The waitress with the coffee pot asked my grandson and me to go, and Owen grabbed the edge of the table and said, “Nana, we CAN’T,” with one finger stuck out past her hip.
His dad was my son, and since we buried him fourteen months ago it’s been just Owen and me on a fixed income that doesn’t stretch past the twentieth.
I’m 69 with a hip that hates booths, so we don’t go out much.
But that Thursday he sat through two shots at the clinic without making a sound, and I told him he’d earned whatever he wanted.
He wanted a caramel steamer with whipped cream, because that’s what his dad used to get him there.
The coffee place on Second Street in Kearney is all white tile and people with earbuds talking to their laptops, the kind of room where a dropped spoon gets looked at.
We took the booth by the window, the one with a moose sticker on the napkin holder.
I pulled his hat off and his curls stood straight up from the static.
He got whipped cream on his chin and laughed, and I laughed with him, and the man at the next table put his coffee down hard.
“Is he going to do that THE WHOLE TIME?” he said.
The woman across from him kept her eyes on her phone. “Some people don’t know where they BELONG,” she said.
My face went hot.
Owen’s bottom lip started going, and he asked me if we were in trouble.
I wiped his chin with my napkin and told him some grown-ups just never learned manners.
Then the waitress came over, and I thought, good, she’s going to say something to them.
She bent down to me instead, real polite. “Ma’am, it might be EASIER OUT THERE FOR YOU. There’s a picnic table across the street by the lot.”
I’ve been slapped once in my life, by my own mother, and it stung less.
Owen looked at me like I’d know what to do.
“Okay, bud, get your hat,” I said, and reached for his cup.
He didn’t move.
He put both hands flat on the table and said it again, that we couldn’t leave.
I asked him why, and he didn’t answer.
He wasn’t looking at me.
He was looking over my shoulder, at something by the register, and his face had gone completely still.
I turned around. ⬇️
The pegboard
Behind the register there’s a pegboard the size of a door, painted green, with rows of little brass hooks.
Most of the hooks were empty. A cardboard box sat on the counter under them with GOODWILL written on the side in marker.
The waitress had gone back there while I was getting his hat. She still had the coffee pot in one hand. She set it on the warmer and went on taking the last mugs down one at a time and setting them in the box, like she was on a clock.
She had one in her hand right then. White, with a lopsided orange sun on it and two letters in black capitals. J + O.
“That’s ours,” Owen said. “Nana, she’s taking Dad’s.”
Jeremy painted that sun. Owen painted the rays, which is why half of them go the wrong way and one of them goes off the edge and onto the handle.
I hadn’t seen it in fourteen months. I’d have known it across a parking lot.
I got out of the booth. It took two tries, one hand on the table and one on the back of the seat, and the man at the next table let a breath out through his nose.
I walked to the register. A sheet of printer paper was taped to the side of it.
MUG CLUB ENDS THURSDAY. MEMBERS, TAKE YOURS HOME. EVERYTHING ELSE IS DONATED.
It was Thursday.
The waitress turned with the sun mug in her hand and saw me coming.
She didn’t put it in the box. She bent and set it on the shelf under the counter, behind a stack of to-go lids.
Then she stood up like she hadn’t.
Paint night
Two springs ago, Donna Pruitt put a sign in that window for a paint-your-own-mug night. Eight dollars a mug, cookies free.
Jeremy took Owen. Owen was four and wanted to paint a moose and couldn’t, so it turned into a sun.
Jeremy did the letters. He wrote everything in capitals, grocery lists and birthday cards and the note on my fridge that says where the water shutoff is. He framed houses for a living and said lowercase was for people with time.
Donna had the mugs fired at her sister’s and hung them on the pegboard. Theirs went on hook forty-one. She kept the members in an orange binder by the register, twenty dollars a year, and your steamer was a dollar off if it came in your own mug.
Every Saturday after that, Jeremy brought Owen in here. Caramel steamer, whipped cream, the window booth.
He tipped the girl at the counter in two-dollar bills, because Owen thought they were treasure. Jeremy got them from the bank in a paper band just to keep it going.
His last Saturday was in August. He stopped at my place after with Owen asleep in the truck and said Donna was selling out and moving to Mesa to be near her daughter.
“She made me pay two years up front,” he said. “Wants cash for the move. I’ve got the card, Ma. We’re set till he’s seven.”
Eleven days later his heart quit on a roof in Grand Island. He was 39.
The hospital gave me his things in a plastic bag with a drawstring. His phone and his belt and his wallet and half a roll of Tums.
I put the wallet in the zip pocket of my purse that week. It’s been there since. I have not opened it.
I didn’t come back here after, either. Owen asked a few times and I said it was too far. It’s nine blocks.
I told myself it was the money. A steamer is four seventy-five, and Donna’s dollar off went with Donna. That was true, and it was also true I couldn’t sit in that booth.
That morning at the clinic, with his sleeve still pushed up, he asked for it by name.
