Chapter 3
MAPLE
Mira Halpern walked into my diner at seven o’clock on Wednesday morning carrying two coffees and a smile that meant she had questions.
“Drink it,” she said.
“No.”
“Drink it. I want you to know what disappointment tastes like before I ask you what you have been doing with your life.”
I drank it.
It was bad.
It was bad the way a lake is wet. Bad the way the sky is blue. Fundamentally, categorically, no-arguments-here bad.
“So,” Mira said.
“So,” I said.
“Booth four. We’re having a conversation.”
I had been on my feet since four-thirty.
Dale, my morning cook, had called in at five with the croup his grandkids gave him, which meant I had been doing the griddle and the counter and the register and the dishwasher all by myself for two and a half hours.
The wave of breakfast regulars had finally thinned out around six-forty-five.
My hands smelled like onions from the hash browns.
My apron had butter on it. The only thing keeping me upright was a steady drip of caffeine and a stubborn refusal to look across the parking lot at the apartment over my garage.
I had not seen Knox Kovak since yesterday morning, when he had eaten my pie at this counter and tipped me twenty dollars and walked out like he had not just rearranged the furniture in my chest.
I had spent the last twenty-four hours pretending that absence was the same thing as relief. That not seeing him meant it hadn’t happened. That the cold coffee he’d drunk was not still sitting on the warmer, growing a film on top.
Mira had been my best friend since we were eleven. She knew the difference between relief and avoidance. She knew me.
“Booth four,” she said again. “Now.”
I followed her.
Mira sat down on the booth side facing the window. She made me sit on the side facing the kitchen, which is what she always did when she planned to interrogate me, because that side of booth four has the squeaky vinyl and you cannot fidget without making a noise. She wanted me trapped in the truth.
She put my fake coffee on the table next to her real coffee. She folded her hands. She had painted her nails since Monday. They were a deep burgundy. The color of honesty.
“Maple Joan Sutton.”
“Mira Halpern.”
“You look like a woman who has not slept.”
“I look like a woman who has been running a diner alone for three hours, that’s all.”
“Don’t sugar me. Sugar means you’re stalling.”
I made a face at her. It was a good face. I’ve had practice.
She made a face back. Older and wiser and infinitely more tired.
Then she said, in the voice she had used since we were thirteen and trying to figure out which boy in our class had stolen my mother’s funeral lipstick out of my jacket pocket, “Talk.”
I looked at the table. It was walnut, or some kind of wood, and there were initials carved into it from 1997. E+K. Someone’s love story, now peeling varnish.
I looked at the napkin dispenser. It had a crack in the plastic.
I looked at her.
I did not, in any of the ten thousand mornings I had imagined this conversation in the last sixty days, imagine that I would tell her like this. I had imagined a glass of wine. A bottle of wine. A controlled environment. A finished cry.
I told her like this anyway.
“The bank merged in October,” I said. “The new bank pulled my line of credit. The mortgage went into default in November because they wouldn’t renegotiate.
The note got transferred to a collections department in Chicago.
They sent me a ninety-day default notice the day before Thanksgiving.
I have eighty-five days. I owe fifty-eight thousand four hundred and twenty dollars.
I have, in my account at the moment, a hundred and seventy-three dollars. ”
Mira did not move.
I watched her face do what faces do when they are processing. When they are taking in information that changes things. I watched her open her mouth.
I watched her close it.
I watched her open it again.
“Maple.”
“I know.”
“Maple.”
“I know, Mira.”
“Why didn’t you tell me. Why on God’s green earth did you not tell me. I have been bringing you bad coffee as a joke for two months.”
“Because telling you would have made it real.”
She closed her eyes.
She put both palms flat on the table.
She breathed in through her nose for a count of four. The breathing exercise. The yoga app that has saved her in moments of crisis.
Mira Halpern is the only person in this town who learned breathing exercises from an app, and she has been deploying them at me at moments of high domestic crisis since 2018. This was a big moment. This was a Count-to-Four moment.
“OK,” she said. “OK. Eighty-five days. Fifty-eight grand. We can—”
“I rented the apartment.”
“What.”
“The apartment over the garage. I rented it. Yesterday.”
“To who.”
“To the new assistant coach for the Fury. The flood. The inn. Sue brought him to the diner at six in the morning yesterday and asked, and I needed the rent, and—”
“Maple.”
I stopped.
Mira opened her eyes.
