Issue 3:1 | Fiction | Sarah Gillespie

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Sarah Gillespie

The smell of bacon frying hung heavy in the air, wafting out onto the quiet street. I loved that smell. It reminded me of mornings at my grandma's house. She cooked a big breakfast almost every morning Ð fried eggs, sausage, bacon, and homemade biscuits. There would be no cold cereal and milk for my grandpa.

Even when they both could have slept in, she was up before daylight, cooking him a hot breakfast and packing his lunch on days he had to work at the plant. She never complained, even when he did. If his coffee was too cold, she got him a fresh cup from the stove. She buttered his biscuits, put salt and pepper on his eggs, did everything but eat it for him.

It was all a bit old-fashioned for me, the obedient wife serving her husband. I wondered what Grandma got out of it. He never brought her flowers. He never took her out to eat, unless they stopped at the local drive-in for burgers after a trip to town or a day of "yard sale-ing." Yet, day after day, Grandma continued her routine without complaint. My marriage was going to be different.

The snow crunched beneath my feet as I hurried toward the door. The metal keys seemed to have frozen in my hand as I fumbled to unlock the front door. Snow days were slow days at the restaurant, especially at lunchtime, but breakfast was a different story. The regulars would be there and preparations had to be made.

"Morning, Mary!" I shouted as I headed through the kitchen. The greeting was acknowledged with a weak "Morning" and a number of grumbles I had learned to ignore. I glanced at the clock to see how much time I had to get things started. Fifteen Ôtil six. That gave me just enough time to get the coffee started and the biscuits out of the oven before the regulars headed in.

This had been my weekend morning ritual since I began working at the Country CafŽ at the tender age of 15. Now I was a wizened 20-year-old, hopeful I was in my last year of college, and ready, if anyone ever really is ready, to take the Big Step myself.

The restaurant and its regulars had become such a big part of my life, a sort of extended family. I was going to miss them when I married and moved away. Often, even if I had the day off, I'd find myself going to the restaurant to help out, especially in the summer when the tourists were in town and things got swamped.

The breakfast regulars were different. I knew who would be in at what time and what they would order. There was a routine--no new faces, no surprises, no frantic pace. I'd have their coffee, with the right amount of cream, waiting at their regular table and their breakfast on the grill. Perhaps that's what made my Grandma's marriage work--the same routine, no surprises. The chime of the front door bell let me know I was right on schedule.

"Morning, Mr. Orr," I called without turning around from my task of adding cream to his coffee.

"Morning, sweetheart," he called from the door where he was hanging up his coat. Adding a spoon to the coffee with "two creams, no sugar," I met him at the table.

"How are you, honey?" he asked, squeezing my shoulders. "It's so nice to see a smiling face so early in the morning, you know."

Soon the eight other men who usually came in every morning would join him. They always came at the same time, always ate the same thing, and usually never failed to have the same number of cups of coffee as the week before. At times, it seemed more like I was having breakfast with old friends than waiting on men in a small town restaurant. I had heard the same stories so many times I could recite them by heart. I bustled around the restaurant picking up plates and filling coffee cups as the men talked about their weeks and teased one another.

The chatter and laughter grew silent as the bell on the front door chimed. Even though I knew who it would be, I looked up anyway. They always grew quiet when he came in. I never knew if it was out of respect or fear or what. He entered the restaurant and sat on the opposite side of the room from the other men. I never knew why he did this either, but he always did.

My hands shook a little as I poured his coffee and filled a bowl with creamers. I dared not add it for him for fear it would not be perfect. As I approached the table, I searched for some indication as to what his mood would be, but his eyes were hidden behind the pages of the town's weekly newspaper.

"Two eggs over easy, with bacon and buttered toast. And don't forget the jelly," he barked, barely acknowledging me.

I left the table quickly, not bothering to write down the order. I dared not ask him if there would be anything else, for fear he would growl at me like he had the time I put cream in his coffee. How many ways are there to dump a creamer into a cup of coffee? Apparently, he felt this was an art I had not mastered.

The other men resumed their conversations, giving me a wink or a nod of encouragement, before raising their cups to signal it was time for a refill.

As I opened the swinging doors to the kitchen, the wave of hot air felt like a sauna. It felt as if the breath were sucked out of me with the swing of that door. The cook stood studying the orders I had given her. There was a dirty rag in her hand and a cigarette, which had an ash about an inch long, hanging from her lips.

