The Secret Friday Gift at the Diner

The envelope was waiting under the sugar caddy again, the way it had been waiting every Friday morning for almost a year, and this time I decided I was done pretending I hadn’t noticed.

I run the Rail Stop Diner on Main Street in Cane Ridge, Missouri, the same counter my grandfather built out of salvaged depot lumber back when the trains still stopped here. Population is a little under nine hundred now, and most of them have sat in my booths at one time or another. I inherited the place from my father, who inherited it from his, and I have run it alone since my husband Gordon passed three years ago, with Sylvie Bramlett beside me the whole way, pouring coffee and telling me when my eyeliner has gone crooked from crying in the walk-in cooler where nobody can see.

Gordon and I ran the Rail Stop together for twenty two years, and when his heart gave out on a Tuesday morning in the parking lot with a crate of eggs still in his arms, I spent the better part of a year deciding whether keeping the place open was an act of faith or just plain stubbornness. Two of the big chain places out on the highway have folded since then, and there were winters when the diesel bill and the propane bill landed in the same week and I sat at my own counter after closing doing math on a napkin that never once came out in my favor. Cane Ridge held me up through that. This town has a way of showing up with a casserole in one hand and a paying customer in the other, and the Rail Stop has stayed open on the strength of people who did not have to keep coming back and did anyway.