PART 1
The nurse rolled down her window, looked at me, and asked, “Where’s my boy?” Neither of us knew his name.
My name is Winifred Castillo. Most people call me Winnie.
I’m 58, and I’ve worked the 5 a.m. drive-thru window at a little coffee stand on Route 9 in Bangor, Maine, for eleven years.
You learn people by their cars at that window.
The plumber in the white van. Large black coffee, two sugars.
The twins in the minivan who always want whipped cream.
And the boy in the rusty green Honda.
He started coming the September before last. Skinny kid. Gray hoodie. High school parking sticker on the windshield.
He always ordered a small hot chocolate. Then he’d look in his rearview mirror.
“Whatever the car behind me gets,” he’d say. “I’ll pay for it.”
The first time, I thought he was being sweet.
The second time, I noticed the car behind him.
A dented silver Corolla. A tired woman in navy blue scrubs. Hospital badge clipped to her collar. Small vanilla latte. $4.85.
The third time, I realized he was waiting for her.
He’d park at the gas station across the road with his engine running. When her Corolla turned in, he’d pull into line right in front of her.
Every school day. For over a year.
He’d pay. Then he’d drive off before she reached the window.
When I told her the boy ahead had paid, she’d smile and shake her head. “That kid again.”
She never knew who he was.
On her birthday in September, he handed me a cupcake with a candle in it and asked me to give it to her with the latte. I snapped a quick photo of him through the window. I don’t know why. It just made me smile.
I asked him once.
“Do you know her?”
He handed me a five-dollar bill and a handful of quarters.
“Not really,” he said. Then he drove away.
My manager, Dwight, hated it.
“He’s holding up the line every morning, waiting across the street like some kind of stalker,” he said. “If he does it again, I’m calling the school.”
“He’s buying a nurse a coffee, Dwight.”
“He’s weird. Kids that age don’t do that for nothing. If he’s parked across the street tomorrow, I’m calling the cops.”
One morning he leaned over my shoulder at the window and said it to the nurse herself. “Lady, that kid’s a creep. He’s probably casing your car. You should report him.”
She just looked at him. “He buys me coffee, Dwight. Nobody’s done that for me in years.”
The next morning, the green Honda was there anyway. Dwight glared at it the whole time. He never made the call. I think he knew how it would sound.
I ignored him. So did the boy.
Then, on a Tuesday in February, the green Honda didn’t come.
It was snowing hard. I figured school was canceled.
But the Corolla came. Right on time.
The nurse rolled down her window and looked past me, at the road.
“Where’s my boy?” she asked.
She said it like a joke. But her eyes weren’t joking.
“Didn’t show today,” I said. “First time in a year.”
She paid for her own latte. She looked strange doing it.
He didn’t come Wednesday.
Or Thursday.
On Friday, the nurse came through the line looking like she hadn’t slept.
“Still no?”
I shook my head.
She gripped the steering wheel. “I keep thinking something’s wrong.”
Then she hesitated.
“We had a kid come into the ICU Monday night. Car accident on Route 9. Black ice. Seventeen. He’s still not awake.”
She swallowed hard.
“I’m not on his case. I work the other unit. I’ve only seen him through the glass.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Skinny. Brown hair. His things came in with him in a plastic bag. There was a gray hoodie.”
I felt my stomach drop.
I pulled out my phone.
I found the birthday photo. The boy, the cupcake, the gray hoodie.
I turned the screen toward her.
She leaned out of her car to look.
Then she put her hand over her mouth.
“That’s him,” she whispered. “That’s the boy in bed four.”
And then she looked at the photo again, closer this time, and said something that made me grab the counter.
“Wait. I know that face. I’ve seen it before.”
PART 2
The nurse’s name was Teresa Brennan.
She parked her Corolla and came inside the coffee stand, still in her scrubs, still holding my phone.
“Three years ago,” she said slowly, “I was a night nurse in hospice. There was a woman named Colleen Merrick. Ovarian cancer. She was only 41.”
She looked at the photo again.
“Her son came every night after school. Fourteen years old. He’d sit in the corner and do his homework so she wouldn’t worry about his grades.”
