I ought to know better than to run errands with Stan on an empty stomach, but hope springs eternal when you have been married long enough to forget last Saturday. The whole morning started off wrong when he stood in the cereal aisle of our local grocery store and sighed three separate times because they had moved the puffed wheat three feet to the left.
By the time we reached the checkout lane, he had managed five distinct complaints about the price of eggs, the length of the line, and the way the teenager scanning our groceries bagged the heavy canned tomatoes right on top of the soft sandwich bread.
I just nodded and paid with my debit card, because forty-eight years of marriage teach you when to hold your ground and when to let a man grumble himself empty. We loaded the brown paper sacks into the trunk of the Buick, and Stan slammed the lid down with a dull thud that made the neighbor’s cat jump off the top of a fence two houses down. He walked around to the driver side, wiped his palms on his jeans, and offered to take us out for breakfast like he was tossing me a bone after a long shift at the mill.
I figured a stack of pancakes and a cup of coffee would sweeten his disposition, but that was before we got caught in the complicated machinery of Stan’s morning logistics.
On the way back home down Maple Street, he mentioned the diner by the highway, the one where they put chopped canned mushrooms into the chili and the toast always tastes faintly of old refrigerator grease. I didn’t say anything out loud, but I must have made a slight face because he caught it in the rearview mirror and immediately changed his mind.
The trouble was that by the time we pivoted toward the north side of town, the dashboard clock was inching closer and closer to eleven o’clock. Stan squinted at the digital numbers on the dash like they were written in ancient Greek and started tapping his index finger against the steering wheel in that four-beat rhythm he only uses when he is about to become difficult.
“If we go to the Highway Diner now, we are right on the cusp,” Stan said, his voice climbing that familiar narrow staircase into his stubborn register. “They switch over to the steam table at eleven sharp. You know how Doris gets about the gravy pans.”
“Then we will go somewhere else, Stan,” I said, leaning my head back against the headrest and watching the telephone poles click past. “There are six other places within three miles that serve eggs until noon.”
That was when I made the mistake of suggesting the brick building with the green awning near the old feed store, the one that makes everything from scratch and charges fifty cents extra for real butter. I love their biscuits because they are tall and flaky and taste like someone actually gave a damn when they mixed the flour. Stan slowed the Buick down so fast the delivery truck behind us gave a sharp, indignant honk that rattled our tailpipes.
“We can’t go there,” Stan said, gripping the steering wheel as if someone were trying to yank it out of his hands. “You know their policy.”
“It is a restaurant, not a maximum-security prison,” I said, turning to look at his profile. “What policy?”
“The single sausage patty rule,” he muttered, staring hard through the windshield at a stray dog trotting across a gravel driveway. “You order the breakfast plate, you get one patty.
If you want two, they charge you for an entire side order, which is four dollars extra for two ounces of pork. It is highway robbery in broad daylight, Loretta.”
I looked down at my fingernails and then back at him, feeling that familiar, heavy weight behind my ribs where affection and exhaustion live side by side. I mean, my bladder had been trying to get my attention for the last ten miles, and here my husband was, ready to die in a gravel parking lot over a stray piece of breakfast meat.
“Stan,” I said, keeping my voice very flat and very even. “You are seventy-one years old. You have a pension, a paid-off mortgage, and two functioning credit cards. If you want two sausage patties, you just tell the waitress to add a second one to the ticket and we pay the four dollars.”
“It is the principle of the thing,” he shot back, his ears turning that dull, stubborn red that always meant he was digging in for a long siege. “You do not reward bad pricing structures. It encourages them.”
We pulled into the gravel lot of the scratch-made diner precisely at eleven o’clock, the crunch of small stones loud beneath our tires. The lunch specials sign was already propped up on an easel by the front door, displaying a picture of a lukewarm meatloaf sandwich that looked like it had been dead for three days. I reached for the door handle, but my body reminded me immediately about the coffee I had finished three hours earlier during our second stop at the hardware store.
“I am going inside,” I said, putting my hand on the latch. “I told you ten miles back that I needed to use the restroom, and if I don’t find indoor plumbing in the next two minutes, I am going to baptize your front seat.”
Stan didn’t move. He had his neck craned sideways, staring through the diner window at the chalkboard hanging behind the counter, trying to read the faint white lettering through the glare of the morning sun. He watched the waitress flip the sign from breakfast to lunch right before our eyes, her hand moving with a casual cruelty that seemed directed right at our windshield.
He killed the engine, but instead of getting out to hold the door like he usually did when he wasn’t being a mule, he slumped back against his seat and let out a long, wheezing sigh that stirred the dust off the dashboard.
