The worn leather Bible was left behind in booth number four.
Miriam was in the middle of her second double shift of the week. At sixty, her feet throbbed constantly, but she needed the overtime to cover her sister’s medical bills. It was past midnight when she finally started wiping down the vinyl booths. Tucked behind the metal napkin dispenser, she found a thick, black Bible.
It looked decades old, its pages softened by years of use. Miriam picked it up, intending to put it in the lost and found behind the register. As she lifted it, a crisp five-dollar bill slipped from the pages and fluttered to the sticky linoleum floor.
She bent down to retrieve the money, noticing that it had fallen from a specific section of the Old Testament. She opened the book to slide the bill back in, but her eyes caught sight of something else.
Tucked neatly into the gutter of the binding, right at the beginning of Leviticus, was a sealed white envelope.
Miriam frowned. She didn’t recognize the handwriting on the front, but the name written in thick black ink was undeniable. It was addressed directly to her. Not just “Miriam,” but her full maiden name – a name she hadn’t used since she fled her hometown in Kentucky thirty years ago, leaving a devastating family secret behind.
Her hands trembled as she broke the seal on the envelope. She pulled out a single sheet of lined notebook paper. The diner was completely empty, the only sound the hum of the fluorescent lights above.
She unfolded the paper and read the first sentence.
Eleven Tuesdays
Miriam Lee Tackett, you have poured my coffee eleven Tuesdays in a row and you have never once looked at my face.
She read it twice. Then she looked at booth four like the man might still be sitting in it.
Patty melt, no onions. Black coffee, no refills until he tapped the cup. He came in around nine and left around ten-thirty, and he put a five on a nine-dollar check every single time. She’d noticed that part. Nobody tipped like that at the Bluebird Grill on Airport Highway, not on a Tuesday, not to a woman with compression socks and a pen behind each ear.
She’d figured him for a trucker. Or recently divorced. He had that look: a shirt somebody had ironed who didn’t normally iron.
She had not looked at his face. He was right about that.
My name is Gary Hatch. I was nine years old on March 9, 1994, when my father walked home from Wednesday night prayer meeting on Route 15 outside Hazard and did not get there. This is his Bible. The state trooper found it in the ditch about forty feet from where they found him. I expect you know which truck.
Miriam sat down. Not in the booth. On the edge of it, half off, the way you sit when you’re not sure you’re allowed.
From the kitchen, Lonnie had the radio going, some replay of a Tigers game from August that he listened to because he’d already heard how it ended and liked that. He leaned out the pass-through.
“You good, Mim?”
“Somebody left a Bible.”
“Huh.” He looked at it like it might be a bomb. “Want me to call Pam?”
“No. I got it.”
He went back to his grill brick. She could hear it scraping. She looked down at the paper and the words had not changed.
What Her Daddy Hosed Off the Bumper
She had been thirty that spring, which is too old to be living in your parents’ back bedroom, and she knew it, and everybody at Little Zion Freewill Baptist knew it too. Her engagement to a man named Curtis had gone bad at Christmas. She was working register at the Dollar General in Hazard and saving for an apartment she kept not getting.
Donna was nineteen. Donna was the pretty one, which in Perry County meant the one Daddy forgave.
That Wednesday Miriam had skipped prayer meeting with a headache. She woke at 2:40 in the morning because the hose was running. The spigot under her window always knocked when it was open.
She went to the window in her nightgown.
Daddy was in the driveway in his undershirt, by the porch light, spraying down the front of the green Ford. One headlight was out. Not dark. Gone, a hole with wires in it. He had a scrub brush. He was working the grille hard, the way he’d scrub a pan somebody let burn.
Donna was on the porch steps in her good blue dress, throwing up into Mama’s azaleas.
Miriam didn’t go out. She’d think about that for thirty years. She stood at the window until Daddy turned off the water, and then she got back in bed and lay there with her eyes open, and in the morning the school bus driver found Roy Hatch.
Daddy was at the kitchen table when she came down. Coffee, Bible, reading glasses, like any morning.
“Your sister made a mistake,” he said. He didn’t look up. “You want to put her in Pewee Valley for a mistake? That what you want?”
Pewee Valley was where Kentucky put women. Everybody knew the name of it.
“Daddy, that man…”
“That man’s with the Lord. Donna’s here.” He turned a page. “Sit down and eat something.”
