Chapter 1 #2
“Coach Kovak,” he said, before he had even finished walking through the door.
His voice was high. Young. “Coach. We need to talk about the practice schedule. Also. Also, your room at the inn flooded. The whole south wing flooded. Sue is — Sue is calling everybody. There are no other rooms in Frostbite Falls until the wing is dry, which she says is, you know, weeks. Weeks. Coach? Are you listening?”
The man at my counter — apparently Coach Kovak, apparently Russian-novel-mountain — set down his fresh cup of coffee. He did it slowly, like setting something down carefully was a form of communication.
He looked at the kid for one beat.
He looked at the puddle of melted snow gathering under the kid’s left boot.
He said, “Sit down, Eli. Order something. Breathe. The schedule is the schedule. Sue will figure out the room.”
Eli sat down. Eli ordered hot chocolate. Eli put his face in his hands.
Coach Kovak looked at me. Through me. Past me. Then at the door, which was opening again.
It was Sue.
Of course it was Sue.
She came in like a small Minnesota hurricane, snow clumped on her boots, her gray hair sticking out from under a wool cap, her phone in one hand and a clipboard in the other.
Sue Hartwell has run the Frostbite Inn since I was in pigtails.
She is built like a mailbox and was, for the entirety of my childhood, my grandmother’s best friend.
She also knows the mortgage history of every piece of real estate in Frostbite Falls, which I found out three months ago when she asked me, very gently, if everything was okay at the diner.
It was not okay.
“Maple,” Sue said, before she had even finished walking through the door.
“Sue,” I said.
“About that spare room over your garage.”
“What about it?”
“How fast can you get it ready?”
“For who?”
Sue pointed.
She pointed at the man at my counter.
The man who had, fifteen minutes earlier, called my pie an inconvenience and my coffee bitter.
The man who was now looking back at her with the same blank no-thank-you face he’d been giving the menu.
I said, on autopilot, my brain already doing the math — ninety dollars a week, twelve weeks minimum, that was over a thousand dollars, that was something — “It’s not really set up for a tenant.
It’s — it’s mostly storage right now. There’s a bed in there but the heat is iffy.
And the bathroom drips. And the floorboards squeak in the bedroom and there’s probably mice nesting in the walls because I’ve been meaning to call the exterminator and—”
“Maple,” Sue said. “I have eleven people without rooms. The Comfort Inn in Two Harbors is full because of the conference. Coach Kovak just got here last night and his entire suitcase is currently underwater. I’ll vouch for him.
I have known the Kovaks since the brother played in Boston.
I would not put a man in your grandmother’s apartment if I did not trust him. ”
I looked at Coach Kovak.
He was looking at his coffee. He had put both hands around the mug, like he was warming them or holding on to something.
I noticed he didn’t look at me.
He didn’t look at me on purpose.
He was, I realized, giving me an out. He was giving me the chance to say no without having to say no to his face.
He was a man who had been raised, possibly by Russian grandmothers, possibly by hockey coaches, possibly by some grim combination of the two, to make himself small enough that a small woman could refuse him.
It was, possibly, the kindest thing a man had done in my diner in three years.
It was also — and I want to be on the record about this — not why I said yes.
I said yes because I needed the rent.
I said yes because the apartment over the garage was ninety dollars a week if I rented it furnished, and the foreclosure clock was ticking, and I had been going to call the listing service in Duluth that morning anyway.
I said yes because Sue Hartwell does not vouch for men lightly, and if she was staking her reputation on this one, then he was probably not going to burn the place down.
I said yes because my grandmother’s voice was in my head saying sometimes you have to do the hard thing, sugar.
“Two weeks,” I said. “We’ll do it two weeks at a time.
Ninety dollars a week, paid in advance, cash or check.
The bathroom faucet drips and there is exactly one space heater that works.
You can use the side stairs. You don’t come in my house unless I invite you in.
You don’t park in my driveway after eleven, because that’s when Theo Jr. comes home from his grandmother’s on Wednesdays and his mother needs the spot. Are we clear, Coach Kovak.”
He looked up. The blue eyes hit mine. Held.
