The cold in Nebraska has a particular quality to it—not the wet cold of coastal winters, but a clean, sharp cold that feels like it originates from the prairies themselves, from the vast open spaces where the wind has nothing to stop it for a hundred miles. On December 15th, 2022, that cold settled over Valentine, Nebraska like a lid being pressed down on a box, and inside Holloway’s Diner, I could taste it even with the door closed and locked.
My name is Frank Holloway, and I’m standing behind the counter of my diner for what I believe will be the last time.
Tomorrow morning, the bank will arrive to take possession of the keys. Not a manager. Not a hopeful buyer. Just the institution itself, arriving to reclaim what they consider collateral—the building, the equipment, the forty-three years of my life that I’d somehow converted into a line item on a spreadsheet.
I’m sixty-eight years old. My knees ache in that particular way that comes from decades of standing on concrete floors. My hands don’t close the way they used to, the fingers somewhat stiff, slightly arthritic. I’m broke in the quiet, unglamorous way that doesn’t make headlines or inspire motivational speeches—broke like counting quarters in a mason jar, broke like keeping the thermostat at sixty-two degrees and wearing a sweater indoors, broke like stretching the same bottle of dish soap across three months by diluting it with water until it’s mostly hope and necessity.
Forty-three years ago, this place opened its doors with a gleaming coffee machine that cost us nearly everything and a neon sign that never once flickered through its first decade of operation.
Now that sign hums like it’s tired of the work.
The diner smells exactly the same as it has for decades: coffee, bacon grease, industrial-strength bleach, and something sweet and indefinable that I never quite learned to name. Pancake batter, probably. Cinnamon. Or perhaps just the particular scent of a place that consistently delivers on its promises—that feeds you, warms you up, gives you a booth by the window and a refill without requiring you to ask.
Last night I slept upstairs in the small apartment above the diner—the same apartment where my wife Joanne and I have lived since 1979. Same creaky wooden stairs leading up to it. Same bedroom with the window that looks out over Highway 20 and the parking lot, where on clear nights we could see the diner’s neon sign glowing against the darkness like a lighthouse meant specifically for travelers.
