Mr. Abernathy had never missed a Tuesday morning breakfast in thirty years.
He was a creature of absolute habit. At eighty-two, he always ordered scrambled eggs, dry rye toast, and asked after Maggie’s grown children. Maggie, a fifty-eight-year-old waitress with a warm smile and a fierce protective streak, viewed him more like a grandfather than a customer.
When Mr. Abernathy missed his first Tuesday, Maggie assumed he had a doctor’s appointment. When he missed the second, she grew concerned. By the third week, when his phone went straight to voicemail, Maggie clocked out of her shift early and drove her rusted sedan straight to his small, clapboard house on Elm Street.
The grass was overgrown, and the morning paper was still sitting on the porch.
Panic tightening her chest, Maggie hurried up the steps. She knocked loudly on the front door, calling his name. When there was no answer, she instinctively turned the brass handle. It was unlocked.
“Mr. Abernathy?” Maggie called out, stepping into the dim, dusty living room.
The house was eerily silent and completely empty of furniture. The floral couch, the television, the old grandfather clock – everything was gone. But the living room wasn’t bare.
Spread meticulously across the worn hardwood floor were dozens of sealed, stamped envelopes. They were arranged in perfect, straight rows, covering almost the entire center of the room. Maggie stepped closer, her heart hammering against her ribs as she looked down at the sea of white paper.
Every single envelope was addressed to her.
Taking a deep breath, Maggie knelt on the dusty floor and picked up the first letter in the row.
A Twenty-Nine-Cent Stamp
The envelope was soft at the corners, like it had been handled a lot. The stamp was an American flag. Twenty-nine cents.
Maggie hadn’t seen a twenty-nine-cent stamp since she was a young woman.
There was no postmark. It had never been mailed. The address was written in blue ballpoint, a careful, slanted hand she knew from thirty years of signed credit card slips: Mrs. Margaret Kowalski, 14 Dunmore Court, Apt. 2B.
Dunmore Court. She’d moved out of that apartment in 1996.
On the back flap, in pencil, very small, someone had written a number. 1.
She slid her thumb under the flap. The glue gave up without a fight. Inside was a single sheet of lined paper, folded in thirds.
March 8, 1994
Dear Mrs. Kowalski,
You poured my coffee this morning and some went in the saucer and you said “sorry hon” and wiped it with your apron. You have a Band-Aid on your thumb. Your little boy was in the corner booth with a box of crayons. I don’t think you could get a sitter.
I came in today to tell you something. I ordered the eggs instead.
I will come back next week.
W. Abernathy
Maggie read it twice. Then she looked at the floor.
Six rows. Five envelopes in each. She counted them with her finger in the air like she was counting the register drawer at close, which was a habit she’d never been able to break. Thirty.
Thirty envelopes. Thirty years.
The Corner Booth
She remembered that Band-Aid. Or she thought she did. She’d cut her thumb on the slicer that spring, because Sal was too cheap to get the guard fixed, and she’d worked a double with it throbbing under the plastic.
And she remembered Kevin in the corner booth. He’d been four. He used to eat the creamers.
That was the year everybody in the Lamplighter Diner was gentle with her. Ray had been dead four months. People tipped her too much and didn’t look her in the face. Tiny, the cook, who was the size of a refrigerator, used to set aside a grilled cheese for Kevin without being asked and pretend it was a mistake ticket.
She didn’t remember Mr. Abernathy from that year at all.
He’d just been there. Like the coat rack.
Her knees were starting to ache on the bare floor. She shifted onto one hip and picked up number two.
Dear Mrs. Kowalski,
It is your birthday. The cook brought out a cupcake with a candle and everybody sang. I sang too. I did not tell you.
I will come back next week.
Number three was about snow. Number four was three lines long and said only that her daughter had a cough and she should get that looked at. Number five said she had cut her hair and it looked nice, and that he’d been married to a woman named Joyce for thirty-one years and Joyce wore it the same way once.
Every single one ended the same.
I will come back next week.
Maggie put number five down on her lap. Outside somebody’s dog was barking at nothing, the same three barks over and over, and a lawn sprinkler next door was going tick-tick-tick-tick.
She had a funny thought, an unkind one. That maybe he’d been in love with her. That maybe she’d spent thirty years pouring coffee for a sweet old man who was actually a creep with a notebook.
She felt bad about it right away. But she kept it.
She skipped ahead.
Number Eleven
November 11, 2004
Dear Mrs. Kowalski,
I don’t come in on Thursdays so you won’t see me today. I am writing this at my kitchen table.
Eleven years. I went out to Route 9 this morning before it was light. There is a cross there now. Somebody keeps putting plastic flowers on it. I think it’s you. I stood there a while.