“Clear,” he said.
“Knox,” he said. A second later. Like he had to think about it.
“Knox,” I said. “Knox what?”
“Knox Kovak.”
“Maple Sutton. Welcome to Frostbite Falls. Your first month’s rent is three hundred sixty dollars, which, since you’ve already given me twenty dollars too much for that coffee, brings your balance to three hundred forty. Cash or check. Sugar.”
It came out of my mouth before I knew I was going to say it. Sugar. I had called this man sugar. My grandmother would have laughed for an hour. My grandmother’s ghost was probably laughing now.
His mouth did the thing. The basement-under-a-smile thing. The heating system thing.
“Cash,” he said.
He pulled the wallet out again. He counted out the rent in twenties on my counter. Three hundred forty dollars in twenties is a lot of twenties. The pile sat there next to his empty coffee mug like a statement of intent. Like he was telling me something without words.
“I’ll get my bags from the inn,” he said. “I’ll be back at around five.”
“Around five,” I said.
“Maple,” he said. He said my name like it was a word in a different language he was learning to use. Slow. Careful. Like it took effort. “Thank you.”
He left a second twenty-dollar bill next to the pile of rent. He pointed at it without speaking. Then at me. Then at the empty mug.
It was a tip.
He turned, and he picked up his second cup of coffee — the fresh one, the one he had not finished — and he walked out.
The bell over the door chimed.
Sue Hartwell stayed where she was, watching me. She had a look on her face I had not seen since my grandmother’s wake. It was the look of someone who had just witnessed something important.
“You’re going to have your hands full, sugar,” she said.
“Sue,” I said. “I am running a diner that is being foreclosed on. I am twenty-six years old. I have been having my hands full since I was sixteen.”
“That is true,” she said. “But I would like to point out, just for the record, that until five minutes ago you had room for one more thing.”
The bell over the door chimed again. It was Eli, the panicking Frostbite team assistant, slipping out behind Sue with his hot chocolate in a to-go cup. He waved at me apologetically. He was a good kid.
The diner was empty.
I stood behind the counter and looked at the pile of cash and the empty mug and the second twenty.
I picked up the rent. I picked up the tip. I put both in the register, my hands moving through the familiar motion. The cash drawer slid open with a soft ding. The bills went into their slot. The drawer slid shut.
I picked up the pie I’d offered, the slice I’d already plated for him. The crust was perfect. My grandmother’s recipe — butter and ice water and the kind of patience I didn’t have but she’d instilled anyway. There was nothing wrong with it. It had not deserved the way he’d looked at it.
I ate it standing up at the counter, with my fingers, looking out the window at his truck pulling out of my parking lot in the dark.
It was four minutes past six in the morning.
The first customer of the actual day — Mira’s father, who comes in at six-oh-five every weekday for the Tuesday-paper-and-eggs special even though it’s Monday — was about to walk in.
I had ninety seconds to put on lipstick. To wash my hands. To become the version of myself that people saw.
I did not put on lipstick.
I stood in the empty diner and I said, out loud, to my grandmother who was no longer there to hear me, “Joan Sutton. I just rented your apartment to a man who scares me. Is this a sign? Is this a sign, Grandma? Because if this is a sign I would appreciate something a little less six-foot-five and a little more here is a check for fifty-eight thousand dollars.”
Joan Sutton, dead since April, did not answer.
The bell over the door chimed.
Mira’s father said, “Mornin’, Maple,” and shook the snow off his hat onto my mat.
I said, “Morning, Mr. Halpern. Tuesday paper, eggs over easy, four sausage links, sourdough toast, no jam.”
“That’s the one,” he said.
“Coming right up, sugar,” I said.
I put on a fresh pot of coffee.
I did not throw out the pot Knox Kovak had drunk from. I let it sit on the warmer. I told myself it was because I might want it later, because I needed to study the failure, because something in me needed proof that it had happened.
I told myself a lot of things at five-thirty in the morning, on Mondays, in late January, in a diner that was being foreclosed on.
Most of them weren’t true.
This was the first one that wasn’t.