“Where’s my boy?”
The nurse said it the second she rolled down her window. Snow was blowing sideways across Route 9, and the wipers on her dented silver Corolla were going as fast as they could. She didn’t look at me. She looked past me, out at the gas station across the road, where for over a year a rusty green Honda had sat every school morning with its engine running.
The lot was empty except for the snowplow guy filling up at pump four.
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 small vanilla latte. It was $4.85, the same as always. She dug the money out of a little coin purse shaped like a strawberry, and she looked strange doing it, like a woman reaching for a stair that isn’t there.
“Huh,” she said. “Snow day, probably.”
“Probably,” I said.
Neither of us believed it, and neither of us knew his name.
My name is Rosemary Delgado. Most people call me Ro. I’m fifty-eight, and for eleven years I’ve worked the 5 a.m. drive-thru window at the Mug & Muffin, a little coffee stand on Route 9 just outside Bangor, Maine. It’s a shed with a window, really, painted barn red, with a hand-lettered menu and a tip jar that says “Fueling Maine Since 1998.”
You learn people by their cars at that window. There’s the plumber in the white van, large black, two sugars. There are the twins in the minivan who always want whipped cream, and a retired game warden in a Ford Ranger who orders decaf and pretends it’s regular.
And there was the boy in the rusty green Honda.
He started coming the September before last. He was a skinny kid in a gray hoodie, with a Bangor High School parking sticker on the windshield and a crack running across the passenger side of the glass. The muffler on that Honda sounded like a lawnmower with bronchitis.
He always ordered a small hot chocolate, $2.75. Then, before I could close the window, he’d glance 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. Kids do that sometimes. They see it on TikTok.
The second time, I noticed the car behind him. It was a dented silver Corolla with a tired woman behind the wheel in navy blue scrubs and a hospital ID badge clipped to her collar. She ordered a small vanilla latte, $4.85.
The third time, I realized he was waiting for her.
I started watching. You do at a drive-thru window at five in the morning, when there’s nothing on the radio but the farm report and the Red Sox losing.
He’d park in the lot of the Irving station across the road with his engine running and his headlights off. He’d sit there five minutes, sometimes fifteen. Then the silver Corolla would come down Route 9 from the direction of Hermon, and the second her blinker went on, the green Honda would pull out and slide into my line right in front of her.
He did it every school day for over a year.
He paid for his hot chocolate and her latte, $7.60 total. Most days it was a five-dollar bill and a handful of quarters and dimes, counted out carefully, like every coin mattered. Then he’d pull away before she reached the window.
When I told her the kid ahead had paid, she’d smile and shake her head.
“That kid again,” she’d say. “Tell him thank you.”
“I’ll tell him.”
She never knew who he was. As far as I could tell, she never even got a good look at him. He was always gone before she pulled up.
On her birthday in September, the boy handed me a cupcake through the window, chocolate with pink frosting and a single blue candle, in a plastic clamshell from the Hannaford bakery.
“Can you give this to her?” he said. “With the coffee? It’s her birthday.”
“How do you know it’s her birthday?”
He shrugged and looked at his steering wheel. “I just do.”
I lit the candle with the lighter we keep for the propane heater, and while he waited, I snapped a quick photo of him through the window with my phone. He was leaning out a little, squinting at the flame, with the gray hood pushed back for once and his hair sticking up. I don’t know why I took it. It just made me smile.
When the Corolla pulled up and I handed the nurse her latte and the cupcake with the candle still burning, she just sat there and stared at it.
“How did he know?” she whispered.
“He wouldn’t say.”
She blew out the candle. Then she put her forehead down on her steering wheel for a few seconds before she drove off to work.
I asked the boy once, straight out.
It was October, cold and still dark, with frost on the window ledge. He handed me a five and four quarters.
“Do you know her?” I said. “The nurse?”
He looked at the money in my hand instead of at me.
“Not really,” he said.
Then he drove away.
That “not really” stuck in me like a fishbone. It wasn’t “no,” and it wasn’t “yes.” It was the answer of a kid carrying something too heavy to set down in front of a stranger.
My manager, Kurt Gagnon, hated it.
Kurt was thirty-four, the owner’s nephew, and he ran the Mug & Muffin like it was a Fortune 500 company. He had a clipboard and a stopwatch app on his phone, and he timed every car at the window. The franchise office in Portland measured “average service time,” and Kurt wanted a bonus.
“He’s holding up the line every morning,” Kurt said, standing behind me with his arms crossed. “Waiting across the street like some kind of stalker. If he does it again, I’m calling the school.”
“He’s buying a nurse a coffee, Kurt.”
“He’s weird. Kids that age don’t do that for nothing.” He tapped his clipboard. “If he’s parked over there tomorrow, I’m calling the cops.”
One morning, Kurt leaned right over my shoulder at the window and said it to the nurse herself.
“Lady, that kid’s a creep,” he told her. “He’s probably casing your car. Figuring out your schedule. You should report him.”
The nurse looked at him for a long moment.
“He buys me coffee, Kurt,” she said. She read his name off his tag. “Nobody’s done that for me in years.”
The next morning, the green Honda was there anyway. Kurt glared at it the whole time, but he never made the call. I think he knew how it would sound out loud. “Officer, there’s a teenager buying lattes for a nurse.”
I ignored Kurt, and so did the boy.
By Christmas, I’d done the math on the back of an order pad. He’d been paying $4.85 every school morning since September, plus his own $2.75. Counting only the days I worked, that was more than a hundred and forty mornings, and over a thousand dollars.
For a kid in a rusty Honda with a cracked windshield and a muffler held on with a coat hanger, that was a fortune.
Where was a seventeen-year-old getting that kind of money? And why was he spending it on a woman he said he didn’t really know?
