The Waitress Who Bought My Dad’s Coffee in 1998 Just Called About the Farm

Part 1

The woman on the phone said she owned the note on my father’s farm, and she was calling to forgive it.

I was standing at the kitchen sink in Cedar Falls, Iowa, holding a chipped mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST DAD, and I actually laughed. Not because it was funny. Because I thought it was a scam.

“Ma’am,” I said, “my father passed six weeks ago. Whatever you’re selling, I’m not in the mood.”

“I’m not selling anything, Ellie.”

That stopped me.

Nobody outside family called me Ellie. Not the bank, not the funeral home, not the man from the co-op who kept leaving voicemails about the outstanding balance on the seed order. I was Eleanor on every piece of paper my father had ever signed about me.

“Who is this?”

“My name is Ruth Halvorsen. Your dad wouldn’t have told you about me. He wouldn’t have known how.”

I sat down on the kitchen floor. I don’t know why. The linoleum was cold through my jeans and there was a coffee stain shaped like Michigan by the fridge and I remember thinking, I should clean that before somebody comes to look at the house.

“I don’t understand what you’re telling me.”

“I bought the promissory note from First National last March. All two hundred and forty thousand of it. Your father didn’t know. The bank called it a private investor sale. I’ve been holding it. I was going to hold it until he was gone, and then a little longer, and then send you a letter. But my daughter said a letter was cowardly.”

I could hear a dog barking somewhere on her end. A screen door. Wind.

“Why would you do that.”

She was quiet for a second. Then she said, “In April of 1998, your father bought me a cup of coffee and a grilled cheese at the Sunrise Diner in Waverly. I was nineteen. I had thirty-one dollars to my name and a black eye I’d told the manager was from a car door. Your dad sat in my section for two hours and left me a hundred dollar bill under his plate. He wrote something on a napkin.”

I closed my eyes.

My father was a quiet man. He wore the same brown Carhartt for twenty years. He counted quarters before he bought gas. He had never, in my entire life, mentioned a diner in Waverly.

“What did he write.”

“He wrote, ‘Whatever it is, you don’t have to go back to it. My name is Hank. If you need somewhere, call this number.’ And then he wrote the number of the farm.”

I opened my eyes and looked at the phone in the kitchen. The old landline. Cream colored, curly cord, mounted on the wall by the pantry. That number.

“Did you call?”

“No,” she said. “I didn’t call. I got on a bus to my aunt’s in Rochester the next morning. I kept that napkin in my wallet for eleven years. And then I put it in a shoebox. And then I did all right for myself, Ellie. I did more than all right. And when I heard about your dad from a mutual, I made some calls.”

I couldn’t speak. I was looking at the WORLD’S OKAYEST DAD mug on the counter. I bought it for him as a joke the Christmas after Mom died. He drank out of it every morning for nine years.

“The note is forgiven,” she said. “Paperwork’s already with a lawyer in Cedar Rapids. You’ll get a letter Tuesday. I just, I didn’t want you to open that letter cold and think it was another trick. You’ve had enough of those, I imagine, these past six weeks.”

I made a sound. It wasn’t a word.

“Ellie? There’s one other thing. And this is the part where I need you to sit down, if you’re not already.”

“I’m sitting.”

“Your father did know about me. He knew for the last three years of his life. I need to tell you what he asked me to do, and I need to tell you before Tuesday, because there’s a decision you have to make, and you have to make it before the funeral home releases the last of his things.”

The dog was still barking on her end.

“I’m listening,” I said.

But my hand was shaking so hard the phone kept tapping against my ear.

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