Perkins Restaurant

Perkins Restaurant

August 1, 2026

As we travel now, we drive our Chevrolet pickup truck with the diesel engine. We keep to the two lane roads, the small towns, the low cost motels. You can learn a lot about the country that way.

This trip north, several days ago, we stopped in Arkansas. There was a Perkins restaurant there, beside the motel, and for dinner, we went to it.

At dinnertime, in the restaurant, there were four customers, including ourselves.

One, a large black man in the work outfit of highway construction, sat in a booth almost next to us. He was eating two dinners, both the meatloaf special, eight dollars each. He didn’t look at us. He didn’t even very much look at the dinners as he ate them. He stared out, past the empty tables, to the fabric wall which held no picture, nor window.

A booth behind the man of two dinners sat a young black woman wearing the smock of hotel work. She had woven her hair into tight rows, each one just neat, just right. She had tinted the top of each row red—but a subtle red, just a touch of color. She held a cellular telephone to her ear with hands which held no rings. She listened, but she did not speak. In front of her there sat a lonely hamburger in the centre of the plate; six dollars.

Just in front of us, at an open table, his back to us, there sat a white man worn thin by the years. He wore denim overalls over a tee shirt that had once been white. The crossed straps of the overalls had worn their edges grey. We could not see, what was his dinner, nor what the cost.

It came time to pay. The waiter came round, and dropped a white paper on each table.

The African American man studied the slip. He reached one large hand into a workshirt pocket. A burst of dollar bills came out, green wadded, to cover over the white of the charges. He stood up, slowly, and he walked to the door.

The young woman with the tinted hair touched the white piece of paper beside the plate where the hamburger had been. She brought forth a small purse from her lap. With care, she counted out six stacks of quarters from the purse, four quarters in each one. She set these beside the white paper. She paused. She brought forth another stack of four quarters, and she set these in the center of the white paper. She turned away from it all, stood quickly, then left.

The man of denim overalls had a leather wallet. We could see it from behind. It folded open, we could see that.There was a picture on one side, at which he looked for quite a time, but what the picture was, we could not see. From the other side of the wallet he pulled out a single green bill. He smoothed it out on the table. There was a cane hanging from the side of the chair beside him. He took the cane down, leaned himself onto it, then up. He left.

Our turn came. We had a wallet, too. But we held the wallet low, beneath the table of our booth, so that none could see, not even the walls, what we had, nor what we gave.