_My father sat on one of the green revolving stools, stopwatch in hand. The cardboard sign on the door of our Tast-T-Cup Diner, flipped to CLOSED, cut with shadow the sunlight streaming in. It was Sunday. My mother stood at her spot beside the small, gray cash register, behind the glass case displaying Beechnut packs and cigars, souvenir thimbles and plastic pocket combs. Spatula in hand, bound in a fresh apron, I waited at the grill.

“Ordering,” my father said. “Two hard-fried, browns, wheat sliced, side-a-strips torch ’em, short stack and grits. Go.” He clicked the watch. I cracked two eggs in one hand and let them plop on the grill, pushed bread in the toaster, threw diced potatoes and bacon behind the eggs, dolloped three puddles of batter the size of saucers and turned them when they bubbled. The bacon made a sound like rain. Toast popped up and I pushed it down again, wet my brush with melted butter as I flipped the eggs, turned the bacon, stirred the pot of grits, shuffled the hashbrowns. Grease spatters stung the backs of my hands as sweat ran down my forearms and hissed away on the grill. I reminded myself of the man on Ed Sullivan, spinning plates on sticks, not letting any fall. Everything smelled done at once and came together on two blue-edged plates I slid under my father’s nose. He clicked the watch and looked at it.

“It don’t beat your old man’s best,” he said, “but damn good enough.” My mother smiled.

* * *

My father now lives in Seven Springs Village, which the brochure termed a “permanent recuperative facility”—a nursing home. We had to send him there following his stroke, a year after my mother passed away. Every Christmas, Jackie and I strap Danny and Lisa in the car to make the trip back to North Carolina. Along the way, I find the places I like to stop for food: Jan’s House, Chick and Ruth’s, 421 Motor Lodge, and a corrugated tin place near Dover simply named Eat. Jackie, a distance runner when she’s not teaching, will order nothing but salad for herself, and plain oatmeal for Lisa (Danny, eight months old, is still nursing). She tells me the place named Eat should be renamed Cholesterol. I tell her it is not the food I go for, though the food is wonderful—chicken-fried steak, green beans from the can, lemon meringue pie with an ocean of egg whites up top.

I go to these places because when I walk through the door I can smell my father’s Dutch Masters Perfectos and Old Spice mixed in the grease and coffee. Now, at Christmas, the windows of the diners carry twinkling strands of colored lights behind the fogged glass; fake-snow aerosol spray spells out “Merry Xmas” across the door. I remember spraying those words myself, T-shirt held over my nose against the fumes. We sit in the vinyl booths, and I do fork and toothpick tricks for Lisa, feed quarters to the tableside jukebox. Jackie eats her salad and steals bites of my pie, lets me stay and linger over bottomless cups of bitter black coffee.

* * *

My father tucked the stopwatch in his shirt pocket, drew out a cigar, jammed it in his mouth. He scraped food from the plates onto the cement outside the back door, where stray dogs came to eat the scraps he left out.

“Now,” he said. “What do you say to the egg man?”

“Stack’em, don’t crack’em.”

“Good. The bread man?”

“Fresh stuff, off the bottom. No day-old.”

“Right-o. Sandy will work the register. She’ll be here to help if you get stuck on anything.” Sandy was a copper-haired waitress with wiry, muscled arms, deep wrinkles, and black horn-rimmed glasses.

My father pointed his cigar at me. “And if Joe Whelan comes around?”

I gathered up my apron to wipe my hands, a movement learned from watching my father. “Don’t serve him any food,” I said.

“That ain’t all.” My father drew a kitchen match from behind his ear, sparked it across his pant leg, sucked fire into the cigar. The smoke stung my nostrils. “The other thing is, throw him out on his sorry ass.”

My mother slapped his wrist with a dish towel and told him to watch his mouth. “Just mind the list, honey, and you’ll do fine,” she said to me.

