But the next morning I got up, put on my good dress, and drove into town, though not to the diner. I was done with that diner. I drove to my church, because a deacon had called me the night before, and half this town had already gone to work on my behalf while I slept.
Folks do not want food some old lady has been frying since the nineties, the new owner had said, in front of a full house of my regulars.
Word travels fast in a town like ours. By the time I woke up, my Tuesday regulars had heard how I was talked to, and they were furious in the quiet, determined way good people get. They were not going back to that diner. And the deacons at my church had a proposition for me.
They had a big fellowship hall with a good kitchen that sat empty six mornings a week. Come cook breakfast there, they said. Saturday and Sunday mornings, by donation, whatever folks can give, for anybody who wants a hot plate and a kind word. We will keep the lights on. You just do what you have done for thirty years.
So I did. The first Saturday, I did not know if anybody would come. Half the town came. They lined up out the door of that fellowship hall for my mama biscuits and my eggs done the way each of them likes, and it was not a diner, it was a family, the way it always should have been.
They come every weekend now. The lonely widowers who need an extra word. The kids who get a free plate on a hard day. Miss Ada boy, who proposed in my old back booth years ago, now brings his own children. The donations more than cover the food, and what is left over the church puts toward folks who are struggling.
The concept diner downtown, all rebranded and shiny, serves empty booths. Because people never came there for the concept. They came for me, and for the mornings I gave this town for thirty years, and those mornings followed me right out the door and into a church hall.
Frying since the nineties, he called it, like it was a smallness. Thirty years of feeding a whole town its mornings is not a smallness. It is the thread that holds a place together, and you cannot clear it out before a reopening. It walks out with the cook.
I am past sixty. My feet ache by the time the last plate is served. But every weekend I stand in that church kitchen and feed my people, and they know exactly who I am, and so, finally, do I.