The driver at stool six left a five folded under his saucer, the way drivers have done for my grandmother for forty-seven years, and I watched my uncle take it.
It was a Tuesday in October, a little before nine, bright and cold, the kind of Carbon County morning where the wind comes across the sage and rattles the big front windows of the cafe.
I had just finished my morning bus route. I drive the long route south of town, sixty-one miles of gravel and two lane, and on the days I have a gap before the afternoon run, I stop at the truck stop for coffee.
Grandma Vonda was pouring the driver’s refill. She had her pale blue uniform on, the white apron tied twice around her waist, her silver hair teased up the way she has worn it since before I was born.
The driver said thank you, ma’am, and slid off the stool, and pulled his coat on, and went out the glass door toward the fuel islands where the semis sat idling in the sun.
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My uncle Rick came out from behind the register before the door had even swung shut.
He walked down the counter, lifted the saucer, took the five, and walked it back to the till.
He rang the drawer open. He laid the five in with the rest of the house money.
He shut the drawer, and he went back through the swinging door into the kitchen without looking at anybody.
Grandma did not say a word. She wiped the ring the cup had left on the counter, and she set the saucer in the bus tub, and she went on down the line with the coffee pot.
I sat there with my hands around my cup and felt my face go hot. I had heard about it.
I had not seen it. There is a difference, and I learned the size of it that morning.
Since 1979
My grandmother started waiting tables at the truck stop on Route 30 in the spring of 1979.
She was twenty-nine years old, a widow with two boys, and the man who owned the place then paid her a dollar and forty-five cents an hour and let her keep what the drivers left.
She has been there ever since. Three owners, two new roofs, one fire in the grill hood in 1994 that she put out herself with a box of baking soda.
She knows every regular by his rig and his order and most of them by his children’s names.
She works mornings, six to one, five days a week. She could have quit at sixty-two, or sixty-five, or seventy.
She says that if she sat home she would die of looking at the wallpaper, and I believe her.
The couple who owned the place for the last twenty years retired this past spring.
They wanted out before another Wyoming winter, and they put it up for sale, and nobody from out of town wanted a fourteen-stool cafe and two diesel islands on a highway most people only drive through.