“Look,” he said, pointing a finger toward the glass door where three local farmers were already sitting with their coffee cups. “Go in there and ask them. Just walk up to the counter and ask Doris if she can stretch the breakfast rule just this once because we got caught behind the tractor on County Road Four.”
I sat there with my hand on the handle, staring at him. The engine fan whirred down to a quiet stop, and for a second the only sound in the car was the ticking of the cooling metal under the hood.
“You want me to walk into a crowded restaurant at eleven o’clock on a Saturday and beg a woman who handles hot grease for a living to grant you an extra piece of pork?” I asked. “Is that your master plan?”
“She likes you,” Stan said, his voice dropping into that wheedling, small-boy tone he only uses when he knows he has pushed things past the legal limit. “You talked to her about her hydrangeas last spring. She remembers you.”
“Stan, my bladder is currently holding a press conference and you want me to negotiate trade tariffs on breakfast sausage,” I said. “Get out of the car. We are going inside together, you are going to order whatever the woman puts in front of you, and I am going to find out if their plumbing still leaks.”
He grumbled something under his breath about stubborn women and lack of fiscal discipline, but he opened his door and swung his legs out onto the gravel. We walked across the lot side by side, him taking those long, deliberate strides that always made me feel like I was trying to keep pace with a Clydesdale. When we pushed through the heavy wooden door, the smell hit us, real butter, scorched coffee, and the sharp, vinegar tang of homemade hash browns grilling on a seasoned flat top.
Doris looked up from behind the counter with a grease pencil in her hand, her gray hair pinned up in a neat little bun that hadn’t moved an inch since Reagan was in office. She took one look at our faces and didn’t even wait for us to slide into a vinyl booth by the window.
“Kitchen’s transitioning, Stan,” she called out before our coats were even off. “Eggs are done for the morning unless you want them scrambled into the fried rice special.”
Stan froze with one hand on the red checkered vinyl of our booth seat, his shoulders dropping about two inches. I slid into the corner by the window with a quiet hiss of relief, watching his face go through three distinct shades of disappointment before settling into that familiar, hangdog look that always got around my defenses.
“Doris,” I said loudly before he could start negotiating. “My husband here is having an existential crisis about pork protein. He thinks if he orders two patties, the state of Kansas is going to audit his taxes.”
Doris let out a dry bark of laughter that sounded like gravel sliding down a chute and tossed her grease pencil onto the counter. “Lord almighty, Stan. You’ve been coming in here twenty years and you still carry on like a Yankee accountant every time the clock strikes eleven.”
“It’s about the principle,” Stan mumbled, though he sat down across from me with a sheepish little twitch at the corner of his mouth. “A man likes to know where he stands with his breakfast.”
“You stand wherever I tell you to stand,” Doris said, walking over with two heavy mugs and a pot of lukewarm decaf without waiting for an answer. “I’ve got two extra patties left over from an order that didn’t go out because some farmer changed his mind at the register. I’ll drop them on the flat top right now, and I won’t even charge you for the second one if you promise to stop looking like you’re attending your own funeral.”
Stan looked up at her, then across the table at me, and I saw the tension finally drain out of the back of his neck where he’s been carrying it since we backed out of the driveway at eight thirty.
“Well,” Stan said, clearing his throat and adjusting his glasses. “That seems like a fair and equitable solution. What do you think, Loretta?”
“I think I need to use your restroom before my kidneys mutiny,” I said, sliding out of the booth and heading down the narrow hallway past the swinging kitchen doors.
When I came back out three minutes later, feeling like a new woman, the smell of butter and pepper had filled the whole front room. Our table was already set with two huge plates of golden hash browns, toast that had real butter dripping down the edges, and two thick, dark sausage patties sitting right beside Stan’s eggs like a pair of proud little soldiers.
We didn’t talk much while we ate, just the steady clink of silverware against heavy white ceramic and the low rumble of the radio playing country gold from the station over in Emporia. Stan ate his eggs with that quiet, focused concentration of a man who had successfully defended his borders against an imaginary invader, cutting each bite into precise little squares before lifting his fork.
When he finished his second sausage patty, he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, folded it neatly into a square, and set it beside his empty plate. He looked across the table at me, his eyes soft behind his bifocals, and reached out to slide his coffee cup toward my refill without being asked.
“You were right about the scratch-made part,” he admitted quietly, looking down at the Formica table where a single corner of buttery toast was sitting between us like a flag of truce. “It’s better than the one with the mushrooms.”
“Of course it is,” I said, reaching across the space to take the handle of the coffee pot from him before he could spill it on his sleeve. “Now eat your toast, Stan, so we can go home and put the groceries away before the ice cream turns into soup.”
