Forty-two years is a long time to keep a seat warm, especially when you are just sitting there by yourself with a crossword puzzle you never quite finish and a cup of black coffee that always gets cold about halfway through the second section. I have eaten my lunch at the exact same vinyl booth at the Cracker Barrel on Route 11 every single Friday since Ronald Reagan was still governor of California, give or take a month when my knee was acting up after the surgery.
Jeannie has been bringing me my grilled chicken salad with the extra tomatoes for eight years now, ever since she transferred over from the Johnson City location, and we never really have to talk about the order because it is just printed on the ticket before I even hang up my coat on the brass peg by the window. I like the predictability of it. My wife passed away back in the winter of 2011, and after the house gets that particular kind of quiet where the only sound is the refrigerator compressor kicking on every twenty minutes, you start looking for things that stay put.
The world outside that window changed quite a bit over four decades, of course, because the old gravel pit down the road turned into a strip mall with a hardware superstore and a bank that looks like a Greek temple, but the inside of this place stayed remarkably stubborn with its checkerboards by the fireplace and the copper kettles hanging from the ceiling beams.
I suppose that is why I kept coming back there every week like clockwork, parking my Buick in the third slot from the handicap sign, walking in through the heavy double doors at exactly 11:45 in the morning, and sliding into the booth where the stuffing in the left-hand bench had gone flat back during the first term of the Clinton administration. It was a good place to hide out from the week, read the obituaries to see if anyone I went to high school with had finally checked out, and pretend that time was not moving quite as fast as my joints kept trying to tell me it was.
Last Friday started off like every other Friday for the last four hundred months or so, right down to the gray drizzle coming down off the mountains and the smell of hickory smoke blowing off the grill vents in the back.
Jeannie walked over with her pad and pencil before I even had my glasses out of my breast pocket, looking like she had been on her feet since dawn, and she dropped my coffee cup down onto the laminate table with that familiar little clink that I could probably pick out of a lineup. She did not hand me the menu because she knew I was going to have the country ham biscuit with side gravy, even though my doctor told me back in October that my cholesterol numbers looked like a telephone number in downtown Atlanta. I opened the local paper to the crossword puzzle and reached for my pen, feeling that steady, low-grade hum of routine settling into my bones.
Then Jeannie did something she had never done in eight years of serving me lunch. She did not walk away toward the kitchen to put my ticket in.
She stayed right there beside the table, shifting her weight from her left foot to her right, and she reached into the pocket of her brown apron like she was pulling out a tip she had forgotten to leave on the counter. Her face had that weird, careful look people get when they are about to deliver bad news or hand over something they are not entirely sure they should be touching. I honestly don’t even know why I remember this part so clearly, but she had a small ink smudge right on her thumb near the knuckle, shaped sort of like a comma.
“The woman in booth six asked me to give you this,” Jeannie said, and her voice was a little lower than usual, almost like she did not want the folks sitting by the fireplace to hear her.
She laid a paper napkin down right on top of the crossword puzzle, folded in half once so the rough, embossed edges were facing me. I didn’t reach for it right away because you get cautious when you live alone for twelve years, and my first dumb thought was that somebody’s kid had left a doodle or maybe the management was running some kind of survey about the coffee beans. But then I looked down at the paper, and the air sort of left my lungs all at once because the handwriting was not printed like a normal person’s grocery list. It was written in that sloping, hurried cursive where the capital letters lean backward just a fraction of an inch, like they are trying to catch their balance on a steep hill.
I hadn’t seen that handwriting since the spring of 1972, back when the student union at East Tennessee State University smelled constantly of stale cigarette smoke, mimeograph ink, and the cheap instant coffee we used to brew in a glass pot with a metal coil. Back then, Diane and I had a tiny apartment over a dry cleaner’s on West State Street where the radiator clanked all night like someone hitting an iron pipe with a hammer, and we spent half our nights sitting on a sagging plaid sofa trying to figure out organic chemistry while the rain beat against the glass. We were roommates for three years, sharing a single tiny closet and a set of chipped yellow plates we bought at the thrift store for four dollars, and we knew every single stupid thing about each other down to the way our hair smelled when we forgot to dry it before lectures.