Now I was standing at the counter with my purse against my stomach, and the waitress put both hands flat by the register. Her name tag had a cactus sticker on it and no name.
“Ma’am,” she said. “Are you a member?”
Hook forty-one
“My son was,” I said. “That’s his you just put under there.”
She looked down at the shelf and back up. Then she turned an iPad around on the counter so I could see it.
A list. Numbers down the side, last names, and a column at the end that said STATUS.
Number 41, NOVAK, J. LAPSED.
“What’s lapsed?”
“Not in since the sale,” she said. “If you haven’t been in since April, you’re lapsed. Lapsed goes in the box.”
“He hasn’t been in since April because he died last August.”
Her face moved. She looked past me at the next table and back again.
Owen had come out of the booth after me and had hold of my coat by the pocket and wouldn’t let go. His hat was on crooked. He didn’t say anything.
The man with the laptop at the end of the counter had stopped typing. He was waiting on a refill and pretending not to.
“Can you look again?” I said. “Novak. Jeremy. It’d be under the boy too, maybe. Owen.”
She scrolled. There was only one forty-one. She didn’t scroll back up.
I opened my purse. There was thirty-one dollars in the front, folded around my Medicare card, and it had to get us to the twentieth.
Nine-fifty of that was for the steamers we’d just had.
On the end of the counter there was a shelf of new mugs for sale, black ones with a white coffee bean on them. The sticker said $24.95.
“I’ll buy it,” I said. “Whatever a mug is.”
“I can’t sell members’ stuff,” she said. “I’m sorry. He’s really strict about the wall.”
“Who is?”
She didn’t answer. She was looking over my shoulder again.
A chair scraped behind me. The man from the next table came up on my left with his coffee still in his hand.
“Problem, Kenzie?” he said.
He was close enough that I could smell his aftershave over the coffee. It was the same one my husband wore in the eighties.
He set his cup on the counter and lifted the hinged flap at the end of it.
Then he walked behind the register like it was his own kitchen.
Scott
He was about fifty, in a fleece vest with nothing under it but a dress shirt. He put his phone face down next to the iPad. Kenzie stepped back to give him room.
“Scott Lindgren,” he said, and didn’t put a hand out. “I own the place. Since April.”
At his table the woman hadn’t moved. She said, “Scott, we said today,” to her phone.
“I’ll tell you what I told Kenzie at seven this morning,” he said. “The club was Donna’s. I bought the building and the machine and the tables. I didn’t buy a hundred and twelve dirty mugs from people who come in twice a year for a dollar off. Anybody who’s been in since April already took theirs home. The rest goes to the Goodwill on Railroad Street. It’ll be on a shelf there by Saturday. You can get it for a buck.”
“It’s my son’s.”
“Ma’am, I believe you. I do. But I’ve had three people this week walk up and say that one’s theirs. I had a guy try to walk out with a Huskers mug that belonged to a lady from Gibbon. If I start handing stuff off that wall to whoever’s got a story, what do I tell the next one?”
“He’s dead,” I said.
Kenzie took a step toward the end of the counter, like she might go back to the tables with the pot. He put two fingers on the counter in front of her without looking at her, and she stopped.
“And I’m sorry for that. That’s why there’s a rule. Then it’s nobody’s fault.”
Owen let go of my coat. He went up on his toes so his chin was on the counter.
“It’s our SUN,” he said. “Me and Dad made it. I did the sticks.”
Scott smiled down at him. “Buddy, I bet you did.”
Then he said over Owen’s head, to me, “He’d say that about any cup with a sun on it. Kids want what’s on the wall.”
My voice came out louder than I meant. “He was in here every Saturday for a year and a half. Ask her.”
Every earbud in the room came out. Two women at the long table turned in their chairs, and a girl by the window held her phone a little higher than you hold a phone to read it.
Scott looked at the room. Then he looked at Kenzie, a long look, like he was adding something up.
Kenzie looked at the lids.
He bent down, moved the stack of lids to one side, and came up with the sun mug. He turned it in his hand once. Then he dropped it into the Goodwill box on top of the others. It clunked on something and didn’t break.
“Kenzie,” he said. “The box. In back. Like I asked you at seven.”
The list by the back door
Kenzie picked up the box. She had to hug it to carry it, and the mugs knocked together all the way down the hall.
Scott walked back to his table and picked up his phone. The woman across from him said something low, and he said, “It’s handled, Tam.”
I told Owen to sit on the stool by the register and not touch anything, and I went after the box.
The hall runs past the bathrooms to a steel door with a push bar. Kenzie had set the box down by it and was standing with her back to me.
Taped to the wall above the box, next to the work schedule, was the same list from the iPad, printed out. All hundred and twelve hooks. Some names had lines through them. Some had checks.
Forty-one had blue pen next to it, in round letters with circles over the i’s.
dad passed aug 25. brings his little boy sat. Donna said he PREPAID?? can we hold till someone comes w/ card
Under that, in black, pressed so hard it went through the paper:
No card no mug. Same for everybody. S
Kenzie turned and saw me reading it.
