The Waitress Who Slipped Me a Twenty in 1997 Just Received the Deed to My Farm

She sat me at her kitchen table and she poured me a cup of coffee without asking if I wanted one.

The dog, a small brown thing with one ear up and one ear down, sniffed my boots and then went and lay down in a patch of sun by the sliding glass door.

“Tell me about my mother,” Diane said.

So I did.

I told her about the bus. About the wallet. About the meatloaf and the pie and standing at the register crying like a child. I told her about Ruth’s hand on my arm and the folded bills and the words “you call your mama.” I told her I’d called my mother from a payphone and my mother had driven all night to come get me and that I had never run away again in my life.

I told her I had gone back to the farm and I had finished my associate’s degree at the community college in Iowa City and I had married a girl named Ellen from Mount Vernon and we had tried for children for eleven years and never had any and Ellen had died of an aneurysm at forty-six in the produce section of the Hy-Vee.

I told her about my father dying and the farm coming to me and the farm being good to me. Corn and beans and hogs and, in the last decade, some solar leases that had turned a working farm into something the accountant called “substantial.”

I told her about the doctor in Iowa City.

She listened without interrupting. She was a nurse. She knew how to listen.

When I was done she got up and she opened a cabinet over the refrigerator and she took down a shoebox.

“My mom kept things,” she said. “Not a lot. She didn’t have room. But some things.”

She set the box on the table between us.

Inside were photographs. Ruth in her waitress uniform, thin and young, standing next to a chrome coffee urn. Ruth with a baby, which must have been Diane. Ruth older, hair gone white, sitting on a porch somewhere.

And underneath the photographs, a stack of index cards held together with a rubber band.

Diane slid off the rubber band and spread them out.

Each card had a name. A date. A place. A dollar amount.

Michael. Bus fare. Denver. October 1983. $18.

Tanya. Groceries. Ogallala. March 1988. $22.

Roberto. Motel. Sidney. July 1991. $35.

I picked up one of the cards. My hand was shaking so bad I could barely read it.

Tom. Meatloaf, pie, bus fare. October 1997. $30.

“She kept a record of every single one,” Diane said. Her voice was very quiet. “She never wanted anything back. But she wrote them down. She said she liked to remember.”

“How many are there?”

“I’ve never counted.”

“Count them with me.”

We counted.

There were two hundred and forty-one cards.

Forty-two years of a waitress in a truck-stop diner in Ogallala, Nebraska, giving away money she did not have to strangers she would never see again.

I put my head in my hands and I cried at Diane Kowalski’s kitchen table the way I had cried at that register in 1997, and Diane got up and she came around the table and she put her hand on my arm exactly the way her mother had, and she said, “It’s all right, Tom. It’s all right.”

—

When I could speak again I told her why I had come.

I told her about the farm. About the four hundred and twelve acres and the equipment sheds and the two houses and the solar leases that paid quarterly. I told her about the will Ed Boone was drawing up in Cedar Rapids and the name I had written on the piece of paper.

Her face went white.

“Tom. No.”

“Diane.”

“No. Absolutely not. I don’t want your farm. My mother didn’t give you thirty dollars so you could give me a farm.”

“Your mother gave me thirty dollars so I could go home. I went home. I did what she told me. And now I’m dying and I don’t have anybody and there is a farm in Iowa that has to go somewhere, and I would rather it go to Ruth Corliss’s daughter than to the state of Iowa or to a cousin in Phoenix I’ve met twice.”

“Then give it to a charity. Give it to a food bank. Give it to a homeless shelter.”

“I might. Some of it. But some of it I want to give to you.”

“Why?”

“Because she wrote my name on a card. Because she remembered me. Because for forty-two years a woman I met for eleven minutes in a diner in Nebraska remembered a scared boy from Iowa and kept his name in a shoebox on top of her refrigerator.”

Diane sat down slowly.

“I never knew she was doing that.”

“She wouldn’t. That’s the whole thing about her, isn’t it. She wouldn’t.”

The dog got up and came over and put its head on Diane’s knee.

“I’m a nurse, Tom. My husband is a middle school music teacher. We have a paid-off house and two kids in college and we do fine. I don’t need a farm.”

“I know you don’t need it. That’s not the point.”

“Then what is the point?”

I thought about it for a long time.

“The point is that she passed something on. She said, ‘don’t pay me back, pass it on.’ And I didn’t. For twenty-seven years I didn’t. I just kept it. I kept her kindness in my pocket like a coin I was saving for something and I never spent it and now I’m running out of time.”

Diane’s eyes were wet.

“So spend it now,” she said. “But not on me.”

“On who?”

She looked down at the cards spread across her kitchen table. Two hundred and forty-one names. Two hundred and forty-one small mercies. Some of them dead by now. Some of them lost. Some of them living lives Ruth Corliss had made possible by giving them twenty dollars they could never repay.

“I have an idea,” Diane said.