28. This Is A Diner
THIS IS A DINER
LUCY
Dina’s apartment is above the restaurant, which is either convenient or inescapable depending on your mood, accessible by a staircase on the outside of the building that Dina and I decorated with potted plants and string lights.
It’s filled with the accumulated evidence of a person who buys things she loves without worrying about whether they match.
We have a Persian rug next to a mid-century chair next to a lamp Dina found at an estate sale in Brentwood. Books everywhere, the same eclecticism as mine, which is probably not a coincidence given that we have been exchanging books since we were twelve.
I don’t sleep well the first night.
I’ve gotten used to sleeping with Fox.
I’ve been sleeping with him for two years now. And these past weeks have been especially wonderful. I’ve been seen. Taken care of.
I lie staring at the ceiling, not sure if I’ve made a mistake by leaving.
“You want your marriage to work, so you left?” Dina asked me when we dug into the mango sorbet I made before the accident.
“When you put it that way, it doesn’t make sense.”
“Explain this to me, babe.”
I licked my spoon thoughtfully. “We both were lying and the accident and time after feel like a time out…a parallel universe situation. But now we’re back in the real, actual universe where I had moved out, and I just need us to find our footing again, honestly.”
Dina sighed. “Honestly, you both are a freaking train wreck. The cutest one I’ve ever seen. You love each other, and I think you both could be really happy.”
“How?”
“When you both can get out of your own way or pull your heads out of your respective asses,” she said with no little frustration.
Sleeping in this bedroom in some ways feels like I have returned to myself after a long trip. The jet lag is still present, but I at least know what time zone I’m in.
I feel the absence of him.
This is an annoying fact.
After tossing and turning and getting maybe four hours of sleep, I wake up when the alarm goes off, with no one—specifically Fox—saying, “Wake up, sweetheart.”
I get up and go downstairs to work, where I start with coffee.
My plan is simple. I get back to work. I rebuild the life that’s mine, independent of anyone else’s, and I think.
Clearly.
Without the fig tree and the peonies and the man with the jaw like an architectural decision standing in the morning light, asking what I want for breakfast.
This is an excellent plan.
It lasts exactly two days.
Because Fox shows up on the third morning.
I am at the counter, drinking coffee and putting together the menu for next week. When the bells above Dina’s tinkle, I turn to see who it could be since we’re about an hour away from opening.
Fox smiles at me. “Good morning, sweetheart.”
I cock an eyebrow. “No.”
He ignores that and walks up to me.
He’s carrying his laptop bag and a coffee from the corner café, which I take offense to. We’re a freaking diner, and he could get coffee here. And if he got a coffee elsewhere, he could stay there.
“How are you, Luce?” He’s wearing the expression of a man who has made a decision about something—which I suspect is me—and is not going to be deterred from it. This is Fox’s most dangerous expression because it is indistinguishable from his resting face.
“Fox—“
“I brought your pills.” He pulls out a bottle of medication from his suit pocket and sets it on the counter. “You didn’t take the nine o’clock beta-blocker for your headache. Dr. Reyes said the nine o’clock one is important.”
“How do you know I didn’t—“
“Did you?”
I look at the paper bag.
Dina sticks her head out of the kitchen. “I told him.”
“Traitorous bitch,” I mutter.
“I heard that,” Dina says in a singsong voice, taking absolutely no affront as she goes back into the kitchen.
“Have you and Dina been gossiping about me?” I demand.
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“We care about you, sweetheart.”
I glare at him. “That’s not the point.”
“It is, medically, actually the point.” He taps the top of the prescription bottle. “You’re supposed to be resting.”
“I’m sitting down.”
He leans to see what I’m doing. “You’re planning this week’s menu.”
“While sitting down,” I point out.
He sits down next to me on a barstool. “Carry on. I’m going to work from here.”
I stare at him in horror. “You’re not going to work from my diner.”
“Technically, it’s Dina’s diner.” He turns his laptop on. “I asked her. She said it was fine.”
“You asked?” I turn to look at the kitchen and shout, “Traitorous bitch.”
“Who loves you!” He leans and brushes his lips against mine. A thrill goes up my spine and hits my lady parts. “Like I do.”
He goes back to his screen and starts typing.
“Fox.”
“Take your pills, Lucy.”
I do.
He doesn’t leave.
In fact, he stays there, working from Dina’s for the next week, while I cook the new items I’ve added to the menu, because we’re at the end of summer and slowly moving into fall, which is a relief, as everyone is sick and tired of the sticky heat.
