He came in every afternoon and ordered the cheapest thing on the board. Coffee and toast, sometimes just the soup. He sat by the window for three hours with a folded newspaper and never asked for a refill he did not pay for. A few regulars complained that he was holding a table through the rush. I let him stay. I started adding bread. Then a bowl of the soup he had not ordered. On cold days, a slice of pie that was going to be thrown out anyway. He always nodded. He never made a speech about it.

Then he was gone. One day. The next. A week. I asked the other servers if he had said he was traveling. No one had heard a word. The window seat stayed empty through the lunch rush, and I stopped setting the extra plate.

His daughter came in a month later. She looked like him around the eyes. She said he had passed in his sleep, and that the cafe had been the only place he went after her mother died. The apartment was quiet. The paper route he used to walk was shorter than he admitted. She set an envelope on the counter. Inside was a short letter in careful print and a check large enough to cover a year of the meals I had quietly added. He had written that the table by the window was the reason he got dressed. She said he had been saving the money for years and left instructions that it go to whoever had been feeding him without keeping score. I framed the letter. The window seat is still open at three. Some days I put out the extra bread anyway.