The Coffee Trailer Across From the Diner

That Winter

We ran the trailer five days a week all that winter. Monday through Friday, six in the morning to one in the afternoon.

On the coldest days I hung a tarp along the windward side of the gravel so the line would have something to stand behind.

The regulars never went back across the street. Not one of them. Eldon came every morning at five minutes to seven, and Mom had his coffee in her hand before he reached the window.

Clancy came over every afternoon for his black coffee, his rent, and refused to take it any other way.

He brought a couple of old lawn chairs out of his building and set them up beside the trailer so the old-timers would have somewhere to sit when the sun was out.

On a Saturday in December a whole carload of women from Mom’s church came by and bought hot cocoa and stood around laughing with her. I had not heard her laugh like that in years.

Around Thanksgiving I started bringing in a dozen cinnamon rolls a day from the bakery uptown. Ida told everybody they were better than Burt’s, which was not quite true, but nobody argued with her.

Mom’s pay went into her checking account every Friday, eighteen dollars an hour, the same as I promised.

Her tips she kept in a coffee can of her own at home, on the top shelf over the stove. I never asked how much was in it.

Burt

I would like to tell you that Burt walked across the street that first week with his hat in his hand.

He did not. For most of that winter he stayed on his side, and we stayed on ours.

I saw him every morning through his window. He would come out and turn on the lights and stand behind the counter with his arms folded, looking across at the trailer and the five or six people standing in front of it.

His young counter girl quit before Christmas. After that, it was mostly Burt alone, cooking and serving and running the register himself. Some mornings he did not open until eight.

I will say this for Burt, and I want it said fairly. He was not a monster.

He was a man whose diner was going under, who had found a way to keep it going that cost him nothing and cost my mother everything.

He told himself the tips were the price of the job. He told himself family takes care of family.

But he was taking care of his diner with her money, and for eleven years he let her go home with sore feet and an empty jar.

There is no reason good enough for that. I have thought about it a lot, and I have looked for one, and there is not one.

My father called me in January. Somebody had told him. He was quiet on the phone a long time, and then he asked how she was doing, and I told him she was doing fine.

He said he was glad. That was all he said, but it was more than he had said about her in eleven years.