The Coffee Trailer Across From the Diner

By Nine

Word goes around a town our size faster than any newspaper. By eight o’clock there were people coming who had never set foot in Burt’s diner, just because somebody had called somebody and said Marguerite was across the street now.

A young mother came with a toddler in a car seat and bought a hot cocoa she did not want, just to put two dollars in the jar.

Two men from the county road crew pulled their truck up on the shoulder and walked over for coffee on the way out to a job.

Our pastor came by at a quarter to nine. He did not say much either.

He bought a coffee, asked Mom how her foot was doing, and put a ten in the jar without making any show of it.

By nine o’clock that jar was full. It was so full Mom had to push the bills down with two fingers to make room for more, and she kept glancing at it like she was afraid it might tip over.

I kept my word. I did not count it. I did not even look at it any more than I had to.

Across the street, Burt had three customers all morning that I saw. I know because I could see the stools from the window.

I do not say that to be cruel. It was simply what I saw.

The Step

We closed up at one in the afternoon. That is early for a coffee trailer, but I wanted to see how one shift went before I pushed it.

I wiped down the machine and dumped the grounds and Mom swept the floor.

When we were done, she took the jar and sat down on the trailer step in the sun.

She tipped it out into her lap, onto her green apron, and started counting it the way she used to count the collection plate when she helped the ladies at church.

She stacked the ones in one pile and the fives in another, and she did the quarters in little towers of four.

She moved her lips while she counted. I sat on an upturned bucket a few feet away and pretended to be busy with my phone.

When she was done, she just sat there with the money in her lap. Then she said, very quietly, “Sixty-one dollars.”

I looked up at her. She was holding the five Eldon had folded so small, turning it over and over in her fingers.

“Sixty-one dollars,” she said again. “Toby, that’s mine. That’s all mine.”

And then she cried. Not hard. Just a little, the way she cried at my high school graduation, with her lips pressed together and her hand up over her eyes so nobody walking by would see.

I did not say anything. I did not go over to her.

I just sat on my bucket and let her have it, because it was hers, and because I knew if I said one word I would have started crying too.

After a while she wiped her eyes on the corner of her apron and laughed at herself.

Then she folded the bills and put them in her coat pocket and patted the pocket twice, like she was making sure.

“I’m going to buy those shoes,” she said. “The ones the doctor told me to get.”

“You should,” I said.

“I’m going to buy them this afternoon,” she said. “Before I lose my nerve.”

She did, too. She drove her old car to the shoe store uptown and bought the ones the doctor had told her to buy two winters ago, and she wore them out of the store and threw her old ones in the trash can by the door.