My name is Dorothy Mae Wilson. I am seventy one years old. Yesterday, five bikers made me cry for the first time since I buried my husband.
I have worked in the same small roadside diner in rural Kentucky since I was twenty four. I poured coffee. Cooked breakfasts. Wiped the same counters. I thought I knew every inch of this place. I thought I knew every story it held. I was wrong.
In 1977, I was newly married. My husband Bobby and I bought this diner with every dollar we had. Bobby was a Vietnam veteran.
He came home with metal in his leg and war in his mind. He could not hold a normal job. But he could cook better than anyone I ever knew.
We named the place Bobby’s Place. He ran the kitchen. I ran the front. We were happy.
In 1979, I got pregnant. A baby girl. We named her Rose. We painted a nursery pink. Bought a second hand crib. Bobby started building a wooden rocking horse in the garage.
Rose was stillborn at eight months. No reason. No explanation. Just silence where a heartbeat should have been.
Bobby never finished the rocking horse. Never stepped into that nursery again. Something inside him broke beyond repair.
He started riding motorcycles with other veterans. He said the noise of the engine quieted the noise in his head. I understood. Those rides kept him alive.
On March 14, 1982, Bobby went on a ride and never came home. His heart failed on a mountain road in Tennessee. He was thirty four. His friends said he died smiling, wind on his face, doing the only thing that brought him peace.
I was twenty nine. A widow. No child. Just a diner I could not afford to lose and a grief I could not escape.
I kept the diner. Everyone told me to sell it. I could not. It was the last piece of Bobby. His recipes. His laughter. His handprints in the cement out back.
So I worked. Every day. For forty seven years.
About thirty years ago, a group of bikers started coming every Wednesday. Five men. Leather vests. Loud engines. They sat in the corner booth. Ordered pie and coffee. Left generous tips. Too generous.
At first I thought it was pity. But they were not pitying me. They asked about my day. Remembered small details. Sent flowers on my birthday. Called me Miss Dorothy. Treated me like family.
I never understood why they drove two hours just to eat at my diner.
Last week, my doctor told me I have stage three lung cancer. I had been too busy working to notice I was dying. I told no one. I planned to work until I could not, then pass quietly in the apartment above the diner where Bobby and I once dreamed of growing old.
Then the bikers came on a Monday. They never come on Mondays.
Thomas, the one with the gray beard, asked me to sit. His voice was gentle but serious. My hands shook as I sat across from them.
Marcus slid an envelope toward me. He said they knew about the cancer. A doctor from their church had asked for prayers. They figured out it was me.
Then Thomas said words that took my breath away.
“We knew Bobby.”
They rode with him in his last year. Young veterans lost in their own pain. Bobby helped them through dark nights. He spoke of me constantly. Called me his angel. Said he planned to grow old with me in that diner.