The Trucker I Fed at Denny’s in 2011 Just Bought the Diner I Was About to Lose

Part 1

The bank gave me until Friday.

I was scrubbing the same spot on the counter for the third time when Roy from the credit union called, and I already knew from his voice what the number was going to be. Ninety-one thousand, four hundred and change. Or the keys.

“Nance, I pushed as hard as I could.”

“I know you did, Roy.”

“Friday. Noon.”

I said thank you like he’d done me a favor, and I hung up, and I kept scrubbing.

The diner was empty at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday in February, which was most of the problem, right there. Bell’s Corner used to have a paper mill and a Kmart and three stoplights that mattered. Now it had one stoplight and a Dollar General and my father’s diner, which had been my diner for six years since the stroke took him, and would be somebody else’s diner by the weekend.

Or nobody’s. More likely nobody’s.

I heard the bell over the door and I put the rag down and put my face on.

He was a big man. Sixties, maybe. Canvas coat, work boots, the kind of hands that tell you everything about a life before he opens his mouth. He sat at the counter, not a booth, which I always liked in a customer. Booth people want to be left alone. Counter people want to be seen.

“Coffee?” I said.

“Please. And whatever’s hot.”

“Meatloaf’s hot. Chicken and dumplings if you can wait ten.”

“Meatloaf.”

I poured the coffee and I punched the ticket and I stood at the pass and looked at him, because there was something. Not a memory exactly. More like the shape of one.

“You from around here?” I asked.

“Passing through. Used to drive this route years back. Haven’t been up this way in a long time.”

“Trucking?”

“Then. Not now.”

He ate slow. He ate like a man who’d been hungry in his life and hadn’t forgotten. When I brought the pie he shook his head, and then he changed his mind and said yes, and he ate that slow too.

He asked what I got for the meatloaf plate and I told him nine seventy-five, and he set a hundred-dollar bill on the counter and said keep it.

“Sir, I can’t.”

“You can.”

“Really, I,”

“Nancy.” He said it like he’d said it before. He was looking at my name tag, but he wasn’t reading it. “You can.”

Something moved in my chest and I didn’t know what it was yet.

He stood up and pulled his coat back on and he looked around the diner, at the water stain on the ceiling my dad had never fixed, at the pie case, at the little framed picture of my father by the register that I’d put there the week after the funeral.

“Place looks good,” he said.

“Place is closing Friday.”

I don’t know why I told him. I hadn’t told anyone. Not my sister, not the girls who worked breakfast, not even Roy really, not out loud like that.

He stopped with his hand on the door.

“Friday,” he said.

“Noon.”

He nodded, slow, like I’d told him the weather. And then he said, “Do me a favor. Don’t sign anything before Friday morning.”

“I have to sign Friday.”

“Friday morning is not Friday noon.”

He pushed the door open and the cold came in and he was halfway to a pickup truck I hadn’t noticed pulling in, and I said, “I’m sorry, have we met?”

He turned back. And he smiled, and it was a smile that knew me, and I still didn’t know him.

“Once,” he said. “A long time ago. You wouldn’t remember.”

“I might.”

“You won’t. But I do.”

He got in the truck and he drove out toward the highway, and I stood in the doorway with the cold on my face and the hundred-dollar bill still folded in my apron pocket, and I tried, I really tried, to remember.

I couldn’t.

Not then.

It wasn’t until I was closing up that night, wiping down the booth by the window, the one nobody ever sat in because the vinyl was cracked, that my hand stopped moving on the table.

And I remembered.

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