Friday morning I got up, put on my good shirt, and drove back out to that diner on the county road, where the owners had driven in for a twenty-eight-years-of-service lunch and did not yet know their manager had run me off two days before.
I came to say goodbye to the graveyard shift that had been mine for twenty-eight years, to the coffee pot and the counter and the long dark hours, before the manager could brand me a thief to the people who signed his checks.
The trucker beat me to it.
The one who had been sitting at my counter with his coffee when the manager screamed at me over fifty dollars. It turned out he ran a whole fleet, and he had been stopping at my diner for fifteen years, and he thought the world of the woman who kept his drivers fed and awake through the night. He had called the owners himself the very next morning.
I have watched that woman feed broke travelers out of her own pocket for fifteen years, he told them, so you will forgive me if I do not believe she cleaned out your till for fifty dollars.
The owners had listened. Then they had checked the drawer counts and the camera, and it was the boy, the new hire, plain as day, skimming the register while the manager looked the other way.
They did not make a show of it. They just told the manager, quiet and final, that he was done, and that a man who would jail a twenty-eight-year employee to cover a boy theft did not belong behind their counter, or anyone else counter.
Then they asked me to stay.
I stayed. That diner is a warm light in the dark for too many people to let it go over one small man with a mean streak. The truckers need their coffee. The broke travelers need a plate and no questions. The three in the morning souls with nowhere else to be need a familiar face.
I am that face. I have been for twenty-eight years, and I am not done yet. The night shift is a lonely watch, but somebody kind ought to keep it, and I have never once minded being that somebody.
The owners stayed for the whole lunch. They sat at my counter like regular folks and let me pour their coffee, and before they left they doubled what the manager had been paying me, and told me the diner was mine to run however I saw fit.
The trucker still comes through every few weeks. His coffee is always hot, and it is always free, and it will be for as long as I am standing at that register.