The list had been made up by my father, scrawled in grease pencil on a piece of shirt cardboard and taped to the side of the cash register:

1. Shirt and Shoes Required.

2. No Money Left Overnight.

3. No Bad Checks.

4. No Biker Jackets.

5. No Transients.

6. No Profanity.

7. We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone.

I read over the faded words as if they were the Ten Commandments. Beside the No Profanity rule, someone—Ray Wilson most likely—had written in “and goddamn you if you do.”

They were leaving on a food-buying trip, to Winston for cured hams, up along the Blue Ridge Parkway for honeycomb, apples, molasses, and the corn husk dolls my mother displayed under the glass counter. My father made the trip every year, on a Saturday, but this year they had decided to go together. I had turned fourteen, old enough to mind the store while they took a vacation. My father wrote a note to get me out of school.

They left on a Wednesday, during the afternoon lull. My father loaded the station wagon with their bags strapped to the top (to leave room inside for the hams). Up to the last minute, he gave me instructions on what to do in the event of holdups or hippies or broken pipes. While the engine idled, he drew me aside and put his arm across my shoulder. I stared at the black hairs on his forearm, the dark green anchor tattooed there.

“Napkin dispensers, Jess,” he said, and lightly shook me. “Don’t forget.” He had drummed into me his theory that the quality of a diner could be determined from its napkin dispensers. His dispensers—always full—ran a tight, gleaming line down the counter, like a row of chrome fence posts.

My mother, wearing her white gloves and beaded hat, kissed me. My father shook hands, told me to say out of his liquor drawer, and honked the horn as they drove off in a stream of white gravel dust.

We lived in a neighborhood of look-alike houses on a narrow blacktop that ran perpendicular to Main Street, less than half a mile from the diner. My father had a talent for imagining disasters—floods, break-ins, gas explosions—and did not want to live far from the Tast-T-Cup. The morning after they left I awoke at four, walked under stars to the diner and cooked my own breakfast, unlocked the door for Sandy at quarter till, flipped the door sign to Open at five on the dot. The Westin’s Feed Store group arrived first, a circle of grizzled old men in caps who spent their days tracing a path from the feed store to the diner, planning hunting trips they never took, inventing lies for one another. They swallowed plates of grits and scrapple and poached eggs with hash. I kept up with their orders while the Bun-O-Matic gurgled coffee smells beside me. The feed store group, led by Ray Wilson, had their jokes over me—“Look, Teddy Hollins left hisself in the dryer too long, shrunk himself up.” They laughed and blew cigarette smoke in the air. Sandy played their straightman, a role usually reserved for my father. I worked the grill, steam table, a waffle iron, my arms aching and wooden. We cleaned and cooked till the lunch crowd arrived: men in suits from the bank, women in skirts, a few feed store stragglers. We served the fried chicken special, fried okra, canned corn, master burgers, and chocolate pie. When it ended, Sandy set her lips in a hard, thin line, the closest she came to a smile.

“You did okay,” she said.

At eight-thirty my second morning, the leather strap of sleigh bells on the front door jangled, and Joe Whelan stepped in. A hat, pulled down to his eyes, shaded his blond stubble of beard and wet mouth. His corduroy coat gave off an odor of kerosene. As he moved to the counter, the men on the stools buzzed in one another’s ears. Joe held out his palm, dotted with pennies, his fingers cracked and cigarette yellowed.

“How much for donuts?” he asked. I set aside the spatula and gathered my apron to wipe my hands; the feed store gang watched me closely. No one spoke.

“Two hundred dollars, Mr. Whelan,” I said. “Of course, you could write me your personal check.” Ray Wilson smacked the counter and laughed, the group around him elbowed each other, grinning and shaking their heads. Joe stared at me, then curled his fingers around his pennies, slid them into his jacket pocket, and pushed out the door.

“His father’s boy all over,” Ray Wilson said, and reached across the counter to slap my shoulder.

