The one thing I meant to do was start the coffee.
I know how that sounds. A man gets accused, gets shamed in front of a stranger at the pump, gets told to sign or get cuffed, and the thing he cannot sleep over is the coffee. But those haulers would be rolling in around five, cold and hollowed out from the dark, and I could not stand the picture of them pulling up to a black window and a bare pot. Thirty years I had that coffee hot before the first rig hit the lot. I was not going to let a boy manager end that on a sour note for men who never did a thing to me.
So I let myself in with the key I had not turned back in yet, got the big urns going, and wiped the counter down the way I always did.
That is when the day boy came in.
He was not due for hours. He stood in the doorway looking like he had not slept either, and he watched me getting the place ready for men who thought I was a thief now, and he came apart right there on the mat.
It was him. The ninety dollars. He had dug himself a hole, the kind a scared kid digs, and he took it out of the drawer figuring the old man on nights would just get blamed and shuffled off and nobody would look close. He never counted on me showing up before dawn to make coffee for strangers.
He set ninety dollars on the counter with a shaking hand and asked me what I was going to do, and I told him the truth, that I was going to pour us both a cup and we were going to figure out how a young man climbs back out of a hole like that.
He wanted to march straight in and confess. I told him to sit down and drink his coffee first.
The district folks came in early for the Friday lunch, and they walked into a station lit up warm and smelling like a full pot, an old clerk and a scared boy at the counter, and the whole thing came out over those cups. The boy told it all. He did not leave one word out.
They did not press charges. He is paying it back out of his checks, and he still has a job, because I asked them to give him the same second chance I had floated a hundred stranded kids down that road. The young manager does not work there anymore.
They asked me to come back. I told them I was already retired, but that I would train the boy right on nights before I went, so the coffee would always be hot for the haulers.
That is the only thing I ever wanted anyhow.
