But that morning, Walter saw that there wasn’t going to be any playful banter between them. It was close to six in the morning, and she obviously didn’t want to be there. She was wearing makeup all right, but not even makeup can cover all the signs of being hungover. She smiled, glad that he was one of the regulars who never tried to get her number.
“Hey, Walt,” she said, smiling a little in her painfully drowsy face.
“Hey, Jan,” Walter said, reaching into his pocket for his wallet.
She already had his coffee made up. He slid her the money, and she rang it out. He told her to keep the change, knowing that they weren’t allowed to take tips. But Walter figured that if she was ever going to buy his house that she’d best take any extra income that was offered to her. He thanked her and headed out.
Some people had built a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street, but Walter never paid them any mind. He was a Stewart’s customer, through and through. As far as he was concerned, any other store that was like a Stewarts was inferior by design, by which he meant that they weren’t a Stewarts. Cumberland Farms was a close second, but going in there always left a greasy feeling on Walter’s clothes.
Also, he wasn’t a Dunkin’ Donuts kind of guy. Back in the day, when Beth had the summers off, she would work at a Dunkin’ Donuts, a couple of miles to the south, hoping that she wouldn’t run into any of her students. Considering the type of students she taught, there was never any real fear that that might happen. The downside to working at a Dunkin’ Donuts was that Beth would sometimes bring home leftovers. That had been back when his cholesterol had been good enough to have a doughnut once in a while. He grew sick of them, along with their coffee.
Besides, nowadays, he trusted Dunkin’ Donuts to make a good batch of coffee with the same amount of trust he put in them to spell “doughnut” right.
He got into his truck, knees aching a little, and headed down to the thruway stop.
****
Atkins, New York was a small town if one were to even call it that. Sure there was a post office, a library, a high school, and a couple of businesses along the main road. But it was a meager town at best. Everyone who used to live here had been farmers, but with all the corporations buying up the farmland, they couldn’t compete. So they sold their land, and got jobs elsewhere, moving down south, with all likelihood.
Walter had thought that he would become a farmer. He grew up on a dairy farm (and as much as the youngsters tried to tell him almond and soy milk was milk, it wasn’t). Hell, everyone in his family had been a farmer at some point or another. It was decent enough work, where you got paid what was due to you.
Nowadays, these kids, this whole generation, knew nothing of hard work, at least not in Walter’s view. They had their parents buy them cars, buy them smartphones so they could like and view pictures of their friends who they didn’t even like, all so that those same friends would like things that they posted, and on and on it would go like some horrid loop.
After Beth died, Walter had tried to go on Facebook. He looked up his old buddies from high school, only to find that the majority of them were dead. Oh, there were a few that weren’t. A couple of them had kids, a sweet life in the suburbs with the pool, and all that. One man had apparently moved out to California and ran a charity for avocado trees. Others were horrid messes and the like.
He tried to find some of his old friends from Croone, New York, but none of them seemed to have a Facebook. When he tried to search for the town, nothing came up online either. It was like the town had completely vanished.
In a way, Walter preferred that, rather remembering his friends for what they were when they were younger, rather than the old decrepit versions of their parents they had all become, much like himself.
No one stays young forever, Walter thought, before getting off the computer at the library. He hadn’t been on Facebook since, and he doubted that he would ever be back.
He drove out of Akins; the streets were as empty and barren as they often were this early in the morning. He drove past the bar, which still had a sizable number of cars in it. The owner there was a member of AA and often said that when it got cold out, he’d leave the people in the bar to sleep out their drunkenness. They couldn’t walk home, since they’d freeze to death, and they obviously couldn’t drive. There were a few cars out to be sure, most likely heading to the toll roads like he was.
I-88 wasn’t a toll road, but I-90 was, and Walter knew a lot of the toll collectors. New York state might be one of the wealthiest states in the union, and they might provide excellent benefits. But it would behoove them, apparently, to provide their