“He told me to get you out,” she said. “Because of the laughing. So I said the picnic table, because he never goes out front. He smokes out this door.”
She put her hand on the push bar. There was a coffee can full of sand on the other side of the glass, full of butts.
“I was going to bring it to you out there. In my apron. I had it under the lids. I was going to say it was from Donna.”
I stood there with my purse in both hands.
“He tipped in twos,” she said. “Your son. I’ve still got one in my cup holder. I didn’t know it was him till Donna sent me the obituary.”
I unzipped the pocket of my purse.
The wallet was brown and gone soft at the fold, and it still bent the way his back pocket bent it. I opened it. His license, with the haircut I told him not to get. The debit card I had the bank shut off over the phone. The two-dollar bills, still in their paper band, eleven of them.
Behind the license was an orange card with a hole punched in the corner.
MUG CLUB #41. JEREMY + OWEN. And under it, in Donna’s slanty hand, PD THRU 8/27. DP.
Two-dollar bills
Kenzie picked the box back up without me asking and carried it out front ahead of me.
Owen was still on the stool. Scott’s cup was still on the counter where he’d left it.
I put the orange card down next to his cup.
He came back over. Kenzie set the box on the counter, and he looked at her like the box had walked out on its own.
“What’s this,” he said, and picked up the card. He read it and laughed through his nose. “Okay. Donna’s cards. You know how many of these Donna wrote out? She wrote them on her knee. She gave a guy a lifetime card for cleaning her gutters. Donna’s in Mesa. Donna sold me a walk-in cooler that won’t hold temp. I’m not paying out Donna’s IOUs from my register.”
I reached into the box. The sun mug was near the top. I turned it over.
On the bottom, in the same orange paint pen as the card, it said 41. Under that, in black capitals, J + O.
I set the mug upside down next to the card and took my hand off it. The orange matched. Anybody could see it matched.
Scott kept going. “That could be anybody’s writing. That’s a paint pen, they sell them at Walmart. Ma’am, I’ve been more than fair. I let you sit. I let him make all the noise he wanted for twenty minutes before I said a word.”
“Scott.” The woman had come up behind him. She wasn’t looking at the mug. She was looking at the girl by the window. “She’s recording. Give the lady the cup.”
He looked at the girl by the window. He looked at the long table. He looked at Owen, who had both hands on the edge of the counter.
“Fine,” he said. “It’s yours. Take it.”
He pushed the mug at me across the counter with two fingers.
“Take your cup. There’s a picnic table across the street, it’s a free country, sit there all day. But I’m running a business, not a memorial.” He turned. “Kenzie, you can clock out. You hid stock from me under my own counter. You’re done.”
Nobody at the long table said a word. The man at the end of the counter picked his refill up and set it back down without drinking it.
Kenzie untied her apron. She didn’t argue with him. She said, “Okay,” and folded it in half and set it on the counter by the card.
I took the band of two-dollar bills out of Jeremy’s wallet. I hadn’t touched them in fourteen months. I put them in her hand and closed her fingers over them.
“I can’t take that,” she said.
She tried to hand them back. I kept my hand on hers until she quit trying.
“He would’ve,” I said.
Owen got down off the stool. He picked up the sun mug with both hands and held it against his coat.
I left the orange card on the counter.
I pushed the door open with my bad hip and held it.
Kenzie came out behind us in her coat.
The picnic table
The Saturday after, we went back to Second Street.
I made the steamers at home in a saucepan, milk and caramel ice cream topping, and carried them in Jeremy’s thermos. The whipped cream was a can in my purse. It cost less than one steamer in there used to.
We sat at the picnic table across the street by the lot. It was cold enough that the bench hurt my hip through my coat. Through the window over there you could see where the pegboard had been. There’s a TV on that wall now with the menu on it.
Kenzie got on at the Hy-Vee deli. She told me on Monday, by the rotisserie chickens. She’s going to put the two-dollar bills toward a tire, she said, and keep one in the cup holder with the other one.
The thirty-one dollars got us to the twentieth, just.
Owen’s arm healed up in two days. He shows people the spot anyway.
The wallet is still in my purse. I’ve opened it twice since. There’s nothing in the front of it anymore but his license.
Owen pulled his hat off and his curls stood straight up from the static.
I poured his steamer into the sun mug. He held it with both hands, and I put the whipped cream on, too much of it.
He got it on his chin. Then he grabbed the edge of the picnic table with both hands.
“Nana, we can stay out here as long as we WANT,” he said.
I shook the can and gave him more.
If this one got to you, pass it to somebody who’s still carrying a wallet they haven’t opened.
For more heartwarming tales of family, check out My Mother Finished Her Supper And Told Me Whose House It Was or She Held Up Eight Fingers and Bent the Ninth, and you might also enjoy My Son’s Old Cushion Had Fresh Orange Stitches Nobody Was Meant To Find.
