The Trucker I Fed at My Diner in 1998 Just Bought the Building to Save My Job
Part 1
The eviction notice was taped to the diner’s front door with the same blue painter’s tape my son used to hang his kindergarten drawings.
I stood on the sidewalk in my apron, keys in one hand, thermos in the other, and read it twice before my brain agreed to the words.
Thirty days. That was what Marlin’s Diner had left. Thirty days, after twenty-six years.
I unlocked the door the way I always did, hip-check the bottom, jiggle the key left. The bell above me gave its tired little cough. Coffee smell from yesterday. Bacon grease in the vents. The stool at the end of the counter where Earl had sat every morning for nineteen years before his heart gave out last April, still tilted a little to the right because he’d been a heavy man and the bolts had never been the same.
I set the thermos down and cried into a stack of clean rags for maybe two minutes. Then I put on the coffee.
You don’t own a diner in a town of four thousand people because you’re the crying type. You own it because your husband walked out in 1996 with a woman named Cheryl and half the checking account, and the bank was going to take the house, and Marlin Cobb, who owned the building on Route 12, said, “Sherry, you can run a griddle. I’ve seen you. Take the lease. Pay me when you can.”
Marlin died in 2011. His son Doug inherited the building. Doug lived in Phoenix and had never once, in fourteen years, set foot inside the diner he collected rent on.
Last Tuesday Doug sold the building to a development group out of Columbus.
The development group wanted a drive-thru coffee chain. They did not want a twenty-six-year-old diner with a cracked vinyl booth and a waitress named Della who’d worked there since her divorce in 2004.
Thirty days.
I turned the OPEN sign around at six a.m. sharp because that’s when I turned it around. The regulars came in the same order they always did. Pete the mechanic. The two nurses coming off the overnight shift at Miami Valley. Ron and his brother Ron, don’t ask, their mother named them both Ronald and it’s been a whole thing since 1961.
Nobody mentioned the notice on the door. In a small town, you give a person the morning before you bring it up.
Della saw me at the coffee station around nine and put her hand on my back and just left it there while she poured cream into a pitcher. She didn’t say anything. I didn’t either. That was the whole conversation.
At two-fifteen, when the lunch rush had thinned to one table of retirees arguing about a football game, a man came in wearing a canvas jacket and work boots. Sixties, maybe. Gray beard cut close. He took the second booth from the door, the one by the window, and picked up the menu even though everyone who eats here twice knows the menu.
I brought him coffee without asking. He nodded thanks.
“Meatloaf special,” he said. “And a slice of whatever pie’s fresh.”
“Cherry.”
“Cherry, then.”
I wrote it down and turned to go, and he said, “Sherry.”
I stopped.
He was looking at me over the rim of the coffee cup with an expression I could not read. Not a customer’s expression. Something older than that.
“You don’t remember me,” he said. It wasn’t a question.
I looked at him. Really looked. The beard, the eyes, the hands wrapped around the mug, big knuckles, one thumbnail flat and ridged the way a nail grows back after you lose it.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve served a lot of coffee.”
He smiled, small. “November of ninety-eight. Snowstorm came through, closed I-70. I was driving a rig out of Toledo, tried to get around it on the county roads, ended up in your parking lot at eleven at night with an empty wallet and a dead debit card.”
The mug in my hand went cold.
“You fed me,” he said. “Turkey sandwich, potato soup, coffee. I told you I couldn’t pay. You told me to sit down and eat it before it got cold.”
He set the coffee down.
“I saw the notice on your door,” he said. “That’s why I’m here.”
The bell above the diner door jingled behind me, but I didn’t turn around.
I couldn’t.