David hadn’t been home for Thanksgiving in thirteen years. Only one of those years, for both November and December, he’d been in jail, taking his lumps for driving drunk and hitting a light pole. Most of the other years, he was intimately involved with spirits of the worst kind.
Sobriety came slowly and disappeared often. His new sponsor made good sense; Jerry, an A-lister in the royal order of Alcoholics Anonymous, told him that it would be easy to fall off the wagon when things were going well, “So don’t get too cocky.”
He’d given reasonable excuses for skipping festive holiday dinners with his mother. Each Thanksgiving, it was something different; David had always been creative. She was gracious and didn’t believe him; he knew it. Liquor made the lying easy. It would have been a relevant song title for the Eagles. In Dave’s active imagination, Joe Walsh would have sung it.
The sleet and slush pelted the car and stuck firmly to the pitted windshield; the crusty ruts created by the tires of a few previous travelers pushed and pulled the Hyundai all over the road. The worn wipers never touched the glass as they skated over a skim coating of icy crust, barely clearing it enough for him to see. The center was clear, sure. But the edges, where the wiper didn’t touch, were bulking up with thick ice.
He directed the car to the side of the road, stopped, and got out to smash the buildup with the curved plastic handle of a golf umbrella that he kept in the car for the more fluid precipitation typical in the South. It worked until it shattered into pieces.
He tossed the remains to the passenger side floorboard, cupped his hands to his lips, and blew warm breath into his palms. The exercise reminded him of being chilly in his youth, but more remarkable was that he didn’t smell any booze when he did it. He was nine months without a drink, and he felt good. The dog stirred in the backseat, catching on they had stopped.
“It’s not so bad driving in Maine weather when you’re sober, but don’t get too cocky,” he said aloud to himself and his backseat companion. Prine—a genetic amalgamation of shepherd, lab, and, maybe, husky lifted his head and yawned, finally sitting up to see if he was there yet. He wasn’t.
The front-wheel drive of the Hyundai successfully got him back on the travel portion of the road—away from the edge for now— but only after spinning the summer-grade Michelins down to some bare gravel. Dave tried to keep the car in the center of the road, on the crown, as one of his drunk uncles taught him, to avoid sliding into the roadside alders. The lessons were more to avoid the cops than the alders.
Dave had been the designated driver for all the drunks in his family during the growing years, sneakily navigating slick roads that come early and stay too long in northeastern Maine. He was drinking by eleven, and his uncles and dad rewarded him for driving them around by giving him a nip or two from the bottle. They surmised that a trooper wouldn’t put their kid in jail for driving drunk.
As much as it seemed to make sense then, David now struggled with the consequences of their backward, back woods logic. He’d worked through the anger. Church helped, prayers too, but a man named Chet once shared words about toast that rang louder inside his head. He had a lot of time to consider it behind bars.
“Just another hour, boy,” he said, trying to reassure himself more than the dog.
Washington County was a long ride from anywhere, but taking Route 2 and then Route 6 to Vanceboro accurately demonstrates the old joke, “You can’t get there from here.”
David considered cutting over to Route 9, called the Airline by the locals, when he passed through Bangor earlier. But that road can be dicey during lousy weather, too.
No matter how you got home to Vanceboro, Maine, it was a crapshoot. The weather in Norcross, Georgia, which Dave now considered home, only impacted steering and braking during horrendous downpours. Snow and ice in Maine forced you to be committed, in the non-institutionalized sense of the word.
Chet’s Diner has been serving good chili on Route 6 since 1967, and it’s the only stop for coffee, bad as it may be. Dave kept his steering inputs small and soft like his Uncle Sherman—also a drunk— had skillfully taught him. He figured Chet’s was an excellent place to stop for a minute; he had plenty of gas, but his eyes stung from the strain of intently watching the road.
He’d not returned to the roadside grill in a long time and questioned whether it might be shuttered or burned down like so many things he now missed. It was also possible that Chet had long left the chat. He’d been alive and cooking last time through, or so David recalled.
He pictured the sign over the counter, hoping it would still be there for a photo opportunity. “Chet’s— the home of the world’s finest toast.” It was homemade bread in those days. The sign made people laugh, but Chet hung it with sincerity.
He’d thought of it often during his sixty-day stint in Gwinnett County Jail, working in the kitchen as a trustee, sometimes buttering toast and thinking about Chet’s poignant words and his own life choices.
It was there that he began to pay attention to his shortcomings. Every piece of toast was a chance to do better. Silly? Maybe. But he’d finally applied it— like butter— in his day-to-day dealings.
Years ago, Dave asked Chet directly about the sign. It was after a long night of drinking.
“How can one claim they make the world’s best toast?”
Chet welcomed the inquiry. “Well, the bread is home-baked, but that’s not the secret.”
“What is it then?” Dave replied, nibbling on eggs and dipping toast in the runny yokes.
“Well, son, do you know how most of your standard restaurant toast has all the butter in the middle?” Chet stared into the distance as if he envisioned a large piece of bread floating before him. He continued, “It’s like the butterer didn’t care. You have to care, Dave, about all things.”