Nashville in late August into September means the last of the good tomatoes—and I mean the ugly heirloom ones from the farmers at the East Nashville market, so ripe they split if you look at them wrong—so I make a tomato tart with a cornmeal crust and a whipped goat cheese base before they’re gone entirely.
It’s the kind of dish that only exists for three weeks a year.
The figs are coming in, which means the fig-and-prosciutto flatbread goes back on.
I also make fig preserves for the cheese board.
Sweet potatoes are starting to show up, not quite at their peak but close enough, so I add a sweet potato bisque with a little smoked paprika and a swirl of crème fra?che to the menu, which becomes the soup of the week and sells out by Thursday. I serve tomato bisque on that Friday and the weekend.
The muscadine grapes—fat, wild-tasting that grow all over middle Tennessee—I use for a sauce over duck breast that I add as a weekend special, because duck and muscadines are one of those combinations that tastes like it was always supposed to exist.
And because summer isn’t entirely gone yet, because the okra is still good and the corn is still sweet for another few weeks, I keep both on as sides—fried okra because Dina’s customers would riot otherwise, and a creamed corn that I make with a little fresh thyme and a splash of bourbon because everything is better with a splash of bourbon.
Fox sits at the counter with his laptop or in the kitchen while I’m cooking.
He follows me around with the determination of a stalker who smiles, makes me rest, makes me take my pills, and ensures that I eat three proper meals a day.
He takes his calls from Dina’s office if there are lots of people in the kitchen, but if it’s just me, he doesn’t bother to leave.
Percy comes to the diner, too, and some other colleagues of Fox. They have lunch meetings.
“They’re bringing business. I have nothing to complain about,” Dina tells me when I protest their presence.
The staff at Dina’s have opinions about this.
Annie, who has been waitressing for Dina for six years and has the observational accuracy of someone whose livelihood depends on reading rooms correctly, tells me while Fox can listen because he’s sitting in the damned kitchen where I’m cooking, “He’s in love with you.”
Fox raises his coffee cup in a toast. “Thanks for noticing, darling.”
I send him a sideways glance that could light a fuse. “He’s a pain in my ass.”
“Hon, he’s working from a diner, on a stool.” She waves in his general direction. “That man has an office. A nice one, I’m sure. And still, he’s sitting on a diner stool because he wants to be where you are.” She picks up her order pad. “I’m just saying.”
“Go away, Annie.”
“And”—she drops her voice to a very loud whisper—“he’s also extremely handsome. Hon, if you don’t want him, I’m happy to climb him like a tree.”
Fox chuckles, amused and entertained. “That’s so nice of you to say, Annie, but I am alas married and a one-woman man.”
Henry, who does the morning prep with me, keeps looking at Fox, then at me, then back at Fox. “Is he working here?”
“Yes.”
“No, I mean, is he working for Dina’s?”
“No.”
“He must’ve really fucked up if he’s stayin’ here all day.”
“He can hear you, Henry,” I point out.
Fox raises a hand, not looking up from his screen. “I’m fine with whatever you have to say, Henry.”
“It’s nice of Dina to let him work from here,” Henry adds.
“Dina is a traitor.”
I say this with love, even though I understand that a traitor who is working in your best interest is not technically a traitor, but still.
Dina has clearly had a conversation with Fox—more than one, I think, based on the evidence—and whatever he said to her, she believes him, which I know because she has stopped making the I-blame-you face when she looks at him and has started making a different face, the one she makes when she has decided how something is going to end and is waiting for everyone else to catch up.
Two weeks into this drama, which Dina’s regulars are now following with great interest, Dina puts her foot down.
“You’re being stubborn,” she accuses.
“You and I decided when we were teenagers, chicks before dicks,” I cry out.
She waves a hand and lies back on the couch, where we’re eating a pint of peach ice cream that I made two days ago.
The restaurant is closed and quiet below us.
Fox has gone home.
“Tell me why you’re being such a hardass?” she demands.
“He lied to me for two years.”
“He was confused for two years,” she protests. “There’s a difference.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Yours. Always yours.”
“Sounds like you’re on his side right now,” I grumble.
“He’s showing up for you every day, Lucy.” She opens the quilt that’s resting on the arm of the couch and spreads it over us. “He’s with you and for you. If you’d agree to quit your job, he’d carry you around on a silk pillow.” She looks at me. “When did any man ever do that for you?”
I don’t answer.
“When did Fox ever do that?” she challenges. “Before.”
I groan out loud and look at the ceiling.
“That’s what I thought,” she says smugly.