He was driving to Minneapolis across the prairie heart of America. He pulled off the freeway at a town he'd never heard of. Grain elevators, churches. A town square with a closed J.C.Penneys and a lot of parking available. There was a hotel on one corner that looked fairly prosperous. A restaurant on the ground floor.
What he wanted was a decent meal. He'd been living on habas and Mountain Dew for too long. There was a sign in the hotel lobby. ``Welcome St. Magnus grads and parents.'' One of those undistinguished liberal arts colleges that hold together so many small mid-western towns, he thought. He didn't see any students or parents around though. Maybe they weren't there yet. Maybe they had already gone.
A pleasant girl led him to a table by the window where he could watch a solitary skate boarder in the gathering dark. The menu surprised and depressed him. Was it really necessary to pay ten dollars and fifty cents for chicken fried steak, a baked potato and some tired string beans? Oh yes also included a salad of brown edged iceberg lettuce and a few shreds of limp carrot. Coffee extra. One refill.
Two tables down along the window wall an old woman sat facing him. Well dressed in a peculiar, timeless way. Well made up, with hard red lipstick and a lot of face powder. She too watched the skate boarder and thought thoughts too private ever to be shared.
He wondered who she was. The wife/daughter/grand-daughter of the founder of St. Magnus? A professor emeritus? A wealthy woman no doubt. A woman who could afford to pay ten dollars and fifty cents for chicken fried steak seven days a week without turning a hair. A woman of privilege. He began to hate her and her sheltered life. He imagined her home on a tree shaded street full of big white wooden houses with sleeping porches. A street where for a hundred years children had safely played. A house with ice skates and tennis rackets still stored in the mud room.
He did not really want to harm her. Life is what you get. Not much to be done about it. She won. He lost. Nothing to get hostile about.
Then he had an idea. Just a simple thing. He took his check and walked over to the cash register.
``Was everything alright?'' the pleasant girl asked.
``Just fine, thanks. I'd like to pay for her dinner too,'' he said, nodding toward the old woman who was still sipping her tea meditatively. ``Tell her my regards,'' he said.
The girl smiled at him. ``That won't be necessary. That's Mrs Johnson. She lives in her car. Even in the winter. We give her dinner every Tuesday. Its on us.''
She looked at the thin man in his washed out black sweats. It takes one to know one, she thought.
``It was very kind of you to offer,'' she said.