I drove a green Buick LeSabre in those days. I sold it to a man in Ohio for parts in January of 1994. I want you to know that I knew exactly what I was doing when I sold it.
I am trying to work up to it.
I will come back next week.
Maggie’s hands went bloodless.
She didn’t drop the letter. She held it out away from her body, the way you hold a baby that’s just thrown up, and she stared at the word green until it didn’t look like a word anymore.
The state police had found paint on Ray’s coat. Green. They’d said it was probably a GM. They’d said it to her in her own kitchen, a trooper named Burke with a mustache, and she’d been holding Denise on her hip, and Denise had pulled the trooper’s pen out of his shirt pocket and he’d let her keep it.
That’s what she thought about. The pen.
She got up. Her left foot had fallen asleep and she nearly went down, caught herself on the windowsill, and stood there with her forehead against the glass breathing on it.
Someone knocked on the open door.
The Woman Next Door
“Oh. Oh, honey, I didn’t know anybody was in here.”
It was a woman about seventy in a pink visor and gardening gloves, the one with the sprinkler. She had a trowel in her hand like she might need it.
“I’m a friend of his,” Maggie said. Her voice came out normal. That surprised her. “I work at the Lamplighter. He stopped coming in.”
“You’re Maggie.” The woman pulled off a glove. “Pam Hatch. He talks about you. Talked. Talks.” She made a face. “I don’t know what tense he’s in, honestly. He’s at St. Agnes.”
“The hospital?”
“The hospice. Out past the Kmart that closed.” Pam looked at the floor, at the rows of envelopes, and she didn’t ask about them, which told Maggie she’d already seen them. “Pancreas. They gave him a couple months back in August. He had a man come with a truck, estate guy, took everything. Said he didn’t want his nephew in Tucson fighting over a couch. Left the door unlocked for you. Made me promise not to lock it.”
“For me.”
“He said you’d come on the third Tuesday. He said not the first, because you’d think doctor, and not the second, because you’re polite.” Pam almost smiled. “He knew you pretty good.”
Maggie didn’t say anything.
“There’s a number,” Pam said, pointing with the trowel. “Toward the end. He said you’d want the last one to be last, so he put the other one second to last. I don’t know what that means. He said you’d see.”
Then she went back out to her sprinkler, and Maggie heard the screen door clap shut behind her.
Not His Handwriting
Number twenty-nine was a different envelope.
Cream-colored, heavier, the kind that came in a box with matching paper. The stamp was a Christmas wreath. And the handwriting on the front was round and loopy and a woman’s.
On the back, in Mr. Abernathy’s pencil: 29. Joyce. 2011.
Maggie sat back down on the floor, cross-legged this time, which she hadn’t done since about 1985, and opened it.
Dear Mrs. Kowalski,
My name is Joyce Abernathy. You have never met me but I feel as though I know you, because my husband has been coming home from your restaurant every Tuesday for seventeen years and telling me what you said.
I am not well, and I don’t think I will see the spring. So I’m going to do something I’ve thought about doing for a long time, which is to write this and give it to Walt and make him promise to put it with the others.
Yes, I know about the others. I’ve known about Route 9 since the night it happened. He came home and stood in our kitchen with his keys still in his hand and he didn’t take his coat off for an hour. I’m the one who told him to sell the car. I want you to know that, because I think he’s going to tell you it was all him, and that isn’t true. I was scared. We had a mortgage and he was sixty-two and I thought they would put him in prison until he died. So I told him to sell it. God forgive me, I told him not to tell anyone.
He has been trying to tell you ever since. I have told him he has to do it himself, in person, and he has told me he will, and he goes every Tuesday, and he comes home and says “next week, Joycie.”
He is a coward. But he isn’t a bad man. Both of those are true and I’m sorry that you have to be the one to hold them both.
I hope your children are well. He says the boy is an electrician now.
Joyce
Kevin was an electrician. He’d gotten his journeyman card in 2009, and Maggie had told the whole diner, and she’d told Mr. Abernathy twice because she forgot she’d already told him.
He’d said, “Well, that’s just wonderful.” Both times. Like it was new.
She folded Joyce’s letter back into its cream envelope very carefully, lining up the creases, and set it on the floor exactly where it had been.
Then she picked up thirty.
Number Thirty
This one wasn’t stamped. It was the only one that wasn’t.
The envelope was fat. Inside were two folded sheets and a cashier’s check from First Valley Savings, and a key on a paper tag.
She looked at the check first, because she couldn’t help it. It was made out to Margaret Kowalski. It was for $211,400.
She put it face down on the floor like it was hot.
