The bell over the diner door was missing its little clapper so it just made a dull thud against the wood frame every time you pushed it open. I hated that sound. I heard it at 6:42 every morning for sixty-eight months straight, right down to the minute, because the shift change at the Bolt and Forge always let out at half past six and it took me twelve minutes to walk up the gravel shoulder of State Route 18.<\/p>\n
My name is Arthur. I worked the punch press until my knuckles swelled up like winter pears and then I walked down to the counter and sat on the third stool from the end where the chrome was peeled away and showed the yellow glue underneath.<\/p>\n
Martha used to sit right there before her chest got heavy and she stopped coming out into the damp air.<\/p>\n
She liked the corner booth where the sun hit the Naugahyde. She would watch the trucks go by on their way down to Pittsburgh and she would tap her spoon against her saucer while she waited for the bacon to cool.<\/p>\n
When she died in the back room of the little house on Tenth Street with the nurse smelling like peppermint oil standing by the radiator, I didn’t know what to do with my hands.<\/p>\n
The house was too quiet. The floorboards didn’t creak the way they did when she was shifting her weight from the kitchen to the stove.<\/p>\n
So I went to the diner because the floor was dirty and the smell of stale grease stayed in your coat long after you left and it didn’t feel like a church.<\/p>\n
The girl behind the counter had hair the color of wet straw and she tied it back with a rubber band she kept on her wrist. Her name tag said Clara, scratched into the blue plastic with a pocket knife.<\/p>\n
She didn’t talk much. She just poured the black coffee from the heavy glass pot with the orange ring around the neck and slid the ceramic mug across the laminate without spilling a drop.<\/p>\n
I never put anything in it. Martha used to tell me I ruined a good bean with cow’s milk and white dust, so I drank it black until the lining of my stomach felt like old shoe leather.<\/p>\n
It was bitter. I liked the bitter part. It gave me something to do with my mouth besides bite the inside of my cheek until it bled.<\/p>\n
Clara would wipe the counter down with a gray rag that smelled like bleach while I stared at the yellow water rings left by the guy who had the stool before me.<\/p>\n
“Just the usual?” she asked me the first week.<\/p>\n
“Just the usual,” I said.<\/p>\n
That was all we said for three years. Then four. Then five winters of salt tracked across the linoleum and gray slush melting into gray puddles by the register.<\/p>\n
I didn’t think about her life outside of those four stools. I figured she lived up over the hardware store or out by the river where the fog rolls in off the locks and makes everything smell like dead carp.<\/p>\n
She had a small scar right under her left jaw that looked like she caught it on a rusty wire fence when she was ten.<\/p>\n
Last Tuesday the rain came down sideways off the ridge and turned the road into a yellow wash.<\/p>\n
My boots were soaked clear through to the wool socks my sister knitted me before her hip went out.<\/p>\n
I pushed the heavy glass door and it made that dull thud and I dropped my lunch pail on the floor by the coat rack because my fingers were too stiff from the damp to hold the latch.<\/p>\n
The diner was empty except for old man Henderson snoring in the back booth with his chin tucked into his flannel collar.<\/p>\n
Clara was standing by the sugar dispenser with her back to me, filling the little glass jars with the metal flip tops.<\/p>\n
She didn’t turn around when I sat down on the third stool.<\/p>\n
“Coffee’s fresh,” she said. Her voice had that flat, iron sound people get when they’ve lived in this county too long and the winter air gets down into their lungs.<\/p>\n
“Thanks, Clara,” I said.<\/p>\n
She brought the mug over and set it down right on the ring where I always put my thumb.<\/p>\n
Then she didn’t move away.<\/p>\n
Usually she went back to the sink to scrub the pie pans with the steel wool, the ones with the burnt edges that never quite came clean.<\/p>\n
She stayed right there with her hand on the edge of the counter, her knuckles gray against the laminate.<\/p>\n
“You look tired today, Arthur,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I didn’t sleep,” I told her. “The oil heater in the hall started banging at two in the morning and it sounded just like Martha’s old crutch hitting the baseboard.”<\/p>\n
