Arthur didn’t say much, just turned over the OPEN sign as I made some coffee and loaded up the cash drawer in the register. I turned on the radio and began to hum along with some old swing stuff, music that brought back memories of being newly married at the start of the war, and Joyce and I taking everything we owned down to Eglin Airfield in Florida, where I worked as an airplane mechanic until ’46. My memories were still fresh of how the test planes could roll and crash and burn and I’d be left to pull out the bodies from the wreckage and try to make sense with what had gone wrong.

“You making the coffee?” Arthur asked. He was dressed in similar green Texaco coveralls.

“That’s what it looks like.”

“Hmm.”

“What do you mean, hmm?”

“I just wish Joyce would’ve been here is all. You ain’t one for cooking.”

“Coffee ain’t cooking.”

“And grits ain’t groceries,” Arthur said. He walked outside, ignoring the slurping pot, and stood by the big pumps waiting for their first customers to come rolling on in.

I whistled along to Harry James’s trumpet on the radio and, even as the first customer rolled under the tin overhang, kept on with the old tune “I’ve Heard That Song Before.”

The car was a two-tone tan-and-white Oldsmobile Rocket 88, and I knew the car before the engine even died and the man walked around and checked out the day just coming on from down east along the river, the morning shadows growing long and thin, almost disappearing into the harder light.

He was a tall, thin man with white hair and round spectacles. As he had stood, he used the door frame and placed the rubber tip of a wooden cane on the ground, smiling and limping his way to me with the steady clog, clog, clog of his heavy, specially fitted shoe.

“Mr. Patterson,” I said and shook his hand. “You headed somewhere?”