Mr. Haskell opened the manila folder in his lap and drew out an old black and white photograph. He is seventy nine years old, a gaunt, leathery man with a pale blue cap that says Veteran, and my daughter Jolene had introduced him to me an hour earlier as a regular from the restaurant where she works. We were in Little Rock for my birthday party of my niece Renee, and the mood, until a minute before, had been loud. Renee had been telling a story about waitresses who spill soup on people for tips. The room hushed as he held the photograph up.
He said, “Maam, I do not wish to disturb your party.” He looked at Renee, who was still holding her wine glass, and then back at the photograph. “But I am eighty years old next spring, and I have been waiting a long while to say this out loud.” He laid the picture on the tablecloth. It showed six young men in uniform, laughing, with their arms around one another, in front of a sandbag wall. “This is my squad, 1968. Five of them did not come home. I am the sixth.”
The room was silent. He said, “When I got back, I could not hold a job. I could not sleep in a bed. I drifted for decades. About eleven years ago, I landed in Little Rock with nothing but a duffel bag and a pension check that was gone by the tenth of every month. I would go into the same cafe every morning and sit in booth four, and order a cup of black coffee, and make it last.” His mouth twisted. “Some of the waitresses did not care for it. One of them told me to go on.”
A plate of eggs set quietly in front of a stranger may be the first proof he has had in years that the world noticed him.
I looked at my daughter. Jolene stood in the doorway to the kitchen with a dish towel in her hands, white as the towel itself. I had known she worked at the cafe on Markham Street for years, and that she was good at it. But I had never heard a word of this. Mr. Haskell said, “Then a young woman started to work the morning shift. She came to booth four on a Tuesday and she did not ask me what I wanted. She set down a plate of eggs and bacon and toast, and she said, The cook made too many. You would be doing me a favor.”
He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “It was the cook who made too many every morning. It went on for six years. I know now there was never too many of anything. I know she paid for it out of her tips. She never told me, and she never let me pay.” He drew a breath. “On my worst days, the days I could not leave the room, she would send the cook to my door with a bag. She never knocked on it herself. She understood that I could not bear to be seen.”
Renee had put down her glass. I saw her mouth move without making a sound. Mr. Haskell turned a page in the folder. “Two years ago I got a letter from the Veterans Administration. A review had found I was owed back pay, disability benefits that I never knew to claim. It came to a little over one hundred and forty thousand dollars.” He looked up. “I filled out the paperwork because a young woman in booth four sat beside me one morning with a clipboard and said, Mr. Haskell, I looked this up. I think you are owed something.”
Jolene was crying openly now, her face in the dish towel. Mr. Haskell stood, slowly, with his hand on the back of the chair, and he walked across the room to her. He was a very small man in a big coat. He said, “I used the money to buy a little house. It has a porch. And I want to give you the deed to my old truck, because it still runs.” He tried to laugh. “And I wanted you to know that you did not feed a man. You fed a sergeant. You brought him back.”
I wish I could say that I stayed composed. I did not. My husband put his arm around me, and I leaned on him. Across the room Renee had risen from her chair, pale and stricken, and she crossed the floor and stood in front of my daughter and said, “Jo, I am so sorry. I said something stupid and cruel.” Jolene wiped her eyes. She said, “You did not know.” And Renee said, “That is exactly what makes it so shameful. I did not bother to find out.”
The party ended early. People left quietly, shaking the hand of Mr. Haskell, one by one, with their coats over their arms. A young cousin of mine stopped him at the door and asked if he could take a picture of the old photograph, and he said yes. Then he gave it away. He folded it into the palm of Jolene, and closed her fingers over it. He said, “I want you to keep him. He would have liked you.” She held it against her chest.
Mr. Haskell still comes every morning to the cafe. Booth four now has a small brass plate beside the window, a gift from the owner, and under the plate, a framed picture of six young men in front of a wall of sandbags. The coffee is free. The eggs are not, anymore, but he pays for them himself, with a proud flourish, and leaves a tip, and Jolene takes it with a bow. Some mornings Renee sits across from him and listens to a story. She never interrupts.