Real Stories
He ordered the same breakfast every morning for eleven years. Then one day he did not come in.
Two eggs, bacon well done, white toast, black coffee. She never once had to write it down.
Eleven years is not a habit. Eleven years is a fixture. He was in the second booth by the window at ten past six every weekday morning, and I could have the coffee down before he had his coat off.
Two eggs, bacon well done
I never once wrote his order down. Two eggs over easy, bacon well done, white toast, black coffee, and he would put the exact money on the table before he ate because he did not like waiting for the bill.
He was not chatty. Twenty minutes, the paper, and he was gone. But he was there before the sun was, every single weekday, for longer than my youngest has been alive.
The morning the booth stayed empty
On a Tuesday in February the booth was empty at twenty past six. I wiped it twice for something to do.
By nine I had convinced myself he had gone to his daughter’s. By the end of the week I had stopped telling myself anything.
Nobody knew his surname
That was the part that got me. Eleven years and I did not know his last name, where he lived, or what he had done before he retired.
I knew how he took his coffee. That was the whole of it, and it had always felt like enough.
The envelope
Three weeks later a woman came in mid-morning and asked for me by name. She had his eyes.
She said her father had died on the Sunday, at home, quickly. Then she put an envelope on the counter with my name on it in handwriting I had never seen.
What was in it
A cheque, and a note with four lines on it. He had written that the diner was the only place he spoke to anybody most days. That after his wife died he started coming because the house was quiet at six in the morning and it was not quiet here.
And that he had never known how to say any of that out loud, so he was putting it in writing instead.
What I do now
I still wipe that booth first. I have started actually asking people their names, which I did not used to do, and it turns out most of them want to tell you.
Eleven years he sat there and I thought I was serving him breakfast.