* * *

The trip from New York to North Carolina is a long one, and like all long car trips, it invites thought. While everyone is asleep in various corners of the car, I think about my father, try to imagine how another year of decline has left him. Last year’s visit, our first since he had the stroke and we placed him in the nursing home, left me shaken, stunned at how nine month’s time could take away his heft, shrivel him, cloud his eyes, ruin his legs. As the white lines move under the car, I try instead to picture him the way he looked in the diner, wide-faced and tanned, lighting cigars or wiping his hands on his apron.

After we arrive in Greensboro, I find my father in his room on the third floor, and I am relieved to discover that the year has changed him only a little; he is thinner, his eyes cloudier. Blue veins are visible beneath his skin. He doesn’t stir much, and I spend most of the day in a chair beside his bed, reading magazines, watching game shows. Jackie joins me there after she has found someone to sit with the kids. She squeezes my hand. On the table next to the bed, shoved in among bedpans and a remote control for the TV, is a tiny fake Christmas tree, not more than six inches tall. Every once in a while, my father opens his eyes, mutters something and points at us.

“Dad?” I say. His breath is foul and full of noise. I talk to him about the diner, about all the food we served up. He doesn’t respond much. Once, he looks at me and says “business,” his fingers shaking, and I come to understand that the decline of the last year has not only occurred in his body. When I mention anyone from the old days, he smiles with tears in his eyes, but this has become his response to nearly everything, and I know there is no real memory tied to it.

* * *

I had done a half week’s worth of good work I knew would please my father. Sunday morning I got up, slicked my hair, drew on my suit and overcoat, carried my mother’s red-letter Bible to church for early service. It was a bright fall day; my black shoes kicked through tatters of blown leaves on the sidewalk. I sat beside Mrs. Mashburn, so word of my attendance would find its way back to my mother. The regular morning service had been given over to “Teen Day.” Rick Turner, from my geometry class at the Junior High, stood at the front and played “Amazing Grace” on his Sears electric guitar plugged into a shoebox-sized amplifier. Then came a Biblical skit rewritten in teen slang (“Hey, man,” Buddy Greenwell as Jesus said, “cast your nets on the other side and everything will be cool.”) I walked home and opened the diner, cooked myself a lunch of chicken steak, gravy, and white bread, then settled in at the grill to ready for the after-church crowd.

The next morning at six, Joe Whelan walked in behind the feed store group. My eyes stung; I looked down and began scraping the grill.

“Joe Whelan, my best friend!” Ray Wilson said, baiting me. “Pull up a stool here, Joe.”

He sat on the stool, placed his hat on the counter, pulled a crinkled five-dollar bill from inside the hatband and straightened its creases. He’d never before had more than a few pennies in hand; I wondered where he’d come by five dollars. Enough money to buy anything listed on the menu.

“Coffee,” he said, “Black.” Sandy shook her head at me, and Ray grinned, excited. I rested my spatula on the grill, wiped my hands on the white apron.

“Listen,” I said, “your money’s not welcome here. Take your business somewhere else.” He breathed through his mouth, the matted ends of his hair quivering like leaves.

“Paying customer,” he said. “I say I’d like some goddamn coffee.” He smacked his hand on the counter, knocking one of my father’s napkin dispensers to the floor. The spatula rang against the grill as I yanked it by its wooden handle and drew it up, sizzling with grease, beneath Joe Whelan’s fleshy throat. The ring of metal on metal hung in the air.

“Out. Now,” I told him. Over and over I repeated to myself rule number seven, that we had the right to refuse anyone. My hands shook as if the spatula handle were electrified. Joe backed off the stool, picked up and replaced the napkin holder, put his hat on his head and walked out the door.

During the afternoon lull, I carried an armful of grease-spattered aprons toward the laundromat, uptown. I walked breathing diner smells out of the cotton bundle, bumping into people. As I turned the corner by the cafeteria, I nearly tripped over Joe Whelan. He was on his knees, his head pressed against a newspaper machine. Beside him sat a half-empty bottle of cheap fortified wine with roses on the label, and along cracks in the sidewalk ran a stream of reddened vomit. Joe retched, his face as gray and parched as old corn husk dolls. He retched again and brought up a wash of air, then fell on his side and began to shiver. Coins rolled out of his jacket pocket onto the walk—his change from the bottle he’d bought with the five dollars I’d refused not three hours before. My heart shook. I dropped my load of aprons, believing Joe Whelan would die at my feet, that it would be my fault. I pulled him up by his corduroy coat, patched bare in spots, stiff with cold and grime.

