…the moment the regulars saw me standing in the doorway.
I hadn’t come to make a scene. The little diner two blocks over had hired me the day after he let me go — the owner said he had been trying to poach me for years and couldn’t believe his luck. I only stopped in to say goodbye to the folks who had sat at my counter for forty years.
I didn’t have to say much. Word had already gone around town the way it does. And when I turned to leave, Earl got up from his stool. Then the Kowalskis. Then the man I’d been calling “hon” since he was in a high chair. One by one they set down their menus, left their tablet ordering blinking on the table, and walked out behind me toward the diner down the street.
He said nobody came for me. Then he watched a whole town stand up and follow me out his door.
By the end of that first week, my new counter was the busy one. The regulars brought their kids. A young man I hadn’t seen in twenty years drove three hours — he was the boy whose father drank the paycheck, and he wanted to buy me a slice of pie for once, he said, instead of the other way around. He’s a schoolteacher now. He tips like a man who remembers.
The son’s “modernized” diner limped along on strangers and cheap eggs for about a year before it closed. The tablets, it turned out, never once asked anybody how their mother was doing.
I’m seventy-one. I still pour coffee. I still know every order before they sit.
Turns out people never did come for the eggs. They came to be known. And I’ve spent forty years knowing them.