9. Della
DELLA
Mid-morning, after the rush and before the lunch build, there’s a soft spot in a diner’s day, maybe the width of two cups of coffee. That’s when Wren comes.
It’s a ritual with rules nobody wrote down.
She crosses over from the bakery with pastries in a paper bag.
Today it’s two cinnamon rolls, still warm, off her own morning tray.
I pour two coffees, hers doctored as I’ve known since before she knew me to speak to.
She takes the second stool from the end, and for the width of two cups, we are not two women who run food establishments seventy steps apart.
We’re just girls at a counter. The bag-for-coffee exchange rate was never negotiated.
It’s simply understood that I will never tell her that her cinnamon rolls could make a grown woman rethink her whole career, and she will never tell me what my pie does to three firemen who shall remain her husbands.
She looks good, which is the thing I notice first, same as I notice it every time, and it never stops being nice to see.
There was a stretch, back when she first rolled into town, when Wren Bailey took her coffee as she took everything.
Braced, both hands, like it might be repossessed.
Now she sits on my stool like a woman with a full pantry.
Bond-bit, flour-dusted, happy in that sturdy worked-for way.
I fed her through the braced times. I’ll take a little credit for that, though not much of it. Mostly it was her.
She marks the windowsill on her second sip. I knew she would. The woman misses nothing; she just files quieter than most.
“Those spoons are new.”
“Spoons,” I say. “Allegedly.”
She looks at them, tipped crooked beside the aloe, For D.
, For D. Again, then at the chair by my sink, which has been there since the storm, which the whole diner has walked around for days like it’s a load-bearing feature.
Then she looks at me, and she asks it in Wren’s particular style, which is one time, small, with the door held all the way open for me to walk out of instead of through.
“Anything going on I should be glad about?”
“Nothing’s going on. The mountain crew’s been coming down more, that’s all. Cold season, men get hungry.”
“Mm, I hear you,” says Wren.
Then she does the face at me. My face, the one I invented, the one I aimed at her across this exact counter back when she was lying to me about three firemen and a heat, the little lift of the eyebrow that says I have heard your testimony, honey, and the jury’s stepping out for pie.
It is a violation of several treaties for her to use my own equipment against me.
She does it anyway, takes a bite of cinnamon roll, and lets it go completely, no follow-up, no digging, because that’s the other rule nobody wrote down.
Friends don’t shove. She learned that from Della’s counter too, and it’s a good counter; it teaches.
I don’t know why I keep talking, except that’s not true. I know exactly why, it’s the same reason anybody keeps talking at this counter, because somebody warm is sitting there not asking, and I’ve watched it happen to half this town, and it is very strange weather to be standing in yourself.
“You know how I got the diner?” I hear myself ask.
“Your parents managed to retire.”
“My folks’ knees retired. The rest of them just went along.
” I top off her cup, which doesn’t need it, so my hands have a job.
“I was eighteen. Dad’s knees went the same spring Mom’s hip started up.
And there was a morning. I can tell you the exact morning, it was raining, we were out of rye, when Dad put the keys on the counter next to the register, said, ‘You’ll do it better than me anyway,’ and went to sit down.
And that was the whole ceremony. Nobody ever asked, is the part.
It wasn’t cruel, it wasn’t even wrong. It was just settled, as you’d settle who takes the window seats.
Della’s got it, Della’s a workhorse. I’d been on the flat-top since I could see over it.
Everybody in this town has been eating my cooking since I was in a training bra, and the day the keys landed I’d already made the biscuits.
So there was never a before, you understand.
There was never some other Della with some other life who chose this one off a menu.
There’s just the girl who was already holding the spatula when the music stopped. ”
Wren doesn’t say anything. She turns her cup a quarter turn, which is what she does instead.
“And I’m not complaining,” I say, because I’m constitutionally incapable of leaving that unsaid.
“I love this room more than anything with a pulse. That’s on the record.
But you asked about the crew, so here’s the relevant history, and then we’re done with it.
There was a man, Grant, for two years, back when I was twenty-two, twenty-three, right in there.
And Grant thought he loved this diner, but what Grant loved was that the diner came with a girl attached who could work a double and still have his supper warm.
Two years of ‘babe, can you get the grill.’ Two years of him sitting on that stool, that one, third from the till, telling his big plans to the back of my apron while I worked.
I’ve had ladies of the church sit there since; it’s fully cleansed.
Then one visit to the city with his cousin, and he found himself a girl who’s never bussed a table in her life, and off he went.
Didn’t even take it hard, that’s the part that educated me.
No scene at all. He just sort of finished his coffee and moved to a table with better service. ”
“Della, look at me.”
“So that’s the shape of it, honey. It’s not sad; it’s just how the numbers land.
I’ve been on the clock since before I could vote.
Everybody who’s ever loved me loved me at least a little bit for the plate in my hand.
That’s fine, that’s human, I love people for worse reasons.
But love, for a girl like me?” I shrug, and I hear my own voice do the register-drawer thing, clean, bright, closing.
“Love’s just another table. One more top to wait, one more order to get right, one more party that leaves.
And I’ve already got a full section. I’m maxed out, seating-wise.
That’s all the crew is running into. There’s no tragedy in it. There’s just no chairs.”
The urn ticks. Hank’s pencil scratches at his crossword across the room.
Wren looks at me for a long moment over the rim of her cup, and I brace for it.
The argument, the you-deserve, the whole casserole of things kind people say.
I’ve served that speech myself a hundred times from the giving side, and I know every ingredient in it.
She doesn’t make the speech. She sets her cup down instead.
“You told me a truth once,” she says. “Right here. I was lying to you about a heat, about three men and my whole heart, and you let me. Then you said, ‘I notice all three of those men go stupid when you walk past my window. Every time.’ You remember. And you were right, it cracked my whole story down the middle. I went home and couldn’t stop hearing it.
” She folds the empty paper bag into a small neat square, corners matched, bakery habits.
“So here’s yours, and then I’ll drop it, because you taught me that too.
Being busy doesn’t make a woman not lonely.
It just keeps her too booked to file the complaint.
” She stands, puts exact change by her cup, even though we both know the coffee was never for sale.
“I learned that at your counter, Della. Took me a long time to learn it about my own.”
Then she’s gone, back across to her gold-lit windows and her waiting ovens, to the three ridiculous devoted men who’ll drift through her shop all day like weather systems with boots on.
There’s no shove this time, no speech, just the one sentence, left on my counter next to the exact change, in the spot where the tips go.
The counter’s already clean, and I wipe it anyway. My hand stops halfway down the laminate, because that’s her move, the clean-counter wipe. I diagnosed it across this very slab of laminate back when she did it, and here I am running the same play while calling it work.
Too booked to file the complaint.
The lunch build starts. I’ve got stock to strain, a Reuben special going, an eighty-four-thousand-dollar problem under my till, and a section, which is full, which has always been full, because that’s the whole system.
Feed the town, hold the room, want for nothing you’d have to sit down to receive.
But the chair’s still by the sink where a tired man put it.
And the growing spoon collection looks determined to stay.
And when the door chimes at the front of the lunch rush, my fool heart checks, before my head can stop it, quick as a hand catching a falling cup, whether it’s anybody with pine and cold air about them.
It turns out to be the Pelhams, which is fine. I seat them by the register where the exits are, then I get back to work, and I do not think about empty chairs, or full sections, or the particular acreage of quiet a certain kind of man brings through a door.
The section’s full, I tell my grandmother’s window.
The window, which has heard my very best material, fogs up exactly like it’s laughing.