She may be a good two and a half decades past the typical age of retirement, but Dot Gallagher has no plans to give up her weekend job at The Hot Chocolate Sparrow in Orleans.

“I’m not going to retire, not until the last day,” declares Gallagher, who turned 92 this week.

“Aunt Dot,” as she is known to all at the popular coffee shop and café on Old Colony Way, began working at The Chocolate Sparrow when Marjorie Sparrow, Gallagher’s niece by marriage, founded the business 20 years ago this month, in 1989. She worked in the basement of the small storefront on Brackett Road in Eastham where the chocolate shop was first located, packing boxes of chocolate.

Gallagher still chides Sparrow for the exacting standards she held. “Every chocolate had to be in a certain spot and I said, ‘What difference does it make, they’re all going to different people?’” she recalls, with characteristic practicality. “But no, she had to have them all just so.”

Sparrow laughs, admitting, “I was very rigid in those days.” She, in turn, teases Aunt Dot about the time she gave her a pay raise, and Dot sent it back.

“I had a time explaining it to the bookkeeper,” Sparrow says. Replies Gallagher, “I did it for fun.”

In addition to helping with the business as it grew and moved (first to another location in Eastham and then to the expanded café in Orleans), Gallagher helped Sparrow juggle her life as a working mom back when her children were young, often picking them up from the bus stop. At the café’s original location on Route 6A in Orleans, Gallagher took on the job of caring for the flowers in the shop’s window boxes and planters, while also working in the Eastham headquarters where the candy-making operation remained until The Sparrow moved to its own building on Old Colony Way.

At first, Gallagher didn’t like the new café, because it was busy and there were so many employees. But one Saturday, she came in and noticed there was an empty corner in the candy-making area, and agreed to work there on weekends.

Sparrow says the challenge is keeping up with her. “Aunt Dot’s not happy when we don’t have stuff to do and she works so fast – Aunt Dot could work anybody under the table,” she says. “She has a great work ethic.”

To Gallagher, that’s no big deal. “In my day, if you took a job, you did whatever had to be done. You didn’t say, ‘That’s not my job.’” That explains why, despite using a cane, she’ll bend over to wipe a spot of caramel off the floor.

While she shakes her head sometimes at how coddled some of the young people she sees appear to be, she resists being critical. “There’s hope for them,” she says diplomatically.

She has always worked in one capacity or another. When she was younger, she put on yard sales for friends and neighbors. For many years, she had a good business doing alterations, and she still sews. She used to make Raggedy Ann dolls, first as gifts and then for profit, supplying a children’s clothing shop on Nantucket.

Before she was married – then Dot Cummings – she worked at the old Howard Johnson’s in Orleans, which was where she met her husband. “I worked there in the 1930s, because I left in 1941 when I got married,” she said, adding that she was considered “an old maid by the time I got married” because she was 24.

Not only did she meet her husband there, her sister Rita also met her husband, Don Sparrow, at Howard Johnson’s, and her best friend Ellie met her husband there as well. In those days, she said, “Almost everybody in the area worked there.” She still remembers how inexpensive meals were then: “English muffins were 10 cents, and you got three halves.”

Although she lived through the Great Depression, she says her family didn’t suffer. “Things were rough, but my mother raised chickens, so we always had chicken and eggs, and we had a vegetable garden.”

After she married, Gallagher and her husband, who was a teacher and later school superintendent, moved off-Cape, and moved around a lot as he changed jobs. “We lived in six different places in New York.” Two of her grown sons live in New York, one in Troy and one on Long Island; her other son lives in Iowa.

In 1972, they returned to the Cape, settling in Orleans, where Dot still lives. Although she has lived here most of her life, she wasn’t actually born here. Her father was from Orleans, but left the Cape to seek work, and it was at a hat factory in Upton that he met his wife, who was from Maine. Gallagher still remembers the fabulous hats her mother used to wear.

The family lived in Milford until Dot was 5, when they moved back to the Cape. “So I’m not a native, my sister Anne [Snow] points out once in a while, I’m a washashore.”

In addition to her three sons, she has nine grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren scattered around the country.

One day each week she gets together with a particular group of old friends whose number is dwindling. “We have what we call a ‘stitch and bitch’ group,” she says with a chuckle, explaining they all bring sewing or knitting and their own sandwiches – the hostess provides coffee – and sit and talk while they work. “It started out with eight of us and now there’s only three left.”

In addition to sewing, Gallagher is a renowned cook, best known for her chicken pies, in which she uses gravy, not white sauce, she notes emphatically. She’s also known for her Indian pudding, her strawberry-rhubarb pie and the peach jam she makes every year – she gave out 50 jars last year.

She’s also an inveterate scrapbook-keeper, making scrapbooks of photographs and family history for her children and grandchildren, and keeping a running scrapbook for The Hot Chocolate Sparrow, documenting the business’s two decades. She has developed an interest in politics that she says is fairly new. “I never was interested too much in it because the country seemed to be running all right,” she says. She voted for Obama in November’s presidential election, and is now keeping a keen eye on the economic stimulus package. “I’d like to find a list of what that $800 billion bailout is for,” she says. “To me, if you’re spending somebody else’s money you should be accountable for every penny.”

Gallagher likes her weekend schedule at The Sparrow, because it fills a gap in her schedule and she doesn’t like to sit around. “I’m busy all five days of the week, and on weekends there’s nothing much to do – I can’t mow my lawn anymore, or shovel my driveway,” she explains.

She has had some health problems, but they haven’t slowed her down much, even if she can’t mow the lawn anymore. “I got a stent, I got a knee – I’m slowly falling apart,” she says dryly.

Although Gallagher, up on the latest health news, asserts that everyone should have a piece of dark chocolate every day, she’s never tempted to indulge in chocolate while she’s working – a fact that Sparrow, a self-confessed chocolate nibbler, finds remarkable.

“I know what everything tastes like,” says Gallagher. “If you get something new I’ll try it.”

Her diet includes plenty of fresh fruit, and she’s fond of a certain cereal made with dates and nuts. Asked if she has a favorite item on the café menu, she smiles sheepishly and says, “I usually bring my own sandwich.”