"Don't come in here wanting me to hurry your orders, you hear?" she snapped, ashes falling like snowflakes from the dangling cigarette.

"Just an order," I replied, holding up the paper to prove that was why I was really there. "It's the rude guy, so if you could get it out first, I would appreciate it," I almost pleaded, clipping it to the front of the row of orders.

"I don't care how damn mean he is," she barked. "He ain't as mean as me."

With that she slapped some fat-covered bacon on a plate and handed it to me. "Tell him to eat this," she howled with a laugh reminiscent of a character from a bad horror movie.

I dumped the bacon into the trashcan where it swam in a mixture of last night's country-fried steak and gravy and shell-tainted egg yolks. I would fix his eggs myself. I had done it lots of times. It wasn't my job, but Mary didn't seem to mind. As far as she was concerned, there could never be too many cooks in the kitchen. Maybe it was because she had raised a family of seven children that cooking seemed to be the last thing she wanted to do with her life. But she had been here fifteen years, stuck, she said, because she didn't know how to do anything else.

One of the eggs I cracked had two yokes. That was a sign of good luck, my Grandma always said. I wondered what good fortune awaited me today. I debated whether this would count as two eggs for his order and decided he wouldn't see the humor in that. So I cracked another egg on the grill. The grease popped and spattered, stinging my arms. Even his breakfast seemed to bite at me.

I dreaded taking the food to him, because this was the time the other men would leave. Nonetheless, I carefully placed the jellies he liked in a bowl. Approaching him with the plate of food, I felt like a messenger approaching a king with the fear of being beheaded if the news wasn't good. The plate clinked slightly against the table as I placed it in front of him. He cast me a reproaching look, seeming annoyed by the fact he was going to have to eat it. I quickly retreated from the table and joined the other men waiting at the cash register.

"Don't' worry about Cowboy," Sam offered with a kind smile of reassurance. "He don't mean nothing by it."

As Sam disappeared out the door, a silence as thick as the smoke rising from behind Cowboy's newspaper seemed to hang over the restaurant. It was a relief when the phone rang, calling me away from cleaning the now deserted tables.

"Country CafŽ, how may I help you?" I chimed, as I answered the phone. "Oh, how are you Mrs. Bays? Yes, yes, I'm fine thank you. Congratulations on your new grandbaby. No, we haven't set a wedding date yet. You know I've still got at least a semester left in school. Yes, I will be sure and let you know. You can pick up your order in about twenty minutes. Okay. You, too. See you a little while."

Finally escaping what seemed to be a game of "Twenty Questions," I thought how her endless chatter was typical of the other blue-haired ladies, the Sunday buffet regulars who had their hair done every Saturday at the Cut & Dye Beauty Salon. Hanging up the phone, I turned to write down the order, only to be confronted with a coffee cup and the unfriendly face of Cowboy towering over me. I took the cup without comment and began filling it.

"So you're getting married, huh?" he asked in a gruff voice.

"Uhhh, yes, sir," I stammered, almost expecting him to laugh or scoff at the fact that anyone would want to marry me.

"I was married for fifty-seven years," he told me, making the first real conversation we had ever had.

"Really?" I replied, unsure of what I should say and shocked that anyone could put up with him for that long. He probably killed her with his deadly silences I thought to myself. I immediately felt a twinge of guilt.

"I don't have enough coffee to fill your cup, but if you don't mind waiting a few minutes, I will make some more and bring it over to you," I said, half apologetically.

"Sure thing," he replied in the nicest tome I had ever heard him utter. He walked back to the table. I watched the coffee brew, staring at it as if that would hurry it along. I feared he would be annoyed with having to wait, and that hint of kindness would disappear from his voice. I hurried over to the table with the steaming coffee pot. By this time, it had begun to snow hard and the restaurant was as empty as the streets outside.

"So, you're getting married?" he asked, as I approached the table.

"Well, we haven't set a date, but yes, I guess I am," I replied, smiling.

"How long have you been engaged?" he questioned in an almost fatherly tone.

"Just a month, since Christmas, but I've known Matt since junior high," I replied hesitantly, somehow wanting his approval.

"Well, make sure you love him before you go and get yourself tied down," he advised, with a nod of his head. "My daughter's done got herself married three times and still don't like a one of them!"

