touch it.

She looked at that empty can for a long time. Then she sat down on the trailer step with her coat pulled around her and looked across the street at the diner, where the lights were off because Burt closes on Sundays.

“What if nobody comes?” she said.

“Then nobody comes,” I said. “And you still get paid on Friday.”

She nodded. But I could see she did not believe the first part would happen, and I could see it scared her more than she wanted me to know.