A cousin in Grundy, Virginia, put a new grille and headlight on the Ford that weekend. The sheriff never came. Roy Hatch had been a deacon at a different church, a smaller one, and his funeral was on a Monday. Daddy went. Daddy sang. “In the Sweet By and By,” second verse. Miriam heard about it from Mama, who said it was the Christian thing.
Six weeks later Miriam put what fit into one Samsonite and the trunk of her Corsica and drove north until the money said Toledo.
She married Ed Kowalski in ’97. Divorced him in ’04. Kept his name, which Ed thought was sweet. It wasn’t sweet. It was just the one name nobody in Perry County would ever think to look up.
She called Mama on Sundays until Mama passed. She never called Daddy. She went to neither funeral.
And Donna she sent money.
It started with fifty dollars in a birthday card. Then it was every month, a money order, because Donna couldn’t hold a job and kept calling to say so. Then Donna’s kidneys quit, and it was everything Miriam could stand on her feet for.
Here’s the part she never told anybody, including the priest at St. Hedwig’s she sometimes went to because it wasn’t Baptist. Some of that money was love. Some of it was so Donna would stay an envelope. So Miriam would never have to drive down there and sit across from her sister and know what she knew.
Postmarked Lexington
The fluorescent tube over booth six had a flicker in it. She’d told Pam about it in June. She read the next paragraph under it.
My mother was Patricia Hatch. Starting in the summer of 1996, she got an envelope every month with cash in it. No note. No name. Postmarked Hazard, and then after about 2010, Lexington. The amounts were never round. Eleven dollars. Fourteen. Twenty-two forty. One time it was six dollars and eighty cents in an envelope, change and all, and she laughed about that for a week.
She bought my school shoes with it. She paid the light bill with it the winter I was fourteen. She thought it was a church lady. She called it the Lord’s mail.
She died last November. I found a steno pad in her nightstand where she wrote down every single one. It comes to $11,340.60 over twenty-eight years.
In February one more came. It came in a used envelope from the Bluegrass Dialysis Center on Nicholasville Road, with a return sticker somebody didn’t peel all the way off.
I drove up there and sat in the lobby two days until I figured out who she was.
Your sister is in chair six. Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays.
Miriam put her rag against her mouth. It smelled like bleach and syrup. She held it there.
She told me everything she could stand to. She told me to look at Leviticus 6, verse 5, so I did, and I’m leaving it marked for you. “He shall even restore it in the principal, and shall add the fifth part more thereto, and give it unto him to whom it appertaineth.”
She said that’s what she’d been doing. Every time you sent her money, she took a fifth of it and put it in an envelope to my mother. She said it was the only clean money she ever had, because it was yours.
Miriam put the paper flat on the table and smoothed it with both palms, which did nothing, and did it again.
She did the arithmetic without wanting to. She had the money order stubs in a Buster Brown shoebox on her closet shelf, rubber-banded by year, because Ed had once accused her of being bad with money and she’d never forgiven him. She didn’t need to go look. A fifth. Every month. Since ’96.
She’d been paying Roy Hatch’s widow for twenty-eight years and had no idea.
She laughed. One time, short, like a cough. Lonnie’s radio said somebody had grounded into a double play.
I’m not after money. I want you to know that before you read anything else. The fives I’ve been leaving you are yours. I worked out what my mother’s steno pad came to, divided by your sister’s fifth, and I don’t want a dime of a Tackett’s money in my wallet, so I’ve been giving it back a little at a time. I’ll be honest. I don’t know how many Tuesdays that is. I didn’t do that math. I just liked having a reason to come in.
Fifty-five dollars. She’d put it toward Donna’s copay.
There was a crossword somebody had left in booth two, half done in pencil, seven down erased so hard the paper had gone furry. She looked at that for a while. It wasn’t anything.
The Other Side of the Page
She almost missed it. She was folding the letter back up, into thirds, then sixths, the way she folded receipts, and she saw ink through the paper.
He’d written on the back. Smaller. Like he’d run out of nerve partway down the front and had to get it back.
There’s one more thing and I went back and forth about whether you should hear it from me. Donna said you should. She said she owed it to you more than she owed it to me, and she’d had thirty years to say it and didn’t, so I’m saying it.
Donna wasn’t driving.
Miriam stood up. She didn’t decide to. Her knee hit the underside of the table and the napkin dispenser rocked.
Your daddy was. He kept a pint under the seat for after church, she said everybody in the family knew that and nobody said it. He picked her up from the dance at the VFW because she called him drunk and crying, and he was drunker than she was. She was passed out against the window when it happened. She woke up because the windshield came in on her.
