Chuck Cordero wipes tears from his eyes while sitting at the Waffle House where four people were shot and killed in Nashville, Tenn. Cordero is a regular customer there.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — He felt like an invisible force was drawing him into the parking lot, past the four new white crosses in the driveway, the balloons and the flowers, and the letters addressed to the dead.

He felt it pulling him into his regular spot, the one where he had been sitting in his car when a stranger, three spaces over, stepped out of a truck carrying an AR-15. He surprised himself by walking into the restaurant and sitting down in his regular booth, which had always seemed like the most comfortable seat in the world — until all of a sudden it didn’t.

At 3:25 a.m. on April 22, a Waffle House in Nashville joined the growing list of cherished American places morphed into the site of a massacre. And Chuck Cordero, a regular customer, joined the growing list of survivors left traumatized and struggling with how to move on.

Children often have little choice but to return to their schools after a mass shooting and employees must return to their offices. But 51-year-old Cordero thought at first he’d never come back here. Then he found himself again and again back at his Waffle House — No. 2,267 in the ubiquitous chain of yellow and black storefronts that are open 24/7, 365 days a year.

The eateries are so ingrained in American culture the federal government uses them after hurricanes to help gauge suffering: An open Waffle House signals hope for recovery; a closed one means disaster. Cordero’s Waffle House was closed for three days.

Four young people died, the oldest of them a 29-year-old cook, Taurean Sanderlin, whom Cordero had always called “T.” He saw the gunman shoot him in the parking lot, and now he feels compelled to come back, multiple times a day, desperate to cling to a community he never realized he was so attached to until a man with a gun threatened to destroy it.

“I don’t know why I’m doing it,” Cordero says. “Maybe I want to make sure my friends are OK. Maybe I want to know that I’m OK. Maybe I don’t want to let the bad people win. I just don’t know.”

Dozens of others feel it, too. The restaurant has been packed after the company pledged to donate a month’s worth of profits to the families of the victims, and people have come from hours away, insisting on buying strangers’ meals.

Cordero is grateful but also eager for this to be his normal Waffle House again, the place where his favorite waitress always had his coffee ready just how he likes it, with cream and three packets of Splenda.