It’s 7:45 a.m. and I’m about to start the breakfast shift at State Road Restaurant. I make my way behind the counter and check to see if the espresso machine is turned on. In walks the pastry chef, handing off trays of baked goods. I, along with the other waitress, assemble muffin mountains and prop pear tarts on cake stands like they’re a work of art. Michael McDonald plays softly in the background. We tie our aprons on and then there she is, right on time, just before the restaurant opens, standing with her jacket in her hands.

Trudy Taylor rarely missed a Sunday breakfast at State Road Restaurant.

“Good morning Trudy,” I say.

“I’ll have my latte,” she responds, smiling.

I never knew Gertrude Taylor, the matriarch of the musical Taylor family who died last week at 92 at her home in Chilmark. I knew Trudy, the lady who loved lattes and pastries and often told waitresses that they were doing a good job when it looked like they were standing around doing nothing.

Once, a few years ago, Trudy told me she didn’t care for pancakes but wished the restaurant had them on the menu. Not long after that, the chef added blueberry lemon ricotta pancakes to the menu, much to Trudy’s delight. Watching her eat those pancakes was like witnessing a child you don’t know eat cake on her first birthday — her grin stretched wide, her ears perking up high, a sparkle in her eye.

“The best things in this world are these pancakes and the highway E-Z pass,” she declared at the end of breakfast that day. Then, as the rest of her group headed out, she spent 15 minutes telling me and the other waitresses what an E-Z pass was, and that we better go get one once our shift was over.

Every Sunday, when Trudy would walk in, she would order her latte and place her jacket down against the window on the banquette bench behind the middle table, “her” table. Then she would walk over to the pastry case.

“What’s that?” she asks me one Sunday, tapping the glass pastry case, pointing to a pile of scones.

“A scone,” I answer.

“Well I know that,” she says, wrinkling her brow. “What’s in it?”

“Bacon,” I tell her.

“Bacon? That’s atrocious. Americans will put anything in a scone. I’ll take one.”

Sydney Bender is editor of Edible Vineyard. She lives in Oak Bluffs.