7. Della
DELLA
Somewhere between the rotation camp and the first hard frost, I acquire a regular.
Every diner has them. I could set the specials board by mine.
Hank Dietrich at the window table with his crossword and his request for “the usual,” which has never once meant the same order twice, the man just likes saying it; the Pelham twins splitting a Denver omelet and an argument.
Regulars are furniture that tips. I know how to do regulars as I know how to do weather.
I do not know how to do Theo Calloway.
He comes down off the mountain on supply runs and after shifts, folds all that height onto the end stool by the register, the one nobody sits on because the vinyl’s split, which I keep meaning to fix, which he has never once mentioned.
He orders like it’s an adventure. The boy is eating his way through my menu top to bottom, in order, like it’s a syllabus.
He’s somewhere in the H’s. When he hit the hash browns he went quiet for a full minute and then said, “I’m going to need to tell my mom about these,” and then he did, from the stool, on the phone, while I stood there holding a coffee pot with my face betraying enough emotion to charge admission.
Here’s the trouble with Theo Calloway, and I’ve given it some study.
I am armored for charm. Grew up behind this counter; I’ve been flirted at by everything this county produces.
Salesmen, seniors, married deacons feeling brave after two coffees, that whole species of man who thinks a waitress comes with the table.
I’ve got a whole toolkit. The deflection, the two-step, the smile that ends conversations politely, honey and no all in one word.
Charm hits my counter and slides right off, wiped up with the crumbs.
Theo doesn’t do charm; Theo does testimony.
“Your pie crust is better than the county fair pies,” he’ll say, to the pie, to the room, to the permanent record.
Not a line; there’s no line attached, he doesn’t even look up to see how it landed.
Another time he says, “You called Mr. Dietrich’s order before he sat down.
That’s like reading weather.” Then there was the day it rained sideways.
“You put the mat out before the rain started. How’d you know?” he asked. “Knees,” I answered, meaning my grandmother’s trick knee I inherited along with the counter. Instead of laughing, he nodded, serious as church, said, “Good knees,” and wrote a note on his hand.
There is no toolkit for this. You can’t deflect a man who isn’t aiming. It’s like bracing for a dodgeball and getting handed a casserole.
The chair thing happens on one of his H-visits.
He’s finishing his hotcakes. “Hotcakes” and “pancakes” are separate line items on my menu, a fact he called “the best thing about this town” with his whole chest. He carries his plate around to the pass-through to save me the steps, which I’ve stopped fighting.
Then he stops cold, looking at the chair.
Wade’s chair, by my sink, facing my window, exactly where the man set it down out of the storm, because I haven’t moved it and I’m not discussing why.
“There’s a chair by your sink,” Theo says.
“There is a problem.”
He considers it as he considered the hash browns. Whatever goes on in that curly head, it takes a second, then lands somewhere that makes his ears go faintly pink, and all he says is this.
“That answer is good.”
Then he pays his check and thanks me twice on the way out.
I stand in my own kitchen having been, and I don’t have a better word for it, witnessed by a twenty-six-year-old with rope calluses and syrup on his thumb.
It shouldn’t reorganize a woman’s afternoon.
I reorganize the pie case about it anyway.
The cobbler is what does the real damage, though.
I should have seen it coming. Cobbler starts with C; the boy doubled back for it, said he’d been “saving it,” which is its own sentence to unpack, and I did the thing I do, the thing I’ve done ten thousand times for ten thousand plates, and cut him the corner piece.
The corner’s the best piece. Most crust, most caramelized edge, most structural integrity.
You give the corner to the ones having a hard day, the kids who’ve been good at the dentist, the men fresh off a mountain.
It’s a two-second decision. It’s not a decision at all; my hands just know the seating chart of who needs what.
Theo looks at the corner piece, then at the pan, where the evidence of my choice sits plain as a signed confession, and then at me.
“You gave me the corner.”
“It’s cobbler, honey. Somebody has to get the corner.”
“You gave Hank the crossword table because the light’s better for his eyes.
You gave Mr. Pelham the booth by the register because his brother runs him hot and he needs the exit.
You put the good bacon. There’s good bacon and regular bacon, I’ve seen the boxes.
You put the good bacon on plates that go to people having a bad morning. ”
He says all this as he’d read off rope lengths, no flourish, just inventory, and I stand there with a cobbler pan in my hands feeling like a woman whose books are being audited.
“You give everybody the good version of everything.”
“That is exactly the job.”
“Okay,” he says, agreeable as ever. Then he cuts into his cobbler without looking up and gives the question no more weight than he gave the hash browns.
“Who gives you yours?”
The urn picks that moment to finish its cycle, which is the only reason there’s any sound in my diner at all.
I’ve been asked hard questions across this counter.
Whether the meatloaf’s really beef. Whether I’d cater a divorce party for both parties.
Whether Marigold’s cinnamon roll recipe was better than my grandmother’s biscuits, which is the closest this town gets to asking a woman to choose a side in a war.
I have never once been asked that, that plainly, by anybody, in twenty-seven years.
The whole trick of it, the reason my toolkit stays in the drawer, is that he isn’t performing an insight.
He genuinely wants to know. He’d like the information.
Somewhere in that curly head is a ledger with my name in it and an empty column, and it’s bothering him, as an uncoiled rope bothers him.
“The cobbler give you a speech, honey, or are you going to eat it?”
He eats it. He lets me have the deflection, as the young and the sincere let you have things, visibly, generously, filing it away with the rest. But he looks at me once more before he goes back to his plate, and for a second there’s nothing puppyish in it at all.
An older steadiness, mountain-work eyes under all those curls.
I go wipe down the far end of the counter, which does not need wiping, and my hands, traitors on the payroll, get the little shake they get after too much coffee, except I haven’t had any.
He leaves before the supper crowd. Pays cash, tips like a lottery winner, thanks me the regulation number of times. It’s not till I’m closing out the register that I find it, sitting by the mints like it wandered in on its own. Another spoon.
Whittled, and worse than the first one, which I say with love. This one has a lean to it, a whole attitude, a bowl like a shallow argument. On the handle, burned careful. “For D. Again.”
I hold it up to the light, and it’s terrible, completely useless as a spoon. You couldn’t stir paint with it.
It goes on the windowsill next to the first one, obviously, next to the aloe and the amber bottle. I stand there a second looking at my little shelf, which is developing a population problem, and address the empty diner in the voice I use when the walk-in acts up.
“I’m going to need a bigger windowsill.”
The diner doesn’t answer. But the chair sits there by the sink where a big quiet man left it, and the spoons lean crooked in the window light.
Somewhere up that dark mountain there’s a man who told his mother about my hash browns, plus a medic pretending he needs eggs.
Behind this counter, I know when a table’s settling in, and I have the sudden clear professional read that whatever this is, it has not finished ordering.
I have comped meals for men far less charming than these.