10. Graham
Graham
Graham had discovered that a lumpy motel mattress could make yesterday’s punishment last into morning.
His shoulders ached when he lifted the coffee, and his lower back twinged when he shifted against the vinyl booth.
Even his hands carried reminders of the loading dock, the skin across his palms rubbed raw beneath borrowed canvas gloves.
Hockey soreness had always come with trainers, ice packs, and somebody asking where it hurt.
This work expected him to get up and do it again.
The coffee tasted burnt enough to strip paint, but he drank it anyway. Faded checkerboard linoleum stretched between red booths patched with tape. Graham had taken the table farthest from the front windows, where the corner gave him privacy.
The bell above the door rang.
Maisie came in first, talking over her shoulder. Wade followed with one hand on the door before it swung shut behind him.
“Don’t let Dottie start telling you about her nephew again,” Maisie said. “Riley wants the pantry tables finished before the food-bank truck gets there.”
“You’re the one who asked her last time,” Wade said.
“I asked where he worked. I did not ask for his romantic history.”
Graham lowered the mug to its saucer.
They hadn’t noticed him. Wade blocked most of the sightline into Graham’s corner, and Maisie was digging through her shorts pocket for cash.
“Morning, Dottie! Let’s get two black coffees and Riley’s iced decaf tea to go. We’ve got to run down to the Parish Hall and help her set up.”
The woman behind the counter reached for a drink carrier. “She’s there already?”
“Since before seven,” Maisie said. “Six folding tables were waiting for us before I even got dressed.”
Wade laughed. “That sounds like Riley.”
Graham froze, his hand resting against the saucer.
Riley had once hated mornings after long shifts. Getting her out of bed before eight had required coffee, bribery, and sometimes stealing the blanket. Now she was opening parish halls before the town finished breakfast, and these people knew the routine well enough to joke about it like family.
Dottie set two paper cups into the carrier. “You taking anything over for her, or is she planning to run that baby on stubbornness again?”
“Tack a croissant onto that order, too,” Wade said. “You know Riley looks forward to your baking before a long shift.”
Graham kept his attention on Wade.
The man studied the chalkboard menu as if remembering Riley’s breakfast were no more remarkable than checking the weather. No performance. No challenge aimed across the room.
That made it worse.
Dottie turned toward the glass case, then reached beneath the counter. “I’ve already got it boxed up, Wade. I swear she’s the only girl in this county who still tolerates my pastry dough.”
Maisie grinned. “She says your baking builds character.”
“My baking has character.”
“Same difference.”
Wade took the white box and balanced it beside the drinks. “Come on. If Riley moves those donation tables herself, Mac will blame both of us.”
“Mac blames everybody.”
“Because everybody gives him material.”
They turned toward the door. Graham raised the mug as Maisie glanced across the diner. He kept his face behind the booth partition until the bell rang again.
The café returned to its usual hum. Graham kept looking at the empty patch of counter where the box had been.
Wade had known what Riley drank. He had known what she ate before a long shift. Dottie had known enough to pack it before anyone asked.
Graham stayed hidden while Riley’s breakfast passed across the counter without him.
The bell above the door stopped trembling after Wade and Maisie disappeared outside.
Graham remained in the booth with his coffee cooling beside his hand. Through the front window, Wade crossed toward his truck, holding the drink carrier and Dottie’s pastry box, while Maisie walked beside him. Neither looked back.
Riley’s breakfast went with them.
“Need me to warm that up?”
Graham turned toward the counter. Dottie stood beside the coffee machine with the pot raised, waiting.
“No, thanks. It’s fine.”
“Your face says otherwise.”
“The coffee isn’t the problem.”
Dottie gave him a long look before returning the pot to its burner. “Most things aren’t.”
Graham looked down at the dark coffee in his mug.
Wade had ordered Riley’s drink without asking. Decaf. Iced. He had added food because he knew what she liked before a long day. Dottie had packed the croissant before either of them walked through the door.
There had been a time when Graham knew every useless detail about his wife. Which gas-station chips she bought on road trips. How much milk she wanted in her coffee. Which side of the bed she took when a hotel room had bad air-conditioning.
Breakfast should have been easy.
Instead, another voice came back to him, his own, impatient and distracted inside that downtown hotel suite.
“The PR team is already staging down in the lobby, Riley, so just call room service. Sitting down for breakfast isn’t on the schedule.”
