PART 2 — THE BREAKFAST MAN
I packed the bags myself this morning, filled the thermos, laid the index card on the dash, and drove my husbands route, stop by stop, to tell eleven more people that the breakfast man was not coming back.
I had thought I knew how my husband spent his mornings. Driving to clear his head, he always said, and I never thought to ask more. For three years, every single morning, he had been driving out to feed the people the rest of the world drove past.
Under a bridge. Behind a gas station. A bench by the river. A dozen stops, each one a person, each one expecting the quiet man with the thermos and the paper bags who never missed a day.
At the first stop, the man in the sleeping bag had seen my car and known, before I said a word, that something was wrong. Where is the breakfast man, he asked. He never misses.
My husband had spent the last three years of his life making sure twelve forgotten people started each day with a warm meal and a face that was glad to see them.
I had to tell that first man that the breakfast man was gone. He cried. Then he asked if he could help me carry the bags to the others, because he did not want them to hear it alone. So a man with everything he owned on his back climbed into my car and rode the rest of the route with me.
At every stop it was the same. Faces that lit up at the sight of the truck, then fell when they saw it was me. People who knew my husband by the coffee he made and the way he asked, every single day, how they had slept, whether their feet were dry, if they needed socks.
They did not know his name either. To them he was only the breakfast man, the one steady thing in lives that had very few. He had asked them never to make a fuss, and so they never had.
By the last stop I had made up my mind. I am not as brave as my husband was, and I do not know if I can do it the way he did. But I know how to fill a thermos and butter a biscuit and ask a person how they slept.
So I am driving the route now. Every morning. Twelve stops. The breakfast man is gone, but breakfast is not, and neither, I have decided, is the part of him that made sure nobody on that route was ever forgotten.