I started watching. You do at a drive-thru window at five in the morning, when there’s nothing on the radio but the farm report and the Red Sox losing.
He’d park in the lot of the Irving station across the road with his engine running and his headlights off. He’d sit there five minutes, sometimes fifteen. Then the silver Corolla would come down Route 9 from the direction of Hermon, and the second her blinker went on, the green Honda would pull out and slide into my line right in front of her.
He did it every school day for over a year.
He paid for his hot chocolate and her latte, $7.60 total. Most days it was a five-dollar bill and a handful of quarters and dimes, counted out carefully, like every coin mattered. Then he’d pull away before she reached the window.
When I told her the kid ahead had paid, she’d smile and shake her head.
“That kid again,” she’d say. “Tell him thank you.”
“I’ll tell him.”
She never knew who he was. As far as I could tell, she never even got a good look at him. He was always gone before she pulled up.
On her birthday in September, the boy handed me a cupcake through the window, chocolate with pink frosting and a single blue candle, in a plastic clamshell from the Hannaford bakery.
“Can you give this to her?” he said. “With the coffee? It’s her birthday.”
“How do you know it’s her birthday?”
He shrugged and looked at his steering wheel. “I just do.”
I lit the candle with the lighter we keep for the propane heater, and while he waited, I snapped a quick photo of him through the window with my phone. He was leaning out a little, squinting at the flame, with the gray hood pushed back for once and his hair sticking up. I don’t know why I took it. It just made me smile.
When the Corolla pulled up and I handed the nurse her latte and the cupcake with the candle still burning, she just sat there and stared at it.
“How did he know?” she whispered.
“He wouldn’t say.”
She blew out the candle. Then she put her forehead down on her steering wheel for a few seconds before she drove off to work.
