And she had a rule.
“Nobody leaves my section hungry,” she used to say. “Nobody.”
I watched her keep that rule my whole childhood. I’d sit at the end of the counter after school doing my homework, and I’d see it. A man would come in who smelled bad, whose shoes were taped together, and he’d count out change on the counter with shaking fingers. Seventy cents. Maybe a dollar.
My mother would take the coins, and she’d bring him a bowl of soup and a grilled cheese and a cup of coffee, and she’d charge him seventy cents. Then later, when the cash register came up short, she’d put the difference in from her own tip jar.
“Ma,” I said once, when I was about twelve. “Why do you do that? You can’t even afford it.”
She was wiping down the counter. She stopped and looked at me.
“Frankie, you know what I see when that man walks in?”
“A bum?”
She flicked the dish towel at my ear. Hard.
“I see somebody’s son,” she said. “Somebody who used to have a mother who worried if he ate. Maybe she’s dead now. Maybe she’s far away. So somebody’s got to do her job for a minute.” She went back to wiping. “Today it’s me.”
She died eighteen years ago this March. Pancreatic cancer. It was fast, which the doctors said was a mercy. It didn’t feel like a mercy.
At the end, in the hospital, she was so thin I could see the bones in her wrists. She held my hand and made me lean in close because her voice was going.
“You’re going to do something good, Frankie,” she said. “I know it. Just promise me one thing.”
“Anything, Ma.”
“Whatever you do,” she whispered, “don’t let anybody leave hungry.”
I promised. 