Chapter Eight
Eggs at six. Grits at six-fifteen. Catfish plates at noon.
By the third day, Patty had turned the compound kitchen into Harmon's satellite location.
She'd found the rhythm by instinct—the same schedule her mother had kept for twenty-two years, transplanted to a motorcycle club's converted cotton gin.
The brothers had been skeptical at first, shuffling into the kitchen at odd hours expecting to find whatever leftovers someone had abandoned in the fridge.
They found her instead.
"Eggs." She slid a plate in front of Burial, who'd appeared at six-twelve looking like a man who hadn't expected food to materialize. "Over easy. Don't tell me you wanted scrambled—I saw your face when Levee made scrambled yesterday. You hated it."
Burial stared at the eggs. "How'd you know—"
"I've been reading faces across a counter since before I could drive. Sit. Eat. Grits in three minutes."
The gravedigger sat. The gravedigger ate.
Word spread fast.
By noon, the kitchen was full. Brothers who'd been grabbing gas station food and cold sandwiches discovered that the diner woman Foxfire had brought home could cook like their grandmothers and talk like their drill sergeants.
"These catfish plates." Slab—a brother whose name she'd learned from context—stared at his food like it had personally insulted him. "This is better than anything I've eaten in years."
"It's the same recipe I serve at Harmon's. Good ingredients, proper technique, and the fear of my mother's ghost watching over my shoulder." She refilled his sweet tea without being asked. "You want cornbread, you say please. That's the rule."
"Please."
"See? You can be taught."
The brothers laughed. The brother ate.
This was what Patty knew how to do. Feed people. Read them across a counter. Make a kitchen into something that felt like home even when home was a hundred miles away and boarded up because smugglers wanted to burn it down.
Her hands moved through the cook line with the speed her mother had drilled into her—plates up, orders out, keep moving because a diner woman who stopped was a diner woman who fell behind. The compound kitchen wasn't Harmon's, but the work was the same. The rhythm was the same.
The satisfaction was the same.
"You're going to spoil them."
Jolene appeared at the kitchen pass, watching Patty work with the knowing eyes of a woman who ran her own establishment.
She was Cottonmouth's—Patty had learned that from Grace—and she carried herself with the particular authority of someone who'd been handling difficult men and difficult situations for a very long time.
"They're feeding themselves on gas station garbage. Someone should spoil them." Patty plated another catfish dinner. "You own the juke joint, right? Grace mentioned it."
"The Blue Delta. Twenty years, three rebuilds, and more trouble than any reasonable woman should tolerate." Jolene smiled. "You run Harmon's."
"When I'm not hiding from smugglers in a motorcycle compound."
"Life has a way of rearranging our schedules." Jolene leaned against the counter. "You're good at this. The feeding, the talking, the way you make a kitchen feel like the center of everything."
"I learned from my mother. Twenty-two years behind the same counter, same recipes, same face that said sit down and eat whether you wanted to or not."
"That's the gift. Making people feel like the food is the least important part of what you're giving them."
Patty paused, spatula in hand. That was exactly right. That was what her mother had always said—the eggs and coffee were just the excuse. The real service was making people feel seen.
"She's in a nursing home now," Patty found herself saying. "Doesn't remember me most days. But when I'm cooking, I can hear her voice telling me I'm holding the spatula wrong or that the grits need more butter."
"Then she's still with you." Jolene's hand touched her arm briefly. "The ones we lose—they stay in the work. In the hands that remember what they taught us."
The kitchen filled and emptied, filled and emptied. Lunch bled into afternoon, and Patty started the pie.
Pecan. Her grandmother's recipe. The one she'd been making since she was tall enough to reach the mixing bowl.
"You're making pie."
She didn't turn at the voice. Amber—a young woman who'd been hovering around the kitchen since yesterday, clearly wanting something but too shy to ask.
"Pecan. Want to learn?"
"I—" Amber stepped closer, her hesitation obvious. "I can't cook. Everything I touch burns."
"Then you're starting from the wrong end. Cooking isn't about not burning things. It's about understanding heat." Patty gestured to the counter. "Come here. I'll teach you to make coffee."
"Coffee?"
"Proper diner coffee. The kind that makes people come back. It's the foundation—you can't learn to cook until you learn to keep people at your counter long enough to eat."
The lesson took an hour. Amber burned the first pot—predictable—but the second was better, and the third was actually drinkable.
"See?" Patty poured herself a cup. "You're not hopeless. You're just impatient."
"My mother always said I rush everything."
"Rushing is fine if you're rushing in the right direction. The trick is knowing when to move fast and when to hold still." She took a sip. "This is hold-still work. The coffee doesn't care about your schedule. It brews when it's ready."
Jolene reappeared as Amber left, a fresh confidence in the young woman's step.
"You just taught someone to make coffee like you were teaching them to breathe."
"Coffee is more important than breathing. You can hold your breath for minutes. Try going a morning without coffee."
Jolene laughed—a warm, genuine sound. "I like you. The brothers are already half in love with your catfish plates, but I like you."
"I'm just a diner woman trying not to think about the fact that my actual diner is sitting empty because a smuggling operation wants me dead."
"You're a woman who grabbed a skillet and swung it at a man twice her size." Jolene's eyes held hers. "That's not just anything."
The afternoon faded into evening. The pie came out golden, perfect, filling the kitchen with the smell of butter and brown sugar. Brothers appeared like vultures, drawn by the scent, and Patty served slices with the commentary she'd been honing for thirty years.
"One slice. You want more, you bring your plate to the kitchen and say please. Anyone who tries to eat standing up gets banned."
They sat. They said please.
She was starting to like these men.
Dinner cleanup took longer than she expected—the compound generated dishes the way her diner generated coffee cups—and by the time she emerged into the clubhouse, the evening had settled into the particular quiet of men who'd been fed well.
Foxfire was in the corner, alone for once. His usual restless energy had dimmed to something almost still, his body loose in a way she'd never seen.
She crossed the room and sat across from him.
"You ate three plates."
"The catfish was good."
"The catfish was excellent. And you ate it like someone was going to take it away."
His jaw tightened slightly. The stillness flickered.
"I noticed," she continued, "because I've been watching people eat for thirty years. Most folks slow down when the food's good—they savor it, they appreciate it. You speed up. Every meal I've seen you eat, you speed up."
"Maybe I'm just hungry."
"Maybe." She leaned forward. "Or maybe you're eating like a man who learned young that food doesn't stick around. That if you don't grab it fast, someone else will."
The silence that followed was heavy. Different from his usual quick-fire energy.
"A man who eats that fast," she said quietly, "is either starving or scared of losing the plate."
Foxfire's eyes met hers.
The restless man who never stopped moving, who filled every room with energy and noise and the particular chaos of someone who didn't know how to be still—he was completely motionless.
And the quiet that followed told her it was both.