She says by the time they got home he’d already told her it was her. He kept telling her. He said she’d begged him to let her drive. He said she grabbed the wheel. She was nineteen and so drunk she couldn’t stand up on the porch, and she said by morning she wasn’t sure. By that summer she was. By then you’d already gone.
She said he told you it was her on purpose. He knew you’d keep quiet for Donna. He knew you wouldn’t keep quiet for him.
She said she let you leave believing it because if you’d stayed, you would have figured it out, and she didn’t want to watch him decide which one of his girls to lie about next.
Earl Tackett died in 2009 of a stroke in the fellowship hall. I looked it up. They had a nice write-up in the Herald. I’m not going to any sheriff. Everyone who drove that truck is dead or on a machine three days a week. There’s nobody left to arrest except me for being angry about it, and I’m about done with that.
Donna asked me to give you this word for word, so here it is: “Tell Mim I’m sorry she spent thirty years ashamed of me for the wrong thing.”
She’s got until about fall, the nurse says. Maybe less.
I’ll be in Tuesday. Same booth. If you don’t want to wait on me, I understand. Have the other lady do it.
Gary
There wasn’t another lady. There was Miriam and there was Lonnie, and on weekends a college girl named Kayla who quit every three weeks and came back.
Miriam put the letter in her apron pocket, under the order pad, and the Bible she carried to the register and then didn’t put in lost and found. She put it in her tote bag with her reading glasses and the Tupperware from lunch.
She cleaned booths five and six. She refilled the ketchups. One of them had a cracked cap she’d been meaning to throw away since Sunday, and she filled it anyway.
When she clocked out it was 1:52 in the morning. In the parking lot she sat in her Buick with the engine running and didn’t drive. She thought about the porch light. She thought about Daddy turning the pages of his Bible at the kitchen table, slow, licking his thumb, and how she’d always believed he couldn’t look at her that morning because he was ashamed of Donna.
She got out her phone. The number for chair six was a front desk that wouldn’t open until six.
She drove home. She did not sleep. Around four she took the shoebox down from the closet and sat on the bedroom floor with it and didn’t open it either.
Booth Four
Tuesday it rained, a cold early-October rain that made the windows sweat.
He came in at 8:56. She knew because she’d been looking at the Coca-Cola clock over the pie case every ninety seconds since seven.
He took booth four. Window side, facing the door. He put his hands flat on the table the way men do when they’re not sure what to do with them, and he looked at the menu he’d ordered off of eleven times.
She brought the coffee pot and two cups.
That was when she finally looked at his face.
He was younger than she’d thought. Forty, about, gray coming in only at the ears. A chipped front tooth. He had a little red mark on the bridge of his nose from glasses he wasn’t wearing. Eyebrows that went up in the middle, like he’d been asking a question his whole life and nobody’d answered it. She’d never seen Roy Hatch, not once, not even a newspaper picture. She’d made sure of that.
She poured his coffee. Then she poured the second cup and set it across from him.
He looked at it.
She’d worked at the Bluebird nineteen years. She had never once sat down during a shift; Pam had a rule, and anyway Miriam’s knees had a worse one. She put the pot on the table and slid into the booth across from him. The vinyl was cold through her uniform.
“I went down Sunday,” she said. “Chair six. She looks like Mama now. She didn’t used to.”
He nodded. He didn’t say anything.
“She said you brought her a milkshake from the Steak ‘n Shake. Strawberry. She can’t hardly have it, with the phosphorus.” Miriam picked up the creamer and put it back down without using it. “She said it was the best thing anybody’s done for her in a year.”
“I didn’t know about the phosphorus.”
“Nobody does.”
Rain on the window. Lonnie in the kitchen, not listening, listening.
She reached into her tote and set the Bible on the table between them, the soft black cover, the five still marking Leviticus. She’d slid it back in where it fell.
He put his hand on it and didn’t pick it up.
“Patty melt,” she said. “No onions.”
“Yes ma’am.”
She didn’t get up.
“First, though,” she said. “Tell me about him. I never let anybody tell me one thing about him.”
Gary Hatch looked at her a long time. Then he turned his cup a quarter turn on the saucer, like his father must have done, like somebody had.
“He couldn’t carry a tune,” he said. “Not even a little.”
If you were Miriam, would you have gone back to booth four that Tuesday?
For more wedding-day secrets and unexpected turns, read the text message that interrupted a bride at the altar and the stranger who stopped a wedding with a car seat. And for another mystery tied to someone dearly missed, see the gift a stranger brought from a dead grandmother.