No big dramatic fight ended any of it, because real life rarely gives you the courtesy of a clean door-slam or a shouting match in the rain. We just graduated, packed our separate cardboard boxes into the trunks of two different cars that both leaked oil, and drove off in opposite directions to take up the lives we had been promised by our parents and our advisors. She went off toward Knoxville for some teaching job she had lined up, and I stayed around the Tri-Cities working for the county surveyor’s office before I met Martha at a Lions Club fish fry in the fall of seventy-four. The letters slowed down from once a week to once a month, then down to Christmas cards with scribbled family updates, and finally they just stopped altogether somewhere around the time my oldest boy started kindergarten.
I stared at that folded napkin on the Cracker Barrel table for what must have been thirty seconds, though it felt like long enough for the coffee to go completely cold in the cup. My hand was hovering over the pen, and my fingers felt stiff and heavy, like they belonged to someone else sitting across the room. Jeannie was still standing there, watching me with her eyebrows pulled together, waiting to see if I was going to fall out of the booth or throw up my breakfast. “You know her?” Jeannie asked, and she sounded genuinely curious now, her pencil tapping softly against her pad.
“I used to,” I managed to say, though my throat felt dry as a saltine cracker. “About forty years ago.”
“Well,” Jeannie said, shifting her apron strap over her shoulder. “She’s been sitting in booth six every Friday for three years now. Same time as you. I just figured she liked the light by the plant.”
Three years. Ten feet away from my usual corner, separated only by a low wooden divider and a fake plastic fern that probably needed dusting. While I was sitting there complaining about my lower back and filling in four-letter words for tropical fruit, Diane had been sitting in the exact same room, eating the same turkey club or the same bowl of vegetable soup, looking at the exact same framed picture of a rusty plow on the wall. The thought made my head spin a little bit, like I had stood up too fast after sitting on the floor for too long.
I didn’t say anything else to Jeannie. I just pushed my coffee cup aside, put both hands flat on the sticky tabletop, and stood up from the booth with my joints cracking like dry twigs. The restaurant was fairly full for a rainy Friday noon, with the usual crowd of retired farmers in their seed caps and traveling salesmen in blue windbreakers sitting over their plates of fried apples and biscuits, and nobody was paying any attention to the old man with the gray crewcut getting up from his customary seat. My legs felt remarkably light, almost like I was walking on loose gravel where you never quite trust your footing.
Booth six was back toward the kitchen doors, tucked right underneath the big brass horn that some antique dealer had sold the franchise owner back when the place was first put up. As I walked down the narrow carpeted aisle, past the rows of wooden tables and the baskets of peppermint candies by the register, every single second of the last forty-two years felt like it was pressing down on my shoulders all at once. I could hear the silverware clinking against porcelain and the low murmur of the weather report coming from the small TV mounted above the pie case, but everything else seemed like it was happening underwater.
When I reached the end of the partition for booth six, I didn’t say anything. I just stopped with my hand resting on the top of the dark oak trim.
Diane didn’t look up right away because she was still smoothing out the edge of a paper placemat with her thumb, but she must have felt the shadow fall across her coffee cup because she stopped moving and turned her head toward the aisle. Her hair was completely white now, cut short and neat around her ears in a way that looked practical and clean, and she was wearing a simple green fleece pullover that looked like it had seen a lot of mountain hikes. Her face had the kind of fine, crinkled lines around the corners of her eyes that come from a lot of laughing and a lot of weather, but the eyes themselves were the exact same startling shade of hazel that used to stare at me over the top of a biology textbook while the apartment radiator hammered away in the dark.
She didn’t gasp, and she didn’t drop her spoon. She just looked up at me for a long, quiet second with her jaw slightly parted, as if she were trying to remember if she had left the stove on back home. Then a slow, tired kind of smile started at the corner of her mouth, reaching all the way up to those familiar eyes.