“You come with me,” I told him.

I led him back to the Tast-T-Cup, propped him on a stool and got him to swallow black coffee till he stopped shaking and could hold up his head. I pulled a menu off the counter and opened it under his nose.

“Order something,” I told him. “Anything.” He held the menu in his hands, staring at me.

“Coffee,” he said slowly, “Black.” I wrote it down. Sandy walked out of the back holding a cigarette.

“What in hell is this?” she said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.” I ignored her, nodded to Joe Whelan.

“Plate of pancakes,” he said. “Lima beans and buttermilk. A hamburger, hunk of pie and a roll. Toast with honey.”

I fixed it all, faster than my father had ever fixed anything, and laid it out on three plates before him.

“Eat,” I said.

And he did. Mouth nearly level with the counter, shoving in the food with his fork, breathing deeply through his nose as he chewed. He downed two more cups of coffee and the buttermilk; I watched the color and heat return to his face. When he finished, he pushed against the counter, drew a deep breath with his eyes closed. He slapped coins from his pocket onto the counter—eleven cents—and walked out the glass door into the sun. I dropped his dishes in the big stainless sink.

“Black and blue,” Sandy said, staring at me through her thick glasses. “Your Daddy will beat your behind.” She shook her

head.

My parents returned with their hams, honey, apples, and corn husk dolls. Sandy kept her mouth closed about what had happened, and I didn’t volunteer it. My father roughed my hair and squeezed my bicep, told me I’d take over as head grillman someday. My mother gave me a gewgaw she bought at the Tweetsie Railroad gift shop. My father showed me how to work it. I rubbed the notched stick; the propellers spun first one way then the other.

* * *

Much of the time, my father cannot remember that Jackie is my wife. When he speaks he calls her Meg, my mother’s name. He insists the cafeteria of the nursing home is his diner; his nurses tell me that twice during the past year, before he was confined to his bed, they caught him in the kitchen of the cafeteria, pulling pots and pans out of the racks. I pretend concern, but as I sit in the dim light of his room at night, closed inside the thin curtain with him, I think of how good it would be if he could get out of bed and rough up my hair, he and I could sneak down to the cafeteria in the dark, whip up a few egg sandwiches and short stacks and then stuff ourselves. But by now he is beyond even standing. I never made grillman.

* * *

At the diner, things were soon back to normal, my mother running the counter two days a week, me in school, working weekends and afternoons. Ray and the feed store gang bragged on how I’d thrown Joe Whelan to the dogs. School let out for Christmas break; I strung lights around the windows, taped a cardboard angel to the inside of the door.

On a Monday morning, out of a cold rain, Joe Whelan walked in. It had been more than two months since I’d seen him. The Tast-T-Cup had a crowd, the men from Westin’s Feed, people out early to catch Christmas sales downtown. Joe scraped his shoes on the tiles, drug his hat off his head so it pulled his hair straight down toward his eyes. His eyes bulged, swollen and yellowed. The hat moved in his fingers.

“Pancakes,” he said. “Coffee, toast—”

“Get the hell out!” my father yelled from the grill. Grease from his spatula dripped. Outside, rain hissed on the sidewalk. Sandy looked over at me; my face burned, and I quickly rang up the check of a gray-haired lady standing before me at the register.

“Out, Joe, before I call the law,” my father said.

“Sic the young’un on him,” Ray Wilson said, grinning. I took a five from the woman, my head down.

“That boy’ll feed me. Anything I want.” Without looking, I felt Joe Whelan point at me.

“You know this man, Jess?” my father asked me. “He a friend of yours?" I handed the woman her change. My eyes watered.

“Best meal I ever had that boy fixed me.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s true, now is it, Jess?”