Graham stared at the mug until the memory finished saying what it had to say.
He had treated ten minutes across a breakfast table like an unreasonable demand.
The booth creaked when he pushed himself up. The ache in his shoulders and lower back flared, and he had to brace one palm against the table before straightening. No trainer was waiting with an ice pack. No massage therapist would knock on his door later.
Good.
He left the coffee unfinished and crossed the diner.
Dottie was wiping crumbs from the counter when he stopped in front of the pastry case. “Need something to go?”
He looked past muffins, glazed twists, and two rows of cookies before focusing on a pastry near the back.
Cherry filling showed through the folded center.
For one brief moment, he had something.
“Excuse me. I’m looking to buy a cherry danish to go for my wife.”
Dottie followed his gaze. Her hand paused on the rag.
“I’ve got exactly one sitting in that display case.” She studied him again. “But if Wade was just talking about your wife, you should know that pregnant girl gave up sugar months ago.”
Graham kept looking at the danish.
Months.
Of course she had.
He had driven down here carrying memories that were already outdated, expecting pieces of the woman he left behind to remain exactly where he had abandoned them.
Dottie leaned one forearm against the counter. “You still want it?”
“Before she moved out here, she used to crave them.” Graham rubbed his thumb across the worn edge of the counter. “After a bad shift, she’d eat the cherry out of the middle first and save the pastry for last.”
“That was before?”
“Yeah.”
Dottie waited.
Graham looked at the lone danish again. “I just want to hand her something she remembers.”
She opened the case and lifted it out with a sheet of waxed paper. “Remembering something isn’t the same as knowing somebody now.”
“I’m figuring that out.”
Dottie folded the pastry into a paper bag and pushed it across the counter.
Graham took the bag from her and held on to the one thing he still remembered.
Dottie rang up the danish.
“Keep it upright,” she said. “That cherry filling gets everywhere once it starts leaking.”
“I will.”
Graham tucked the receipt into his pocket and turned toward the door. His coffee still sat in the corner booth, untouched since Wade and Maisie had walked out. Going back for it would only give him another excuse to stay inside.
Morning heat met him as soon as he stepped outside.
The Aston sat near the edge of the lot, looking absurd beside two dusty pickups and a delivery van with rust blooming around its wheel wells.
Graham headed for it with the bag pinched between his fingers.
Yesterday’s work made each stride shorter than usual, and lowering himself into the driver’s seat took more patience than he wanted to give it.
The passenger seat was already occupied.
His jacket lay beside the divorce petition, the papers folded once across the middle where he had left them. Graham stared at the arrangement before placing the pastry on top of the jacket, far enough from the petition that the grease from the bag wouldn’t stain the pages.
A divorce petition and a cherry danish.
Hell of a marriage strategy.
He started the engine.
Wade’s truck had disappeared down the road minutes earlier, but Silver Creek wasn’t large enough to hide a parish hall.
Graham pulled out of the café lot and followed the direction Maisie had mentioned, passing a bait shop, a shuttered hardware store, and a row of low houses set back beneath live oaks.
Every turn gave him another chance to stop.
Riley hadn’t invited him to the charity drive. She hadn’t asked him to bring breakfast. Yesterday, she had shut a metal door in his face and gone back to work.
Showing up somewhere else could cross the line fast.
Graham eased off the accelerator as a delivery truck pulled into traffic ahead of him. The pastry shifted against the jacket when the car slowed.
“Come on,” he said as the truck crawled toward the next intersection.
The words sounded ridiculous in the empty car.
What exactly was he rushing toward? Another refusal? Another reminder that Riley had built a life where people knew her schedule, her drinks, her food, and the jobs she volunteered for before most of the town finished breakfast?
Probably.
He kept driving.
A hand-painted sign appeared near the roadside several minutes later.
SILVER CREEK PARISH HALL — COMMUNITY FOOD DRIVE TODAY
Graham turned into the gravel lot.
Wade’s battered truck sat near the far side of the building. A few other cars were scattered around it, and the double doors at the front stood closed beneath a faded awning. Graham parked away from the entrance and shut off the engine.
The silence inside the Aston left nowhere for his excuses to hide.
He reached across the console and picked up the bag. The paper had gone warm from the car, and one corner bent beneath his fingers before he loosened his grip.
The divorce petition remained on the passenger seat.