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 door when I unlocked it Tuesday morning, and I almost laughed, because thirty seconds earlier I’d been thinking about the strawberry pie I needed to start.

Sixty days.

That’s what the paper said. Sixty days to vacate the building I’d worked in since I was nineteen years old.

I stood there in the January cold with my key still in the lock and read it twice. New ownership. Redevelopment. Thank you for your years of service.

My name is Diane. I’m fifty-four. I’ve worked at Millie’s Diner off Route 6 in Warrenville, Illinois for thirty-five years. Started as a waitress the summer before college, which I never actually got to. Millie died in 2011 and left me the business, not the building, and I’ve been paying rent to a management company in Chicago ever since. Six thousand a month for a cinderblock box with a leaky roof and the best meatloaf in three counties.

I peeled the notice off the door and went inside and started the coffee anyway, because the truckers would be in at five and they didn’t do anything wrong.

By seven I’d told my two morning girls. Kayla cried. Rosa didn’t say anything, just kept refilling the sugar caddies with her jaw set tight. Rosa’s been with me nineteen years. She’s got a son at Illinois State on financial aid and about forty dollars of margin in her life.

I didn’t cry. I don’t, much. I called the management company at eight and a woman named Brittany told me the building had sold to a developer in December and there was nothing to discuss.

“Sixty days,” she said, like she was reading it off a card.

“I have four employees.”

“I understand this is difficult.”

I hung up.

Around ten, the lunch prep started and I was elbow-deep in ground beef when the bell over the door rang. I don’t usually come out for the bell. Kayla handles the front. But something made me look up.

A man in his early sixties. Gray beard, good coat, the kind of quiet posture that fills a room without trying. He took the counter stool closest to the register, same one truckers always pick, and he smiled at me like he knew me.

“Coffee, black,” he said. “And whatever pie you’ve got that’s fresh.”

I wiped my hands and poured his coffee. Something about him was pulling at me, the way a name does when it’s on the tip of your tongue. I set the mug down and looked at him a beat too long.

“Do I know you?” I asked.

He turned the mug in his hands. “I ate here on February 12th, 1998,” he said. “You gave me a slice of apple pie and you didn’t charge me for the meal.”

I stared at him.

“I don’t,” I started, and then stopped, because a memory was climbing up out of somewhere very deep.

A young man. Maybe twenty-five. He’d come in around midnight, in the middle of an ice storm, and ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, which was a bowl of chili. He’d counted change out of a Ziploc bag. He was crying, quietly, the way men cry when they’ve decided nobody is going to see them do it. His truck had broken down and he had a wife in a hospital in Iowa and no money for the tow.

I remember I brought him the meatloaf platter and told him the kitchen had made an extra by mistake. I remember I put a slice of apple pie down and said the day-old ones we threw out anyway. Neither of those things was true. I remember I slid two twenties across the counter and told him a customer had left it and asked me to pass it along, which also wasn’t true. That was tip money. My tip money. I was making four-fifteen an hour.

I remember he asked my name and I told him Diane, and I asked his and he said Robert.

I hadn’t thought about him in twenty-six years.

I looked at the man at my counter, at his good coat and his steady hands wrapped around the mug, and my knees did something funny.

“Robert,” I said.

He nodded once.

“I saw the sign on your door on my way in,” he said. “I need to talk to you about that.”

And then he set a folder down on the counter and slid it toward me.

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