Chet’s eyes met David’s, looking through him like he’d just imparted the wisdom for the ages.
“I guess.” Dave mustered. He’d never considered it. “Toast is toast.”
The sentence scored a grimace and scowl from the Vietnam Vet standing over and before him.
“Dave, it matters. I butter the whole slice of toast and pay attention to the edges. The details matter, even when talking about something as simple as bread that’s been browned in a toaster. I start on the edges, not in the middle, slathering the butter on all of it. Yeah, plenty in the middle, of course. But I make sure the whole slice of toast gets some attention. That’s all it takes. If you’re a plumber, you solder all the joints to the best of your ability. Voila’, no leaks. If you’re a writer, you check your punctuation; good sentences. But I make toast—the world’s finest—never had a complaint.”
It wasn’t the bible verses he’d committed to memory that pulled Dave away from alcohol. Sure, it helped, but it was the realization that he’d paid no attention to his own edges or his middle for a long time. He wanted to see the sign again and find out if Chet was still there. He wanted to tell him face-to-face about the little kernel of truth that meant so much.
Neon signs only shine brightly— all the letters visible— in Hollywood movies. Sometimes, the scriptwriters find a way to delete the illumination of one or two gas-filled tubes to create a humorous or off-color visual for effect. None of Chet’s letters worked anymore. Instead, a poorly aimed cheap spotlight shone on the sign over the door. A lone pickup, encased in ice, was parked in the unplowed lot.
Prine jumped free of the back door and concurrently stretched and sniffed the new world. The good boy hadn’t been out of the car since a Bangor fuel stop. He lapped the icy pebbles of sleet out of the air like a kid catching flittering soap bubbles. He rolled in the fresh blanket of slush, appearing unconcerned about the chill.
“You’ve never even seen snow before, so I’m betting there’s some Husky in there,” Dave said aloud as he stretched and huffed in the air, immediately making him cough from the burning sensation he felt in his lungs. He’d forgotten November weather can demand boots and a warm coat. He’d brought neither.
A tall fellow wearing a stained apron, leaning on the back door outside for a dooryard smoke, hollered, “Your dog is welcome to come inside. It’ll get cold real quick inside that car, and he’s probably not used to it. I mean, if you’re planning on staying and eating something.”
Dave looked up, wondering how the guy knew his dog wasn’t a local. “I think he’s a husky, so he should be fine.”
“If he’s from the same place where your license plates were stamped, he’ll need some time to acclimate.” And with that, he took another long drag before flicking his cigarette into a distant snowbank.
“Bring him in; I like dogs.” He stepped back inside after stomping his black shoes on the stoop.
He yelled out again, “Remind me before you leave to give you an ice scraper,” before slamming the back door shut behind him.
It wasn’t Chet.
The rush of hot, humid air, smelling of greasy this or that, struck Dave hard in the face when he pushed through the glass door, and the overhead cowbell clanged, announcing the only customer. Prine lifted his head and sniffed everything he could. There was already a water bowl, filled to the brim, sitting beside the stool at the end of the bar, and Prine found it.
Chet’s truth still hung over the bar, but he no longer held the spatula or the butterknife. David took a photo, reviewing it as if it were to become a treasured photograph of a loved one. He then slid the phone into his back pocket.
“What’ll you have, son? You’ve come a long way to get nowhere. And in the middle of a pretty decent storm, no less.”
“I have,” Dave said. “I’ll take an order of toast and a cup of coffee. It’s been a long time coming. Maybe some scrambled eggs for the dog if it’s not too much trouble.”
The cook smirked, catching a bit of the Downeast accent Dave had never been able to shake. “It’s not trouble at all. I hear a little Maine in you.”
“There’s a lot of Maine in me. It’s my first time back in a long time; this time, I’m sober. Where’s Chet?
The man squinted and tilted his head slightly. “Good on you, me too: four years sober for me, and a friend of Bill W. You knew Chet?”
The past tense reply confirmed what Dave suspected. “I did, did you?”
“My uncle. A good man. He’s been gone a while. I’d love to have him back.”
Dave waited for more. But the man turned toward the grill and started scraping it off with a heavy-handled spatula.
Silently counting to five in his head, Dave concluded at around the four-count that the grillmaster would only be saying something else once he figured out the customer’s backstory.
Dave spoke up, “Your uncle told me once or twice that I needed to pay attention to the edges, but It didn’t take until I found myself responsible for making other people’s toast. It’s a long story. Anyway, I’m heading home to Vanceboro for Thanksgiving dinner with my mother. First time in a long time.”
The man turned around, smirking. “I don’t close for a while, and it looks like it’s just you, me, and that dog until nine. I have time for a story. Let me start some eggs. I bet you can pour us a couple cups of coffee and figure out how to work that toaster.”
“I sure can.”
Drive safely, and Happy Thanksgiving from the Jagged Edge of America.
I remain,
TC