The Trucker I Fed at My Diner in 1998 Just Bought the Building to Save My Job

Part 2: The Folder

I didn’t open it right away.

I stood there with my hands still smelling like raw beef and looked at this stranger who wasn’t a stranger, and I said the first thing that came into my head.

“Is your wife okay?”

He blinked. I don’t think he expected that.

“She passed in 2019,” he said. “Cancer. A different one than the one she was in the hospital for that night.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We had twenty-one more years than the doctors gave her in 1998. Because I got to Iowa.”

He said it flat, no music in it, but he was looking at me the way people look at a person who has done something they cannot pay back and have stopped trying to.

I sat down on the stool next to him. Kayla was pretending to wipe the same spot on the counter for the fourth time. Rosa had come out of the back and was standing in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel over her shoulder, watching.

I opened the folder.

The top page was a purchase agreement. My eyes weren’t working right. I saw the address of the diner, and I saw a company name, Ridgeline Holdings LLC, and I saw a closing date of December 18th.

“You bought it,” I said.

“I bought it.”

“From the developer.”

“From the developer. He was going to put a Dollar General here. I offered him twenty percent over his purchase price and he took it the same afternoon.”

I turned the page. There was a lease agreement underneath. My name at the top. Millie’s Diner. Rent of one dollar per year for the next fifteen years, with an option for me or a successor to purchase the building at the end of the term for the price he’d paid, adjusted only for inflation.

I read it twice. The numbers didn’t change.

“Robert,” I said.

“I’ve been looking for you for a long time,” he said. “I didn’t remember the name of the diner. I remembered Route 6 and I remembered Illinois and I remembered a young waitress named Diane and I remembered that the apple pie had a lattice top.” He almost smiled. “I drove up and down that highway three times last summer. I finally hired someone.”

“Hired someone.”

“A woman in Chicago. She found you in about a week. She’s better at it than I am.”

I closed the folder. My hands were shaking and I didn’t want him to see it, so I put them under the counter.

“I can’t accept this,” I said.

He nodded like he’d expected that too.

“I know,” he said. “So I’d like to ask you a favor instead.”

“A favor.”

“I don’t have children. My wife and I couldn’t. When I die, this building goes to whoever’s running the diner. That’s already written. I’d like you to keep it going long enough that it means something to somebody else the way it meant something to me that night. That’s the favor.”

I didn’t say anything for a while.

“Diane,” Rosa said, from the doorway. She’d never called me by my first name in nineteen years. She always called me Miss Diane, and I’d told her a hundred times to stop, and she never did.

I looked over at her.

“Take the favor,” she said.

—

I took the favor.

I signed the lease at a lawyer’s office in Naperville on a Friday afternoon, and I paid Robert one dollar out of my wallet, an actual crumpled bill, and he folded it and put it in his shirt pocket like it was something worth keeping.

He came in once a week after that. Wednesdays. He’d sit at the counter and order the meatloaf and a slice of whatever pie was fresh, and he’d pay full price and tip forty percent, and we didn’t talk about 1998 anymore. We talked about his wife, Marlene. He talked about her the way people talk about a book they’re still reading, present tense, like she was in the next room. We talked about the diner. We talked about Rosa’s boy at Illinois State. Robert asked what he was studying, and Rosa said mechanical engineering, and Robert nodded slowly and said his wife had been an engineer, and Rosa said she hadn’t known that a woman could be an engineer in the seventies, and Robert said neither did most of the people Marlene worked with.

Rosa started bringing him coffee before he asked.

In March, I got the roof fixed. First time in twelve years. I paid for it myself with money I’d been putting away for rent I no longer owed.

In April, we replaced the front door.

In May, Kayla asked if she could paint a mural on the back wall by the bathrooms, some sunflowers, and I said yes, and she cried about that too. Kayla cries about a lot of things. I’ve come around on it.

In June, Robert didn’t come in on Wednesday.

He didn’t come in Thursday either. He’d told me once he lived in a town called Sandwich, about forty minutes west. I looked up his number in the paperwork from the lease and I called and it rang and rang.

Friday morning, a woman called the diner. She said her name was Karen and she was Robert’s sister. She said Robert had had a stroke Tuesday night. He was alive. He was in a rehab facility in Aurora. He’d been asking for me.

I closed the diner at two that afternoon, which I have not done on a weekday in fifteen years, and I drove to Aurora.

He was in a wheelchair when I got there. The right side of his face wasn’t working the way the left side was. He saw me in the doorway and his eyes filled up.

“Diane,” he said. It came out slow.

I sat down next to the bed and I took his hand and I didn’t say anything for a while, because I knew if I opened my mouth I was going to make it about me, and this wasn’t about me.

“The pie,” he said, after a minute.

“What about it.”

“Bring some next time.”

“I will.”

He closed his eyes. His sister was standing in the corner and she was watching me, and I couldn’t read her face at all.

When I got up to leave, she followed me out into the hallway.

“He talks about you,” she said.

“He barely knows me.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

“That’s not what he thinks,” she said.

—