Then the phone rang, and it was a woman named Corliss Weyandt calling from the parish hall at St. Joseph’s at twenty till five, and she was not calling to see how I was.
She was calling because nothing had come.
Here is a thing about that diner that the new owner did not know, because it is not in any book he bought.
Every Monday since 2003, forty breakfasts go out the back door of that kitchen at five thirty. Sausage, eggs, biscuits, foil pans, into the trunk of whoever from the pantry is driving that week.
Gus started it when the plant closed and I kept it going after he sold, and it never once appeared on a ticket. I came in an hour early Mondays and cooked it, nobody paid for it, nobody talked about it, and I never said the word charity out loud in that building.
Corliss has driven Mondays since 2011. She sat in that lot at five fifteen and the back door was locked and the lights were off.
Now the second thing, which knocked me sideways, and I did not find it out until Wednesday.
That parish prints a bulletin every week. The back page has the pantry numbers and the thank-yous, and the same standing line has been at the bottom of it since Father Danko put it there in 2004.
Monday breakfasts, forty households, provided at no cost by Frank Osterhaus at the diner on Tuscarawas. He has asked us not to print this. We are printing it anyway, in small type, once a week, where he will not see it, because he does not attend here and somebody in this parish ought to know.
Twenty-one years that has been in a bulletin I have never held.
Half that church crowd on Sunday morning had read my name in small type at the bottom of a bulletin for two decades, and then they watched a man stand in the middle of my counter and tell me I smelled like grease.
I did not go back to that diner. He called Tuesday and I let it ring. He called again in November and I took that one and told him no, politely and finally.
St. Joseph’s hired me in December. They put in a real hood and a six-burner with money they raised in eleven weeks. I cook Monday, Wednesday, and Friday in that hall, it is a hundred and forty meals a week now instead of forty, and they pay me, which I argued about and lost.
Corliss runs the drivers. There are nine of them.
The diner is still open and I hope it stays open. There are people in this town who will not go in there now, and I have told about six of them to knock it off, because the two girls waiting tables did nothing to me and they need the tips.
He said nobody comes there for me, they come because it is cheap. He may be right about the diner. I could not tell you.
What I can tell you is that forty households in this town have eaten a hot breakfast on Monday morning since 2003, and it took a locked back door at five fifteen for anybody to find out where it came from.