The Old Man V

The next day the old man got his coffee right away but he didn’t go to his table like normal. Instead, as I wiped trays so I was doing something and couldn’t have anyone complain, he continued with his story. He spoke in his quiet voice, but it sounded earnest. It was the sort of voice that makes you want to lean forward to catch every word.

“I was telling you before about how I dropped my future wife off at the house she lived and drove home myself, but having agreed to see her again. After a week I started to worry that she had just blown me off but then I got a phone call from her. I don’t think my feet touched the ground from happiness. She wanted to see me that Saturday, and she offered to meet me at the same dance hall we had been at before. I was all slicked up when I went that Saturday, and she was mighty fancy that night too.”

“So did you keep going out together?” I asked, liking the romance of the story so far.

“Not for as long as you might thing. At the end of that month she lost her job and her savings only lasted her about two months after that. She was desperate with no money for rent or food when I offered to marry her. That was all I could do you see, back in those days you didn’t just offer a unmarried woman a room in your house, it was best if you were married first or there would be all sorts of talk. I didn’t have the money to pay for her rent and food unless she lived with me either. So after dating for all of three months we decided to get married.”

“Didn’t your mother object to such a short romance?” I asked, remembering that the old man had said that was the parent that he had still living at that point.

“Not at all, she was overjoyed that I had found a nice girl to marry, even if she was a foreigner and usually my mother had nothing good to say about people from other countries. So that was that, we lived together until she died and while we did have our fights I have never loved another woman,” the old man looked sad again, and went to go sit down. I snuck him a refill of coffee when my bosses weren’t looking and put money for it in the till just in case the owner was staring at his video cameras. Random acts of kindness were considered bad business practice.

I started to feel almost like a granddaughter of the old man. Having opened up to me he continued to be filled with warmth towards me and it made going to work something to look forward to. I never found out where it was he lived or what his name was, and he only knew my name from my name tag, but we were still firm friends. There was no need for us to know anything else about each other since we saw each other every day and knew where to find the other one if we wanted to talk. I gave him a pair of socks for Christmas that I had knit myself, and to my surprise he had a present for me, a wooden spoon he had whittled out of pine.

One day the old man didn’t come to the restaurant and though I looked for the white cowboy hat the next couple of weeks it never came again. I supposed I knew he was dead, but not knowing his name I couldn’t even go to the funeral home or look in the obituaries. After the third week I just shrugged, walked up to the manager, and quit. If an old man could live like he had with only a middle school education could manage to have the life that he had then I figured I could do better if I tried. I haven’t looked back since.