I folded my apron on the counter, hugged three regulars on the way out, and went home to wait. Thursday morning came. 7:15 sharp, the bell over that door jingled, and I know exactly what happened next because eleven people have told me, and four of them told me twice.
Mr. Dale Prewitt came in, hung his hat on the hook he has used since Reagan, and sat down in the third booth. He asked for pecan pie and black coffee, the same eight words he has said to me every Thursday for nineteen years.
There was no pecan pie.
There has never been pecan pie on that food service truck. I baked it Wednesday nights after close, off the clock, my mother’s recipe, twenty-seven years, and Blake had no idea it did not come from a freezer.
He offered Mr. Prewitt an apple turnover. Mr. Prewitt asked who used to make the pecan. Blake said an employee they had let go.
Then that man took out his wallet and went past the bills into the little pocket behind them, and pulled out an index card folded in quarters, gone soft and yellow as an onion skin, and he set it on the table and turned it so Blake could read it.
I wrote that card nine years ago. Marjorie Prewitt died on a Tuesday in February and that man came in Thursday at 7:15 anyway because he did not know what else to do with a Thursday. He sat there forty minutes and never touched the plate. I did not say anything to him, because there was nothing to say. I just slid this under it on my way past:
Dale. Pie is on me until you can taste it again. Sit as long as you want. Nobody in here is going to make you talk.
Blake read it. Read it again.
And then Mr. Prewitt mentioned, the way a quiet man mentions the weather, that he has owned that building since 1988, that Old Man Cobb never needed a lease longer than a handshake, and that he supposed he and Blake ought to sit down and talk about paperwork one of these Thursdays.
He put two dollars down for coffee he did not drink. Took his hat. Went home.
Blake was at my screen door before noon. He apologized about as well as a twenty-nine-year-old man can, which is to say badly, twice, looking at my porch boards. I let him finish.
I went back the following Monday, on my terms. Wednesday pie hours are paid now, time and a half, and it is on the menu board as Loretta’s pecan, and the third booth is not available at 7:15 on Thursdays for any reason on this earth.
Mr. Prewitt never did raise the rent. He never mentioned it again. Blake learns names now. He is not good at it yet, but he writes them on his hand.
You can put your name on a sign in an afternoon. It takes about twenty-seven years to put it in somebody’s wallet.