The gray-haired lady smiled and pressed a quarter into my hand. “Here’s a little something for you,” she said. I looked at my father.

“You feed those dogs,” I said under his hearing, my lips barely moving with the words.

“Want to feed him, Jess?” He winked at me. I squeezed the quarter into my palm.

“No, sir,” I said. I looked at Joe Whelan. “Get on out of here.”

The cardboard angel muffled the sound of the sleighbells as the door swung shut behind him. I dropped the quarter into the pocket of my apron.

* * *

Our way home, we are delayed by trouble with the car, and do not start back for New York till afternoon of New Year’s Day. We said our goodbyes the night before at Seven Springs, where the nurses gave my father a noisemaker and strapped a tiny fireman’s hat to his head. At midnight, they brought grape juice in plastic champagne glasses, and Jackie kissed his cheek. I shook the thin bones of his hand, and noticed the anchor tattoo on his forearm has faded away. The nurse whispered to us that visiting hours were long since over, that we would have to leave. My father slightly raised his head off the pillow and looked at me. “Rules,” he said, and then tried to say it again. I knew it might well be the last thing I’d ever hear him say.

On the road at dinner time, I look for one of my usual places to stop, ignoring a cafeteria with a sign that promises “Open New Year’s” and the bright fluorescence of the fast food places Jackie points out to me. Jan’s House, Sarah’s Diner, and Marvin’s are closed, dark except for twinkling lights and a lit-up, plastic nativity scene on the counter of Jan’s. Dusk turns to night, our oldest begins whining, the baby crying. Jackie draws Danny out his car seat, opens her coat and blouse to nurse him. I give Lisa animal crackers out of the glove compartment and turn up the heater to lull her to sleep.

“Please,” Jackie says, “Can’t we stop for a burger?” She sounds angry and tired. I don’t answer her but keep driving, my own stomach pangs deepening. I pass the golden arches, Burger King, and the others with their blinking signs advertising drive-thrus open till three. Of all the things my father taught me to hate, first among them was fast-food restaurants, which in his mind closed us down. When the first fast-food burger stop was put up in town—a red and white tile prefab assembled in pieces off the backs of trucks—my father stood on the sidewalk across the street to watch the construction, smoking and spitting flecks of tobacco off his tongue. He stood there till dusk. The Burger Palace, as it came to be called, was not built on Main Street, with my father’s diner and the other restaurants, but right among the houses in our neighborhood, where Mr. Corgison’s place had been torn down. I could see my father through our living room curtains. He stood watching until long past the time the workers had left. His cigar, I noticed, had gone out.

“I know you don’t like McDonalds,” Jackie says, interrupting my thoughts, “but would just one time kill you?” Danny makes small sucking sounds.

I remember a cardboard sign inside EAT: “Open 24 Hours a Day, 365 Days a Year.” But the diner is outside Dover, still more than seventy miles away. I look at Jackie in the dim light. She rests her chin atop Danny’s head, her eyes watery and dark- circled. In a small voice, Lisa says, “Daddy, I’m still hungry.” The road we are on runs past another strip of fast-food joints; I turn the wheel to steer us into the parking lot of one.

Through its glass front the restaurant is a loud mix of yellow and red plastic, cardboard clowns dangling by strings from the ceiling, a stainless counter lined with computer registers and inflatable Santa Claus dolls.

I think of what I will miss not stopping at EAT—the inside full of grease and steam, waitresses sliding past in slippers and white nurse shoes, old men with their shoulders bent over the counter, the smell of my father’s Dutch Masters and Old Spice. Reflections off the yellow plastic shine through the windshield, illuminating the shadowed faces of Jackie with Danny held close, Lisa sleepy-eyed in the back seat. I shut off the car and sit, hearing the engine tick. Such simple things I long for—warm food and hot, bitter coffee. Jackie looks up and smiles, her eyes full of the easy gratitude that hunger allows.

“You’re angry.” she says. I shake my head. Now seems like the right time to stop. It’s late, and we are all hungry.