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

Part 3: The Booth by the Window

I brought pie every Sunday for the rest of June and all of July.

Apple, because that was the one from 1998, and because Robert would eat two bites of anything else and set the fork down, but he’d finish the apple. His speech came back in pieces. His right hand didn’t. Karen was there most Sundays, and she got easier with me by degrees. By the end of July she was hugging me at the door.

Robert came home to Sandwich in August, to a small ranch house with a ramp Karen’s husband had built off the back porch. I drove out on a Saturday and brought a whole pie and stayed for three hours. Marlene’s picture was on every wall. She’d been a tall woman with a serious mouth and laughing eyes, and in one of the pictures she was standing next to a jet engine with a clipboard, and I made Robert tell me the story of that one twice.

He asked about Rosa’s son. I told him the kid had made the dean’s list.

He nodded and closed his eyes and I thought he’d fallen asleep, but after a minute he said, “Set up a scholarship.”

“What?”

“A scholarship. Through the diner. One kid a year. Doesn’t have to be much.”

“Robert.”

“I have money, Diane. Marlene and I never spent it. There’s nobody to leave it to.”

“You have Karen.”

“Karen has more than she needs. I asked her.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Think about it,” he said.

—

He died in October.

Karen called me on a Sunday morning before I left for Sandwich. He’d gone in his sleep. She said it had been peaceful, and I believed her, because Karen wasn’t the kind of woman who softened things for anyone’s comfort.

I closed the diner for his funeral. Put a sign on the door. Rosa and Kayla came with me. The service was small, maybe thirty people, mostly from the engineering firm where he’d worked for thirty years. I sat in the third row and I did cry, finally, quietly, the way he had cried at my counter in 1998.

Karen spoke. She talked about Marlene, mostly, because you couldn’t talk about Robert without talking about Marlene. She talked about the night in 1998 when Marlene almost died in Iowa and Robert almost didn’t make it there in time. She said Robert had told her, more than once over the years, that a waitress at a diner in Illinois had saved his marriage before it even got started.

I hadn’t known he’d told anybody about that night. I’d thought I was the only one who remembered.

I looked down at my hands in my lap.

The lawyer called me on a Thursday, two weeks later. He said Robert had made some updates to his will in September. He asked if I could come to his office in Aurora on Monday. He said Karen would be there too.

I didn’t sleep much that weekend.

Monday, Karen and I sat next to each other in a conference room with beige carpet, and the lawyer read through the will in the tone lawyers use, which is designed to keep anybody from feeling anything. Karen got the house in Sandwich and most of the retirement accounts. There was money for two nieces, a nephew, a church in Ottawa, and a hospital in Iowa where Marlene had been treated in 1998.

Then he got to me.

Robert had left a sum of money, in trust, to fund the Marlene Petrasek Scholarship, one award per year, administered through Millie’s Diner, for a child of a Millie’s employee pursuing higher education. He’d left the building outright to Millie’s Diner as a business entity, no longer contingent on anything.

And he’d left me one more thing.

A brown envelope, sealed, with my name on it in his handwriting from before the stroke.

The lawyer slid it across the table. I didn’t open it there.

Karen walked me to my car. It was cold, first real cold of the fall, and she held her coat closed at her throat.

“You know what he told me, right before he died,” she said.

“What.”

She was quiet for a second, looking at something over my shoulder.

“He said he’d spent twenty-six years trying to figure out how to pay you back,” she said. “And that he’d finally understood, that summer, that he wasn’t going to. That it didn’t work that way. That the only thing you could do with something like that was pass it on.”

I nodded. I didn’t trust my voice.

“He said you already knew that,” she said. “He said that was the whole point of you.”

She hugged me, quick and hard, and got in her car.

—

I opened the envelope that night, alone, at the counter, after Kayla and Rosa had gone home. I made myself a cup of coffee and I sat at the stool where Robert used to sit and I slid a finger under the flap.

It was one page. His handwriting, from the good months, before June.

*Diane,*

*You won’t remember, but you told me your last name that night. I looked it up in the phone book years later and I lost my nerve. I’m sorry it took me until now.*

*The forty dollars is in the envelope. I know it doesn’t work like that. Take Rosa out to dinner somewhere nice. Order the pie.*

*Robert*

There were two twenty-dollar bills folded into the crease of the page. They looked like they’d been sitting in a drawer for a very long time.

I sat there for a while. The coffee got cold.

Then I got up, and I turned off the lights except the one over the counter, and I locked the door, and I went home.

—

We gave out the first Marlene Petrasek Scholarship the following May. Rosa’s son didn’t get it, he’d already graduated by then, top of his class, with a job lined up in Peoria. It went to Kayla’s niece, who’s studying nursing at Waubonsee.

The plaque hangs by the register. Kayla painted it herself. It’s got sunflowers around the border.

I kept the two twenties. I never spent them. They’re in the drawer under the register, in a Ziploc bag, and every so often when things get hard, I open the drawer and I look at them, and I close it again.

The booth by the window, the one closest to the counter, has a small brass plate on it now. It says *Robert and Marlene*, and underneath, in smaller letters, *February 12, 1998*.

Truckers still sit there sometimes. They don’t ask about the plate. Most of them, I think, assume it’s a memorial for somebody who used to eat here, which I guess it is.

Once in a while, though, one of them asks.

And then I pour them a coffee, and I sit down across from them, and I tell them the story.