She didn’t say anything for a long time. Henderson snored louder in the back, a wet rattle that sounded like a shovel hitting stones in the garden.<\/p>\n
“She talked about you a lot before she went,” Clara said.<\/p>\n
I looked up from the black liquid in the cup. The steam was coming off it in a thin, crooked line that drifted toward the ceiling fan where the grease had turned black and thick.<\/p>\n
“Martha didn’t have many people,” I said. “Just her brother down in Wheeling and he didn’t come up for the funeral because of his truck.”<\/p>\n
Clara reached into the pocket of her green apron and pulled out a small white paper packet with the red lettering of the diner’s brand rubbed off from being carried around in her pocket.<\/p>\n
She didn’t tear it. She just laid it flat on the counter next to my spoon.<\/p>\n
“She wasn’t my cousin on the Wheeling side,” Clara said. Her voice was too quiet, almost like she was talking to the coffee pot instead of me. “She was my mother’s sister’s girl. I stayed with her for two summers when I was twelve after the house burned down.”<\/p>\n
I stared at the little white packet. My thumb started to twitch against the side of the ceramic mug.<\/p>\n
“She never mentioned you,” I said. “Martha would have told me if she had kin up here.”<\/p>\n
“No,” Clara said, and she finally looked me dead in the eye with those gray eyes that didn’t have any white left around the edges from being tired. “She wouldn’t have. Because you liked things a certain way and she didn’t want you feeling like you had to take care of nobody else.”<\/p>\n
The diner was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator compressor kicking on in the back kitchen with a low, heavy hum that made the whole floor vibrate through the soles of my boots.<\/p>\n
“What is that?” I asked, pointing my finger at the paper packet like I didn’t already know what was inside it.<\/p>\n
“Sugar,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I drink it black,” I told her, and my voice sounded thin and stupid, like an old man arguing with a dog. “I’ve drunk it black since the day we got married in the courthouse in Beaver Falls.”<\/p>\n
Clara let out a short, dry breath through her nose. It wasn’t a laugh. It was just air coming out of her.<\/p>\n
“I know you did,” she said. “And the first day you came in here after she died, you sat right there on that stool and you looked like you were going to fall right off of it and hit your head on the floor.”<\/p>\n
She reached out and tapped the white packet with her fingernail. It made a dry, crisp sound against the Formica.<\/p>\n
“She made me promise,” Clara said.<\/p>\n
I couldn’t breathe. My chest felt like someone had laid an iron anvil across my ribs while I wasn’t looking.<\/p>\n
“Promise what?”<\/p>\n
“She said, ‘If I ever go, make sure he drinks something sweet because he won’t do it for himself,'” Clara said. She didn’t look away from me. “She said you had a toothache you wouldn’t admit to and you hated anything that tasted good because you thought you weren’t allowed to have it anymore.”<\/p>\n
I sat there with my mouth half-open, looking at the little red letters that weren’t there anymore.<\/p>\n
“Every day?” I asked. My throat felt like it was full of road dust.<\/p>\n
“Every single day for five years,” Clara said. “Two packets. Right when I pour it so it dissolves before you even pick the cup up.”<\/p>\n
I looked down at the black coffee. I had been tasting it every morning, that same dark, burnt taste I thought I needed to keep myself straight, like a penance I had to pay for still being alive while her side of the bed stayed cold.<\/p>\n
I reached out with my thumb and forefinger and picked up the paper packet. It was slightly damp from her pocket.<\/p>\n
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I whispered.<\/p>\n
“Because you would have stopped coming,” Clara said simply. She reached over and picked up her gray rag, turning back toward the sink where the dirty spoons were piling up in the gray water. “And you looked like you needed a place where somebody was paying attention to what you took in your cup.”<\/p>\n
I sat there for a long time with the little white packet in my palm, feeling the paper bend under the pressure of my thumb while the rain came down harder outside and tapped against the dirty glass like someone trying to get in out of the dark.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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