She looked at me the way she had looked at me when I was sixteen and I had told her my parents had not, in fact, come home from their drive into Duluth, because their car had not, in fact, made it past the third bend on Highway 61.
She had been sitting on the steps of the high school.
She had been holding my hand for an hour afterward. She had not let go.
She looked at me the way she had looked at me when I was twenty-five and I had told her my grandmother’s last words were don’t sell my pies, sugar, don’t ever sell my pies. She had cried harder than I had.
She looked at me the way the people who know you look at you when they are about to ask the question that is going to make you cry.
“Sugar,” she said, in her warmest voice, the one she only used when the situation was actually bad. “Sugar. Did he eat the pie.”
I looked at the napkin dispenser.
“Maple.”
“Mira.”
“Did. He. Eat. The. Pie.”
I put my hands over my face.
“He ate the pie.”
She sat back. The vinyl squeaked. She did not, to her credit, laugh. She just looked at me for a long moment while I was hiding behind my hands, and then she said, with the philosophical resignation of a woman who had now seen a thing that could not be unseen, “OK. Well. You’re cooked.”
“I am not cooked.”
“You are cooked. He’s the new coach. He’s six-five. Sue Hartwell vouched for him. He moved into your grandmother’s apartment. He ate the pie. Maple. Sugar. Sugar. You are cooked.”
“He is a tenant.”
“You have a tenant who could pick you up with one hand.”
“I am not interested in being picked up.”
“Sugar. You absolutely are.”
I picked up the gas station coffee and drank it just to make her stop looking at me.
It was still bad.
It was worse now.
The bell over the door rang at eight-thirty-two and saved me.
I knew it was eight-thirty-two because I had been keeping track of the minutes since I had told Mira about the foreclosure, the way you keep track of the minutes after you stub your toe in the middle of the night, hoping the pain will stop being interesting.
Eight minutes of Mira’s interrogation. Forty-two seconds of me being cooked.
Thirty-one seconds of realizing that she was right.
Heather Park came in with a hat full of snow and Theo Jr. on her hip. The door brought a gust of cold that ruffled the napkins at table six.
Heather has lived next door to me for as long as I have lived in my grandmother’s house, which is to say for the last eleven years.
She is thirty-six. Her husband walked out in 2020, which was the year both her parents died and the year she found out she was pregnant with Theo Jr., which was a lot of years to put into one year.
She makes rent by working as the parts manager at the Ford dealership two towns over.
She has grease under her fingernails most days.
She is one of the three or four people in Frostbite Falls who I would die for without thinking about it.
She set Theo Jr. down on the floor. He was in a snowsuit that had come from a thrift store, red with fading stripes, and he immediately bolted toward the counter like he owned the place.
“Maple,” Heather said, in the voice of a woman who had a story. The story was written on her face. Something had happened. Something small, something domestic, something that had shifted the way she was looking at things.
“Maple,” Theo Jr. said, in the voice of a small person who was about to say something more important than his mother.
“Heather,” I said. “Pancakes?”
“Pancakes,” she said. “And a coffee. From the good place.” She looked at the cup of gas station sludge on booth four. The gas station coffee. The coffee that had been sitting there for four minutes like evidence. “Did Mira do that to you again?”
“She did.”
“Mira.”
Mira waved from the booth. She looked entirely too satisfied.
“Pancakes,” Theo Jr. said louder. He was not loud by temperament. He was loud by determination. “Maple. I have news.”
“News?”
“Yes.”
“Hit me.”
He took a deep breath. He had practiced this. The breath was the breath of a rehearsed speech. He held up one mittened hand, fingers spread, like he wanted me to count something off them. Like he was counting off his accomplishments.
“Mr. Grumpus fixed my bike wheel.”
I went still.
I went very still.
I was, at that moment, holding two plates and a coffee carafe and a jar of strawberry jam, and I set all of them very carefully down on the counter so I would not drop any of them, and I said, in my most reasonable voice — the one I use when I am on the edge of something and need to pretend I’m not — “Theo Junior. Honey. Who is Mr. Grumpus.”
“You know who Mr. Grumpus is. He lives in your grandma’s apartment. The hockey man.”
I closed my eyes.
I opened them.
“Did you give him that name.”
“Yes.”
“Theo Junior.”
“Mom said it was rude but it was already happening so it stuck.” He said this like he was explaining a scientific principle. Like the name had adhered to Knox Kovak the way they do, inevitable and irreversible.