Knot Lost (Ember Hollow #2)

1. Della

DELLA

The trick to feeding a whole town is simple. Keep the coffee coming. Keep your hands busy. And never, not once, not ever, let anybody see you sit down.

Before dawn, the diner belongs to me, and nobody else, and that’s my favorite shift of the day, the one with no customers in it.

Griddle is coming up to temp. First urn burbling away like it’s got gossip.

Bacon laid out in ranks, biscuits proofing under a towel, the whole room smelling like tomorrow’s good mood.

Out the front glass, Main Street is still wearing its nightclothes.

The big red firehouse across as sits quietly.

Two doors down, the bakery’s already glowing gold at the edges, because Wren keeps my hours, more or less, and between the two of us, this street smells better before sunup than most towns manage all day.

I run the morning as I’ve run it since I was eighteen years old.

Flat-top, urn, biscuits, pie case, unlock the register, straighten the sugar caddies that do not need straightening.

My hands know the whole dance without me.

That frees my head up to do what it does best, which is plan the day’s specials and absolutely nothing else, no sir, nothing else going on in there at all.

The season’s turning, too. You can smell it under the bacon, that first mineral edge the mornings get, which means the county’s already started asking after the Snowline Supper.

It’s a whole season of cold away yet, the big night when the snowline drops and the town packs the grange hall to eat my grandmother’s chili till the roasters scrape, but this valley starts looking forward to it as kids look forward to the last day of school.

Early and out loud, right at my register.

Best night of my year, every year. I plan a whole season around it, and I’d never once tell the town how much of that is for me.

I eat my own breakfast standing over the sink.

One biscuit, split, standing up, watching the window steam.

The counter stools are for customers. The booths are for families.

The sink is for me. Honestly, it’s efficient; honestly, it’s fine.

If you write in to complain that the woman who owns the place doesn’t use her own furniture, I will personally refill your coffee and change the subject, because I have been changing that subject since before I could legally vote.

The corner booth I don’t seat anybody in.

That one’s the founders’ booth. My grandparents built this room, laid the counter themselves, hung the sign, and there’s a photograph of the two of them above the corner booth on opening day, my grandmother holding a pie like a fight she intends to win, wearing the same copper-red hair I yank into a ponytail every morning of my life and the same freckles the flat-top keeps refreshing on me every summer.

Small, quick women, the Hartley line, built for narrow aisles.

The pie survived the photo. Not much else ever argued with her either.

Next to it there’s a newer photo, my folks in matching visors on a golf course in Arizona, sunburned to the color of my house hot sauce and grinning like they got away clean.

And they did, they got away with retirement.

Everybody in the pictures over that booth is alive and thriving, fully prepared to tell me how to run this diner from eighteen hundred miles away, which is the correct distance for advice.

On the windowsill over the sink, between the aloe plant and the radio, sits a little amber bottle, and I give it the same look I give it every morning, which is no look at all.

Suppressants. One small white pill with breakfast, and the whole omega situation goes down to a hum you can ignore, like a walk-in with a tired compressor.

It leaves me no cycles, no scent worth mentioning, mine or anybody’s.

The world comes at me through wax paper, and I go out to the world the same way.

The town has me filed under beta, and I have never once corrected the paperwork, because the paperwork suits me.

Wren knows. I told her once, quiet, after she came to town, and she has guarded it ever since.

I started taking them at nineteen for the least romantic reason on God’s green earth.

You cannot run a breakfast rush in pre-heat.

Can’t be flipping eggs for the after-church crowd while your own biology files a workplace grievance.

A diner needs a cook it can count on, and this town got one.

If the price of that was boxing up one whole department of being a person to stack in dry storage, well.

It was a fair trade. I’d shake on it again.

The bottle rattles thinner than it used to, is all. And the refill requires a conversation with a doctor, which I have been dodging with the footwork of a much less busy woman.

The phone rings while the first pancakes are on. Right on schedule, the weekly call from Mom.

“Baby. Did you get the gravy right?”

“Good morning to you too. My gravy’s fine.”

“Your gravy’s good. Grandma Hartley’s gravy was right. You’re still rushing the roux, I can hear it in your voice.”

“You cannot hear a roux in my voice, Mother.”

“I raised you in that kitchen. I can hear everything in your voice.” A pause, and I brace, because I know this pause as I know a ticket rail filling up. It’s the pause that comes before the special order. “Have you met anyone?”

I flip pancakes one-handed and hold the phone away from my ear. Her voice keeps going anyway, sunbaked and certain, listing the nice young men her water-aerobics friends have as grandsons, as if I might drive eighteen hundred miles to date a stranger named Chad who works with boats.

“I have met everyone, Mom,” I tell her when the phone comes back. “I have met the entire town. I feed them twice a day. That’s the problem with your question.”

