The Coffee Trailer Across From the Diner

Monday Morning

I had the urn going by six. It was cold and clear, the kind of November morning where the sun comes up low and orange over the rooftops a little after half past six and every shadow on the street is about a block long.

Mom came at a quarter after six, and I stood beside her at the window in my black knit cap and my flannel shirt. She had pinned her auburn hair up the way she always did for work, and she had on a gray long-sleeve shirt and a forest green apron I had bought her on Saturday at the farm store.

She stepped up into the trailer and took a long look around, the way a woman looks at a new kitchen.

Then she found a rag and started wiping down the counter, which was already clean because she had cleaned it twice on Saturday.

Across the street the lights came on in the diner at six thirty. I could see Burt through the front window.

He came out from the kitchen, turned the coffee maker on, and stood behind his counter looking out at the street with his arms folded.

He saw the trailer. I knew he did. He looked right at it for a good long while, and then he went back into the kitchen.

At six forty, nobody had come. The street was empty except for a cat on the curb in front of the hardware store, washing its face in the one patch of sun.

At six fifty, still nobody. A car went by without slowing down. Mom poured herself a cup of coffee and held it in both hands and never drank a drop of it.

“It’s early yet,” I said. She nodded and did not say anything.

Eldon

At five minutes to seven, a tan barn coat and a feed cap came around the corner by the bank.

Eldon Pruitt is eighty-one years old. He carried mail on the streets of Chillicothe for thirty-four years and walked most of the routes on foot, and he still walks to breakfast every morning from his house four blocks over, rain or shine.

He had eaten breakfast at Burt’s counter every morning for as long as Mom had worked there.

Two eggs over medium, wheat toast dry, bacon soft, coffee black. She had his plate going before he got his coat off.

He walked up to the diner door the way he had a thousand times. He put his hand on the handle.

Through the window I could see Burt look up and lift the coffee pot at him, the way you do for a man who is already a regular.

Eldon stood there with his hand on that handle for maybe three seconds.

Then he let go, turned around, looked both ways like a man who has been crossing streets since before the war, and walked across toward us.

I heard Mom take a breath behind me.

He came up to the window and set both hands on the little ledge.

His face was red from the cold, and his eyes were watering a little the way old men’s eyes do in the wind.

“Marguerite,” he said. “I’ll have a black coffee, and whatever you’d have poured me at the counter.”

Mom filled a cup from the urn. Her hand shook just a little.

She put a lid on it and leaned out the window and handed it down to him, and he reached up and took it in his big chapped hand.

He held the cup and looked at her. “I sat at that counter eleven years and watched him take that jar,” he said. “I should have said something. I’m sorry I didn’t.”

Mom did not say anything. She just nodded at him, and her chin did the thing it does when she is trying not to cry in public.

Eldon reached into his coat and took out a five-dollar bill and folded it small, and he leaned up and dropped it in the jar.

Then he stepped back onto the sidewalk and stood there drinking his coffee.