There’s more, because there’s always more in a small town like Bangor.
The day after Eli woke up, the Bangor Daily News ran a little story. The reporter had heard it from one of the nurses at the medical center. The headline said, “Teen Paid for Nurse’s Coffee for 412 Days. She Never Knew Who He Was.”
Somebody shared it on Facebook. By the next week, it had been shared two hundred thousand times. A national morning show called the Mug & Muffin. Kurt actually answered the phone and said, “We’re kind of busy right now,” and hung up, which I’ll love him for until the day I die.
People started showing up at my window. They came from Brewer and Hampden and Orono, and some from as far away as Portland and Boston. They’d order a coffee and then say, “Whatever the car behind me gets, I’ll pay for it.”
By spring, it was happening forty or fifty times a morning. Some mornings, nobody at the window paid for their own coffee at all.
Kurt put a chalkboard up beside the menu: “PAY-IT-FORWARD COUNT.” He changed the number every morning with a piece of yellow chalk. By the first day of summer, it was over six thousand.
Kurt’s uncle, who owns the stand, put out a second jar next to the tip jar, labeled “Eli’s Jar.” People filled it with dollar bills, fives, and twenties. A man in a Tesla dropped in a hundred and told me not to tell anybody. By the end of June, there was $11,826 in that jar.
We gave it to Bernadette. She refused it twice. The third time, Joanne sat her down in her kitchen in Brewer and said, “Bernadette, you taught me something two years ago. You let me do something for your grandson when I didn’t know what else to do. Let these people do the same.”
Bernadette used the money to pay off the last of the reverse mortgage arrears on her little house. She’d fallen behind on her property taxes and homeowner’s insurance the year Danielle died, and the lender had sent her a default notice in January. She hadn’t told Eli. She hadn’t told anyone.
Eli found out anyway. He found the paid-in-full letter on the kitchen table and cried for an hour.
Joanne did one more thing, and she didn’t tell anybody about it either. I only know because Linda Morrissette, the financial advocate, mentioned it to me months later.
When Danielle Thibodeau was dying in the ICU two and a half years earlier, Joanne had sat with her one night after her shift. Danielle told her that her biggest fear was that her son would end up drowning in her debts the way she’d drowned in her own mother’s.
After that night, Joanne quietly asked the hospital’s charity care committee to review Danielle’s account. The committee forgave $14,000 of Danielle’s balance under the hospital’s financial assistance policy before it ever went to collections. Joanne never told Danielle, and she never told Eli or Bernadette.
The $31,240 that Coastal Recovery Services was chasing was what remained after that.
“She’d already been paying it forward for two years,” Linda told me. “Long before that boy ever bought her a coffee.”
Eli graduated from Bangor High School the following June, one year late. He’d missed most of his senior year in the hospital and rehab, and the school let him finish with summer classes and a tutor that Kurt’s uncle paid for.
The graduation was held at the Cross Insurance Center downtown, a big arena by the river. Eli walked across the stage without his cane, slowly and carefully, with a slight limp he’ll probably carry the rest of his life.
When the principal read his name, “Elijah Daniel Thibodeau,” three rows in the stands went crazy.
Bernadette was there in her church dress, crying into a handkerchief. I was there with Hector’s old camera. Kurt was there in a polo shirt with his stopwatch app finally turned off. Thomas Ouellette came, and so did Linda Morrissette, Theresa Boucher, the ICU charge nurse, and the plow driver from Hermon who found Eli in the ditch, a big man named Gary Labbe who hugged Bernadette so hard he lifted her off the ground.
And Joanne Pelletier was there, sitting right next to Bernadette, where family sits.
After the ceremony, out in the parking lot in the June sunshine, Eli came over to us in his blue cap and gown with his diploma in one hand.
He handed Joanne something with the other.
It was a small Mug & Muffin cup with a lid. I’d made it myself at six that morning and given it to him at the window, because he’d asked me to.
“Small vanilla latte,” he said. “Four eighty-five.”
Joanne took it with both hands and laughed through her tears.
“You paid for this one too, didn’t you?”
“I did,” Eli said. “But this time I’m handing it to you myself.”
Joanne set the cup down on the hood of her Corolla and hugged him. She held on to that boy in the middle of the parking lot for a long time, the way only a mother can hold on to someone.
I took a picture. It’s taped up beside my window at the Mug & Muffin now, right next to the birthday photo of the skinny kid in the gray hoodie squinting at a candle.
