Life work

Edie fills a small plastic tub with water from a pressurized hose and sets it in the microwave. When it boils, it will turn oats into oatmeal. The buttons beep as she puts three minutes on the timer.

“At 7 o’clock when we open, I just know there will be someone who wants oats,” she says, now cleaning out coffee pots. She washes three green-rimmed pots for decaf and three black for regular. “The first thing is to get the water hot. I need to get oats going first thing.”

Before the first plate of hash browns, the first bowl of oatmeal, the first scrambled egg at Wee Willie’s diner on South Walnut Street, Edie Heltenburg, the waitress who has worked there for 27 years, boils water.

Edie’s hair is short, curled, brown with wisps of gray. She wears jeans and a denim shirt, glasses and no jewelry. Her 75-year-old body probably stood 5-foot-and-change before her back stooped.

She arrives at 6:15 a.m. to open the diner on Tuesdays, and works every day except Wednesday and Thursday. Her alarm clock rings at 4:30 a.m., but it’s 10 minutes fast and she’s usually awake before it goes off.

“I thought I didn’t want to get out of bed this morning, but I was all right when I got here,” she says later. “Sometimes I think I’ve got nine lives like a cat. Now I’m living the Wee Willie’s part.”

She makes $2.13 an hour plus tips. That’s minimum wage. Though her regulars are generous and she hasn’t seen her tips slow since the economy tanked, Edie probably will never retire. She’s among the only 5.3 percent of Monroe County residents over 75 who still work. She can’t afford insurance if she quits.

The microwave beeps. She takes out the water and pours it in a metal pot with oats.

It’s 6:45 a.m. when she starts the first pot of coffee. Any sooner and it’ll taste old. In minutes, the nutty aroma zings the air.

The diner is dark, but when the sun rises, light will pour through the huge windows. From the inside, Wee Willie’s looks like a log cabin, with timber walls and forest green booths. Outside, you’ll miss it if you aren’t a local. It’s a plain wooden building. There’s no sign, but regulars don’t need it. Customers know where to show up for their eggs.

Bill “Willy” Lutgens, the owner, walks to the front of the one-room building and unlocks the door at 7 a.m.

The first customer enters, walks to the booth closest to Edie and sits down with his wife. He wants an honest cup of coffee. She wants decaf. He orders a bowl of oatmeal.

***

Ice water splashes out of two glasses that Edie grips while balancing a plate of toast and another of biscuits and gravy. Lunchtime on Friday.

The owner’s wife, Brenda, says Edie isn’t the fastest waitress, but she’s the customers’ favorite. The five waitresses—Edie, Holly, Cindy, Phyllis, and Mary— have personalities as distinctive as their hairstyles. They are among the 64,000 Indiana residents who work on minimum wage.

Edie glides back behind the counter, checking the coffee maker for its level of the almost-bitter liquid that fuels this whole place. She picks up a green pot and a black one and visits each table to fill up cups.

“Edie! Order up!” Bill shouts from behind the grill window. As Edie hustles back to fetch her plates, she bumps into Holly Faulk, the youngest waitress.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Edie,” Holly says, and turns her head and swishes her long brown ponytail. Her eyes beam from behind glasses. She is 36 but moves like she’s 25. She wears dangling earrings, a black t-shirt, and jeans.

It’s no problem. The waitresses are used to dancing around one another in the crammed space behind the counter.

Edie carries away a plate of hash browns as Holly turns to a man sitting at the counter. His name is Tim Johnson, but here he’s Timmy, and he wants his pancakes.

He calls in his lunch order most weekdays. He programmed Wee Willie’s number in his phone. Timmy is in his 40s, a construction worker at IU who gets a half-an-hour lunch break. He’s got dark hair and a happily fed belly.

His pancakes arrive in a Styrofoam to-go box.

“I don’t know why they make it to-go every time I call,” he says, meeting Holly’s gaze.

“You want me to put that on a plate for you?” Holly asks.

She slips the pancakes out of their box. Fork in hand, he warms up. He’s an easy friend of all the waitresses.

One time he asked them to find out what made Willie’s pancakes the best in Bloomington. It’s the Gold’s Best Flour, he learned.

He loves the flour and the pancakes, but he loves the staff the best. He’s known Edie since he was a freshman at Bloomington South High School in 1980.

“She was a waitress then. She is still. She was a nice woman then, and she’s a nice woman now,” he says. “The only thing different is her age.”

Holly brings Timmy his bill. $6.26.