“You’re late,” she said. Her voice was a little thinner than it used to be, but the inflection was identical, that slight drawl from upper East Tennessee that no amount of living in other states could ever quite sand down. “I figured you’d have your coffee finished by now.”
I let out a sound that was half a laugh and half a dry cough, and I pulled out the opposite bench without asking and sat down right across from her before my knees decided they were done holding me up. The table between us was smaller than I remembered college desks being, just big enough for two water glasses and a little glass jar of honey. On the white paper napkin she had left in my booth, written in that same sloping hand I had not seen since the Carter administration, was a simple sentence with no punctuation at all: Are you still drinking black coffee and failing to solve the Sunday crossword.
“How long?” I asked, and my voice sounded rougher than I meant it to, like I needed to clear my throat about three times.
“Three years,” she said, looking down at her own coffee cup, tracing the rim with her index finger where a wedding band used to live. “I saw you pull in that first Tuesday after my husband passed away in Bristol. I parked my Buick right over by the ice machine and sat in my car for twenty minutes trying to decide if I should come inside or just drive back home to my sister’s place.”
“Why didn’t you say something then?” I asked, leaning my forearms on the table, feeling the familiar sticky varnish under my sleeves. “Three years, Diane? I’ve been sitting ten feet away from you eating pot roast every Friday while you’ve been sitting over here chewing on your straw?”
She looked up at me then, and that old, familiar stubborn look came back into her face, the one she used to get whenever we argued about who was supposed to clean the grease trap under the stove. “And say what, Thomas? That we got old? That we both ended up fifty miles from where we started with a bunch of ghosts and a drawer full of medical bills? I wasn’t sure you’d even remember my name. People change. They get thick around the middle and they forget things.”
“I haven’t forgotten a damn thing,” I said, and as soon as the word came out of my mouth, I realized it was the truest thing I had said to anybody since Martha’s funeral six years ago.
We sat there for a long time while the restaurant around us slowly emptied out, the 12:30 lunch rush giving way to the quiet lull between the afternoon shift and the early-bird supper crowd. Jeannie came by once to clear away our empty plates, taking one look at the two of us sitting in booth six together with our coats still draped over the hooks, and she didn’t ask if we needed anything else. She just reached down and took my old coffee cup from booth three, set it down right next to Diane’s cup without a word, and walked away toward the kitchen with a little half-smile on her face that looked like she had just solved a puzzle she had been working on all week.
We talked about everything and nothing for two hours. We talked about her husband, Jim, who had worked for the power company and loved bass fishing more than he loved sleeping, and I told her about Martha and how she had kept our garden growing even when the blight got the tomatoes every July. We talked about our kids, her daughter living out in Denver with two boys who played soccer, and my youngest son working as an electrician down in Knoxville who still hasn’t learned how to check his oil properly. We didn’t mention the forty-two years in between very much, because once you get past sixty, you realize that the middle part of life is mostly just logistics and laundry anyway, and the only parts that really stay gold are the beginning and whatever little bit you manage to salvage at the very end.
About two o’clock, the rain outside finally let up, leaving the parking lot asphalt looking dark and shiny like an old leather shoe, and the sun broke through the clouds over the ridge in that low, yellow way it has in late November. The light came streaming right through the big front window of the Cracker Barrel, hitting the copper kettles and the wood-paneled walls until the whole place looked warm and amber, like the inside of an old church before the evening service starts.
Diane reached across the laminate table, her fingers a little stiffer than they used to be, and picked up the folded paper napkin that started the whole business. She smoothed it out flat against the wood with the palm of her hand, then folded it back up into a neat little square and tucked it inside her purse next to her reading glasses and a packet of mints.
“You coming back next Friday?” she asked, and she didn’t look down when she said it. She just looked right at me with those same hazel eyes from the room over the dry cleaner’s, steady and clear and entirely unimpressed by the years we had wasted being careful.
I looked down at the two white coffee mugs sitting side by side on the table, close enough that their handles were almost touching, and then I looked back at the empty space where my booth used to be ten feet away.
“I don’t see why not,” I said. “Jeannie already knows where to find us.”