“That is not what I asked, Della Rae. And you know it.”

I do know it. I also know how to end a phone call with love and a spatula in my hand, which is a skill you develop or you burn things.

Then I tell her the gravy’s perfect and her sunhat’s ridiculous in the photo she sent.

She tells me I work too hard in the exact proud voice that means the opposite.

We hang up as we always do, her saying eat breakfast, baby, me saying I own a diner, neither of us meaning what we said or saying what we mean.

I’m stacking the first order of the day for myself, which is to say, leaning on the sink with a sausage patty in a folded slice of toast, when the door chime goes and a shadow falls over most of my morning.

I know him before I turn, and it has nothing to do with scent.

The search-and-rescue patch pinned beside my name tag is a souvenir, per the official record, and will not be taking questions.

Nothing gets to me by scent; we covered that.

It’s the sheer acreage of the quiet that gives him away.

Nobody else in this county stands that still.

Wade Merritt, Ridgeline Search and Rescue, the man the mountain answers to.

Big as the doorway he’s standing in, jaw like a fresh-split log, dark hair going gray early at the temples like the tired got ambitious, and eyes the exact color of the sky before it means it.

Storm-gray, worn as other men wear a wedding band, permanent and mostly unmentioned.

He comes in maybe twice a season to order black coffee like it’s a rescue in progress, then he overtips and leaves.

I catered a training camp for his crew up the ridge back in the spring, sixty sandwiches and a vat of chili, and his men ate like the mountain doesn’t feed them, which it doesn’t, which is the whole point of the mountain.

“Good morning, ma’am,” he says.

“Della,” I say, same as I said in the spring, same as I’ll apparently still be saying when we’re both in the retirement home, where the man will find me at bingo and call me ma’am.

“Della.” He turns his ball cap over in his hands like it’s got instructions printed inside. “Fall rotation’s coming up, the ridge camp. Crew was hoping, I was hoping you’d do the food again.”

“You mean the whole camp?”

“The full day.” A pause the size of a flatbed. “They still talk about the chili.”

And there it is, that little lift under my sternum, dumb as a bird hitting glass, because a large tired man said my chili was memorable. I put it down as I put everything down, fast, before it can order anything else.

“It’s just sandwiches,” I say.

It comes out of me on autopilot, the same three words I said to Wren at this very counter back in the spring, when she did the face at me.

I invented that face; I know exactly what it costs.

And I notice, distantly, that I’ve now said it enough times to enough people that it’s stopped being an answer and started being a plea.

Wade looks at me for a second with those tired eyes, and I get the strangest feeling, like being read. Like a man running down a checklist and finding a line item off.

“Sixty of them,” he says, dry as switchgrass. “Just sixty sandwiches.”

“And the chili as well.”

“And the chili.” He puts the cap back on, which, on Wade Merritt, is a whole closing argument. “Crew’ll be glad. They, uh.” He looks at the pie case like it might help him. It has helped many men.

“The young one whittles, fair warning. He’ll try to give you a spoon.”

I have no idea what to do with that sentence, so I do what I do with every sentence, and offer it coffee.

He takes it black, to go, leaves a five for a two-dollar cup, then fills the doorway on his way out, the same as he filled it coming in.

The room stays a size too small for a minute after he’s gone, and I stand in my own diner feeling weirdly like the last table of the night, the one that lingers.

Foolishness. I have biscuits to pull.

It’s only later, opening the register to count the drawer before the rush, that I see the corner of the envelope sticking up under the till tray where I stuffed it when it came.

Cream paper, the lawyer kind, Willard Alder printed in the corner in a font that thinks highly of itself.

It’s been riding under my cash drawer unopened since it arrived, because I know a bad ticket when it hits the rail, and a girl’s allowed to leave one order sitting when the whole rest of the board is up and working.

The griddle’s hot, and the town’s about to come through that door wanting eggs and news. I could leave it another day.

But I don’t, because I never could leave a ticket.

The paper inside is thick, and the words are few, as expensive bad news always is.

Willard Alder, nephew and property manager of the Alder family holdings, is writing to inform me, cordially, that with Great-Uncle Alder’s affairs now signed over to the next generation, the family is reviewing arrangements regarding the building at 4 Main Street.

It says cordially, the absolute nerve of the word.

Which building would that be? The one I’m standing in.

The one with my grandparents hanging on the wall of it and my whole life seasoned into the flat-top of it.

Reviewing arrangements, my foot.

I read it twice, fold it back into thirds, and slide it under the till where it can think about what it’s done.

Then I flip the sign because it’s time, because the coffee’s ready and the bacon’s laid. Somewhere out there, the whole town is waking up hungry, and whatever Willard Alder is reviewing, he can review it from the back of the line.

First customer through the door gets a smile and a menu she doesn’t need.

Nobody, all day, sees me sit down.