In The News

Something for Stevie

I try not to be biased, but I had my doubts about hiring Stevie. His placement counselor assured me that he would be a good, reliable busboy, but I’d never had a mentally handicapped employee, and wasn’t sure I wanted one.

I wasn’t sure how my customers would react to Stevie. He was short, a little dumpy, with the smooth facial features and thick-tongued speech of Down’s Syndrome. I wasn’t worried about most of my trucker customers, because truckers generally don’t care who busses tables as long as the meatloaf platter is good and the pies are homemade.

The four-wheeler drivers were the ones who concerned me: the mouthy college kids traveling to school; the yuppie snobs who secretly polish their silverware with their napkins for fear of catching some dread “truckstop germ;” the pairs of white-shirted businessmen on expense accounts who think every truckstop waitress wants to be flirted with. I knew those folks would be uncomfortable around Stevie, so I watched him pretty close the first few weeks.

I shouldn’t have worried. After the first week, Stevie had my staff wrapped around his stubby little finger, and within a month my trucker regulars had adopted him as their official truckstop mascot. After that, I really didn’t care what the rest of the customers thought of him. He was like a 21-year-old puppy in blue jeans and Nikes, eager to laugh, eager to please, but fierce in his attention to his duties. Every salt and pepper shaker was exactly in place, not a bread crumb or coffee spill visible, when Stevie got done with a table. Our only problem was convincing him to wait to clean up a table until after the customers were finished.

He would hover in the background, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, scanning the  dining room until a table was empty. Then he would scurry to the empty table and carefully bus the dishes and glasses onto his cart, and meticulously wipe the tabletop with a practiced flourish of his rag. If he thought a nearby customer was watching, his brow would pucker with added concentration. He took pride in doing his job exactly right, and you had to love how hard he tried to please each and every person he met.

Over time, we learned that he lived with his mother, a widow, who was disabled after repeated surgeries for cancer. They lived on their Social Security benefits in public housing two miles from the truckstop. Their social worker, who stopped to check on him every so often, admitted that they had “fallen through the cracks.” Money was tight, and what I paid him was probably the difference between them being able to live together and Stevie being sent to a group home.

That’s why the restaurant was a gloomy place last August, the first morning in three years that Stevie missed work. He was at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, getting a new valve or something put in his heart. His social worker said that people with Down’s Syndrome often had heart problems at a young age, so this wasn’t unexpected, and there was a good chance he would come through the surgery  in good shape, and be back at work in a couple months.

A ripple of excitement ran through the staff later that morning when word came that he was out of surgery, in recovery, and doing fine. Frannie, my head waitress, let out a war whoop and did a little dance in the aisle when she heard the good news. Big Ben, one of our regular trucker customers, stared at the sight of the fifty-year old, slightly overweight grandmother of four doing a victory shimmy beside his table.

Frannie blushed, smoothed her apron and shot Ben a withering look. He grinned.

“Okay, Frannie, what was that all about?” he asked.

“We just got word that Stevie is out of surgery and going to be okay.”

“I was wondering where he was. I had a new joke to tell him. What was the surgery about?”

Frannie quickly told Ben and the two other drivers sitting at his booth about Stevie’s surgery, then sighed.

“Yeah, I’m glad he’s going to be okay,” she said, “but I don’t know how he and his mom are going to handle all the bills. From what I hear, they’re barely getting by as it is.”

Big Ben nodded thoughtfully, and Frannie hurried off to wait on the rest of her tables. Since I hadn’t had time to round up a busboy to replace Stevie, and really didn’t want to replace him, the girls were bussing their own tables that day, until we decided what to do.

After the morning rush, Frannie walked into my office She had a couple of paper napkins in her hand and a funny look on her face.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I didn’t get that table where Big Ben and his friends were sitting cleared off after they left, and Pony Pete and Tony the Tipper were sitting there when I got back to clean it off,” she said. “This  was folded and tucked under a coffee cup.”

She handed the napkin to me, and three $20 bills fell onto my desk when I opened it. On the outside, in big, bold letters, was printed, “Something for Stevie.”

“Pony Pete asked me what that was all about,” she said, “so I told him about Stevie and his mom and everything, and Pete looked at Tony, and Tony looked at Pete, and they ended up giving me this.”

She handed me another paper napkin that had, “Something for Stevie” scrawled on its outside. Two $50 bills were tucked within its folds. Frannie looked at me with wet, shiny eyes, shook her head and said simply, “Truckers.”

That was two months ago. Today is Thanksgiving, the first day Stevie is supposed to be back at work. His placement worker said he’s been counting the days until the doctor said he could work, and it didn’t matter at all that it was a holiday. He called ten times in the past week, making sure we knew he was coming, fearful that we had forgotten him, or that his job was in jeopardy.

I arranged for his mother to bring him to work, met them in the parking lot, and invited them both in to celebrate his first day back. Stevie was thinner, paler, but couldn’t stop grinning as he pushed through the doors and headed for the back room where his apron and bussing cart were waiting.

“Hold up there, Stevie, not so fast,” I said. I took him and his mother by their arms. “Work can wait for a minute. To celebrate you coming back, breakfast for you and your mother is on me.”

I led them toward a large corner booth at the rear of the room. I could feel and hear the rest of the staff following behind as we marched through the dining room. Glancing over my shoulder, I saw booth after booth of grinning truckers empty and join the procession.

We stopped in front of the big table. It’s surface was covered with coffee cups, saucers, and dinner plates, all sitting slightly crooked on dozens and dozens of folded paper napkins.

“First thing you have to do, Stevie, is clean up this mess,” I said. I tried to sound stern.

Stevie looked at me, then at his mother, then pulled out one of the napkins. It had, “Something for Stevie,” printed on the outside. As he picked it up, two $10 bills fell onto the table.

Stevie stared at the money, then at all the napkins peeking from beneath the tableware, each with his name printed or scrawled on it.

I turned to his mother. “There’s more than $10,000 in cash and checks on that table, all from truckers and trucking companies that heard about your problems. Happy Thanksgiving.”

Well, it got real noisy about that time, with everybody hollering and shouting, and there were a few tears as well. But you know what’s funny?

While everybody else was busy shaking hands and hugging each other, Stevie, with a big, big smile on his face, was busy clearing all the cups and dishes from the table.

Best worker I ever hired.