“What the!” he says. “I shoulda asked what the special was. Bacon burger. I remember when that was $2 in the ‘80s. Now it’s $4.99.”

He pays, tells Edie and Holly goodbye, and heads out the door to work. His day will end at 5 p.m. Wee Willie’s closes at 3 p.m., but after the customers leave, there’s still work for Edie.

***

The sky threatens rain. It’s Saturday at 3:30 p.m., Wee Willie’s has been closed for half an hour, and Edie sits at the counter with the day’s receipts piled in neat stacks around her.

Edie checks every girl’s receipts for errors. Today, someone forgot to charge for a piece of cheese. The biggest mistake she can remember is a $6.10 undercharge for a breaded tenderloin.

Mistakes like that cost Bill money, Edie says. He’s threatened to take dollars out of waitresses’ paychecks, but he never does. Edie hopes the others will slow down when they ring up customers.

Cindy always has the fewest mistakes, she says. Edie doesn’t make many mistakes herself.

“I’m pretty much part of the woodwork,” she says. “I try to get it so they don’t notice me. I get it written down right so the kitchen gets it right.”

Edie takes on the extra task of checking receipts on her own, usually on the clock, sometimes not.

She loves math. She loves numbers. She calls herself a “pinch-penny.” She never eats out, has a freezer full of frozen food, and makes her own bread with wheat flour and honey.

Money goes straight into her bank account, and her biggest expense is health insurance. It’s worth her sweat, she says.

In 1999, insurance covered the radiation that beat her breast cancer. In 2002, insurance covered the three strips of metal, 18 screws, and bone graft it took to fix her arm. An oncoming car hit hers when she turned in to work that morning. She remembers walking in the back door, dripping with blood.

“The only thing I remember telling Bill was, ‘you better get someone in here to replace me,’” she says.

For nine months she did physical therapy. She couldn’t work, but she had a little money saved until she could get back to earning tips.

“I’m not going to run my bank account down,” she says. “I’ll never get rich, but I do all right.”

At one time, Edie wanted to be a music teacher. She grew up in Ohio and majored in public school music with a minor in math at Capitol Hill University. She moved to Bloomington to earn her master’s degree in music education at IU. She was a student at the same time David Baker was a student. Baker is a world-renowned composer, multi-instrumentalist and the chair of IU’s Jazz Studies Department.

After finishing her degree, Edie worked at Kroger to pay off student loans, and soon got married. The marriage ended when she was still a young woman. With two sons and no job, she needed to find work fast. She waitressed at a few restaurants, then settled at Willie’s.

Her eldest son died nearly 20 years back. He was 29 when his motorcycle hit a car that turned in front of him. Edie can talk about it, but she does only briefly. Edie lives with her younger son, who is now 43. He is the production services coordinator at the IU Auditorium.

“People ask me when I’m going to retire,” she says. “It doesn’t look like I will soon or at all. My mother lived to be 85. I’d run out of money if I live to be 85.”

***

Water stains the ceiling above booth seven as it rains outside. A gray bucket catches the drips by a sign that reads, “Out of use due to leak. Don’t sit!”

Booth seven is Mary’s. On Sundays, Edie serves tables four and five and booth five, just behind the leaky waste of space.

It’s Sunday at 1 p.m., and the loss of a booth means people crowd the door. The place is crammed like a container of sugar packets.

Edie weaves between chairs. She carries waters and menus to a mother and her son. They stare at the downpour as rain hits the window.

At Edie’s table five, four boys finish their midday breakfasts. They are university students who look like they woke up on couches, zipped up hoodies, and drove straight to Willie’s.

One boy flags her over, hoping for the check. Edie points to the paper on the table, hidden beneath a glass of water. She smiles and one boy jokes that she teleported over when they weren’t looking. They laugh.

When she clears away their plates and forks, they leave bills and change on the table. The boy who teased her pats her back quickly and thanks her for the food. College kids tip well, she says.

She hurries behind the counter, bends down, and dips her hands into a tub of suds. She brings up a small towel and wrings it out.

As she carries it back to the table, a balding man with only a few strands of gray hair rises. He’s got an announcement to make.

“I’m just recovering from a tooth extraction, and this is the first real meal I’ve had. And I loved it,” he says. “I just love being here.”

Edie looks up from the table she’s wiping and smiles at him as he opens the door to leave.

The circles of hot soapy water dry in an instant. She slides the towel across each empty seat until they’re all clean and waiting.