The Tip Jar With Grandma’s Name

Lonnie

Lonnie Faust is sixty-three years old and he has been stopping at that truck stop for coffee for more than thirty years.

He hauls livestock, mostly, cattle and sometimes sheep, and he comes through on Route 30 three or four mornings a week.

He sits at stool two. He orders two eggs over medium, wheat toast, and a side of hash browns he never finishes.

He calls my grandmother Miss Vonda, and he has never once in thirty years called her anything else.

When my grandfather died, Lonnie was one of the men who carried him.

When my father had his back surgery, Lonnie came by the house with a sack of elk steaks and did not stay long enough to be thanked.

He is the kind of man who does not talk much, and when he does, people listen, because they know he has thought about it first. The other drivers on that road know him and trust him.

Duane called Lonnie from that rest area on Monday afternoon. I do not know exactly what he said.

I know that Lonnie said one thing back to him, which Duane told me later, and which I have thought about many times since.

He said, “She was pouring my daddy’s coffee when I was still in high school. You tell Callie we will take care of it.”

The Jar

On Wednesday, after my afternoon route, I went down to the cellar and stood in front of my canning shelves.

I put up tomatoes and green beans and chokecherry jelly every fall, the way Grandma taught me, and I keep the empty jars on the bottom shelf.

I picked out a quart mason jar, a plain one with no chips in the rim. I washed it and dried it and set it on the kitchen table.

I got the roll of masking tape out of the junk drawer and the black marker out of Duane’s truck box.

I tore off a strip of tape about as long as my hand. I pressed it flat on the side of the jar with my thumb.

Then I wrote my grandmother’s name on it in big letters, slow and careful, the way I write a name on a child’s lost lunch box.

My daughter, who is eleven, came in and looked at it. “Is that for Great-Grandma?” she asked. I said it was.

She asked what it was for, and I told her it was for people who wanted to say thank you.

She went to her room and came back with a dollar bill out of her piggy bank.

She folded it in half and dropped it in. “That is the first one,” she said, and she went back out to the yard.

I sat at the kitchen table a while after that, the afternoon sun coming across the oilcloth, with the jar in front of me and that one folded dollar in the bottom of it.

I said a prayer. I did not pray that it would work. I prayed that I would not make things worse for the people I loved.