Dear Maggie,
I’m going to call you Maggie in this one. I never did, out loud. I always called you Mrs. Kowalski the first few years and then you said “Walt, for Pete’s sake, it’s Maggie,” and I said all right, and then I never said it, did you notice? I couldn’t.
On November 11, 1993, I was at the American Legion on Fairfield Road until about ten-thirty. I had three bourbons. Maybe four. I’ve told myself three for thirty years so I don’t really know anymore.
It was raining. Route 9 past the quarry doesn’t have any lights. Your husband was walking on the shoulder in a dark coat and I didn’t see him until he was in front of the hood. I felt it. I want to be honest with you about that. It was not a deer and I did not think it was a deer.
I stopped about a hundred yards on. I sat there with the engine running. I looked in the mirror and I could see something on the road and it wasn’t moving. And I put the car in drive.
The paper said later he died right away. I have prayed that was true and I’ve also wondered if they say that to everybody.
I found out his name from the paper. I found out about you from the paper, “survived by his wife Margaret and two small children.” I found out where you worked from a man at the Legion who knew your father-in-law. I came in that March to tell you. I sat down in your section and you said “what can I get you, hon,” and I said scrambled eggs and dry rye. I don’t even like rye toast. I just said it.
And then I kept coming. I don’t know if that was for you or for me. I think it was mostly for me. I liked knowing you were all right. I liked when you were all right. Some years I think that was the worst thing I did, sitting there letting you be kind to me.
I sold the house in August. I sold everything. The check is all of it after the hospice gets theirs. It doesn’t fix anything. I know that. Do whatever you want with it. Burn it, I won’t know.
The key is to a storage unit at Pruitt’s on Route 9, number 14. There’s nothing in it but a box. In the box is the side mirror off the Buick. I took it off before I sold the car because it was cracked and had his coat fibers on it, and I couldn’t throw it away. I don’t know why. I’ve had it in a box for thirty years. The police can have it. I’ve written a statement for them too, it’s in the box, and signed it in front of a notary named Doug at the UPS Store. Doug didn’t read it.
I am at St. Agnes, room 6. I don’t know how long. If you don’t come, I understand that.
I’m not going to write “next week.” I’m out of next weeks.
Walt
Maggie sat on the floor of the empty house until the light coming through the window moved off the envelopes and onto the wall.
She thought about Ray’s boots by the door at Dunmore Court. She’d left them there for almost a year. Denise used to put her feet in them and clomp around.
She thought about how she was going to tell Kevin. Kevin would want to drive to St. Agnes and do something. Denise wouldn’t say anything for a week and then call at two in the morning.
She thought, very clearly, I poured that man’s coffee four thousand times.
She didn’t cry. She wanted to and she couldn’t find the way in.
At some point she stacked the envelopes, all thirty, in order. Then she put the check inside number thirty and the key in her apron pocket, and she drove home and didn’t turn the radio on.
Tuesday
She worked the Wednesday. She worked the Thursday. She called the state police barracks on Friday and asked for a trooper named Burke, and the girl on the phone said he’d retired in 2008 and passed in 2015, and was there somebody else she could talk to.
Maggie said she’d call back.
On Tuesday she came in at five like always and Tiny was already on the grill. Tiny was sixty-four now and had a bad hip and still called her “Mags” like she was a kid.
“Two scrambled,” she said. “Dry rye. To go.”
Tiny looked at her for a second over the hood. He didn’t ask.
She drove out past the Kmart that closed. St. Agnes was a low brick building with a fountain out front that didn’t have any water in it. A nurse with purple scrubs walked her down to room 6 and said, “He’s been asking what day it is all morning. I keep telling him Tuesday.”
He was smaller. That was the first thing. He’d always been small, but now he looked like somebody had let the air out of him. There was a tube under his nose and his hands were on top of the blanket and they were mostly knuckle.
He opened his eyes when she came in. He didn’t say anything.
Maggie set the styrofoam box on his tray table. She opened it. The eggs had gotten a little rubbery in the car. She took a plastic fork out of her apron and put it next to the box, handle toward him, the way she’d done every week for thirty years.
Then she pulled the chair over and sat down. Her purse was in her lap. She kept both hands on it.
He looked at the eggs. He looked at her.
“Maggie,” he said.
It was the first time.
She looked out the window at the dry fountain for a long time. A man in a windbreaker was walking a little white dog around it.
“You didn’t ask about the kids,” she said.
—
Would you have walked into room 6? I honestly don’t know if I could have. Tell me what you’d do.
For another diner mystery that turns on an unexpected discovery, read the envelope hidden in a customer’s Bible or the scar that made a waitress’s customer go pale. For a very different secret revealed at a life-changing moment, try the phone handed over at the altar.