I couldn't help but laugh and was surprised when he chuckled.

"You know why I come here every week?" he asked.

"Well, no, but somehow I'm guessing it's not the food," I joked with him.

"Well, no, I can't say that it's the food either," he laughed. "My wife cooked breakfast for me every morning, but on the weekends, we always came here to eat. It was long before you were even a gleam in anybody's eye. This is the place we met. Back in high school, she waited tables here and me and the boys used to come in and give her a hard time. She had the prettiest blue eyes I'd ever seen. The same color as yours. I think I loved her the moment I saw her. I told the fellows I was with that girl was gonna be my wife some day. They laughed at me, but I knew."

I remembered my Grandpa telling the same story. He was making music at a tent revival down in the River Bottom near Cedar Branch. He saw this scrawny young girl with big blue eyes and long brown pigtails playing tag with her brothers near the tent. He told his friends he was going to marry that girl. It seemed strange that Grandpa and Cowboy, gruff and tough men for all appearances, fell in love at first sight.

"My wife passed on about five years ago," he continued, "and I can't say I've been the same since. It's almost like I lost a part of me."

I was so shocked that Cowboy was even talking to me I couldn't quite bring myself to say anything other than, "Really?"

"He must think I'm an idiot," I thought to myself, "acting like I don't know how to carry on a conversation." This was like talking to a complete stranger and, although the uneasiness he usually caused had softened, I was still on my guard.

"That's how you know you're in love," he told me, with a look on his face that seemed to be years away. "When you think about your dear one first thing in the morning and last thing at night, when you just can't wait to see her again when you've been apart for awhile."

His eyes grew misty. I felt I was intruding in some sacred place. I shifted the coffee pot from one hand to the other, then smiled, unsure of what else to do or say. For as long as he had been coming into the restaurant, he shared little more than what he wanted to eat and when he needed more coffee. As far as I could remember, he had never even asked me my name, and now here I was listening to his life story in the empty restaurant.

It reminded me of the lyrics of an old song my step-dad often played: "ÉThere's something Ôbout a Sunday makes a body feel alone. There's nothing short of dying half as lonesome as the sound of a sleepy, city sidewalk, Sunday morning coming down."

Outside the snow was really coming down. There would be no lunch crowd after church today. Chances were, most of the services would be cancelled because the roads were getting really icy. Matt would come for lunch. He always did, no matter what. I smiled again, thinking how he would burst through the door and scoop me up, no matter who was around, and plant a big kiss before he asked, "What's today's special, besides you?" It was always the same. He knew the menu by heart and I knew him. It didn't matter what the special was; he always ordered the same thing: double chili-cheese burger, side order of home fries, and a large Mountain Dew. I always started his order before he came in the door.

"Cowboy," I said, still unsure of myself, "why don't you ever sit with the other guys?" I knew I probably shouldn't ask him. Given his gruff nature, it probably had something to do with an old quarrel or hurt feelings.

"To be honest with you, I just like to sit here with my wife," he told me. "I know she's not around anymore, but when I'm here, it's almost as if I can feel her, and, for that moment, I'm happy again. I just don't want to forget her, you know?" His eyes filled with tears.

The dinging of the front door bell startled us both. I was disappointed I would have to leave him to wait on the new customers, brave souls who had started to church not knowing the services were canceled. They wanted hot coffee, sausage gravy and biscuits to muster the courage to begin the treacherous journey back down Allison Gap Road.

I hurried to take their orders to the kitchen and bring the coffee to their table, anxious to resume my conversation with Cowboy. But when I finished, he was gone, leaving his money on the table and disappearing into the cold.

I found myself looking forward to next week and hoped he would stay after the other men left. A twinge of embarrassment flickered inside when I thought of how I had dreaded seeing him come through the doors so many times. Clearing the table, I thought about how he must have looked at her so many years ago in this very same place. I wondered if that was how my Grandpa looked at Grandma when he told all his friends the little, pig-tailed girl was going to be his wife some day.

While I did it every morning for nine or ten old men, I could not see myself cooking breakfast every morning at 6 a.m. no matter how much I loved Matt. Although it was warm and cozy inside the restaurant, I shivered, suddenly feeling the aloneness of a "Sunday morning coming down," just like the song said.

"My marriage will be different," I thought, shaking off the chill and racing to get Matt's burger on the grill.