12. Della
DELLA
The taper works like a tide going out. Doc drew me the curve on a prescription pad, half-doses stepping down like a staircase into cold water, and I stuck it to the walk-in door next to the temperature log, because in this kitchen everything gets a chart, even me.
Nobody tells you the senses come back in shifts. Like staff, like they’ve been off working somewhere else all these years, and now they’re trickling in for the morning open, tying their aprons, picking up right where they left off, no apology for the absence.
Smell clocks in first, and smell does not ease into the workweek.
The rain gets me before anything. I’m prepping before dawn, sky still dry, and out of nowhere the morning goes green, mineral, cold, right through a shut window.
My hands stop in the biscuit dough because I’m nine years old again on the loading dock, smelling weather come up the valley before my grandmother’s knee announces it.
I stand there with dough on my knuckles and my eyes stinging, and then the rain arrives, on schedule, mine again.
I make the best biscuits of the season and refuse to discuss with myself why.
Then it’s everything, everywhere, all shift long.
The fryer oil, Lord, the fryer oil. I change oil I logged as good, because the log was written by a woman with a nose full of wax paper.
I taste a fry out of the new batch and have to have a private moment by the walk-in, because I have apparently spent years serving fries thirty percent less magnificent than my fries.
No one told me, and this town ate them anyway, out of love, which is somehow worse.
The coffee smells like my childhood. The pie case smells like a choir.
Hank’s pipe smoke, which he thinks he’s hiding, announces him from across the street through a closed door, and the Pelham twins have been conducting a two-man cologne war for who knows how long, and honest to God, both of them are losing.
And under it all, faint, like a radio in another room.
The van smells like somebody baked in it.
My apron smells like somebody baked in it.
My own pillow, upstairs, smells warm, like crust, like apple butter, like sugar caramelizing at the back of an oven.
It takes me an embarrassing stretch of evenings to work out that nobody baked in my bedroom.
That’s me, that’s just me, arriving back, seeping out around the edges of a seal that’s coming loose, and I lie there smelling my own pillow like a fool, meeting a woman I apparently am.
I cry about exactly one thing, and I time it for after close, per the allotment.
The thing is the flat-top. Scraped down and oiled, ticking cool in the dark, it smells precisely, precisely, like it smelled when my grandmother ran it, which means it always has, which means I’ve been standing at her post breathing her air and couldn’t tell.
One cup of coffee’s worth. Then I wash my face in the prep sink and inform the flat-top that we will not be making a habit of it.
All of which I thought I understood was coming back, weather, fries, family.
Then the crew comes in off a dawn callout, and I find out what else kept the receipts.
It’s a nothing call. The scanner told me the shape of it while I pulled biscuits, a lift-assist for a rancher’s hand out past the feed store, everybody vertical by sunup.
The three of them come down the mountain after, cold-stamped, hungry, taking the counter like they’ve taken it all season.
It’s routine, so I’ve got the pot up before the door finishes chiming, routine, right up until the door swings wide and the morning air comes in off their jackets in one cold sheet, and it’s carrying.
Pine arrives first, and it isn’t air freshener pine or cleaning-aisle pine.
It’s cut pine, green, sharp, alive, with rope and clean sweat worked through it.
That one walks in wearing chestnut curls.
Then comes cold air over granite, enormous, mineral, quiet, like the smell of standing on a summit with your eyes shut, with woodsmoke banked down underneath it, patient.
That one fills the doorway and says “Ma’am” with his cap in his hand.
Threading through the middle runs coffee and antiseptic with warm skin under both, like a hospital run by somebody’s favorite uncle. Wry, clean, awake all night.
These men have been coming down my mountain. Years of wax paper. Nobody told me they smelled like the reason the county gets out of bed.
The silverware tray is in my hands and then it is extravagantly not.
Forty forks hit the floor of my diner in the loudest event this town has witnessed since the church organ incident, and every face at every table comes up.
I’m standing there in the wreckage with my heart going like a fry basket, breathing in through my nose like an amateur, like a tourist, like a teenager…
Then Theo, half off his stool to help before the last fork settles, looks at whatever is happening on my face and asks with complete sincerity.
“Did you just bless me?”
I laugh so hard I have to sit down.
I don’t perch, and I don’t lean; I sit, right down on the chair by my sink, the migrated chair, in front of the entire breakfast rush, howling into my apron while forty forks glitter across the tile and three large confused men begin gathering them up with the earnest coordination of a crew that has trained for many emergencies but not this one.
Across the room, Mr. Pelham asks if I’m quite well.
Hank never looks up from his crossword, God preserve him.
I laugh until my ribs hold a grudge, because it’s that or explain, and there is no explaining that the woman who runs this counter just smelled three men for the first time while her whole nervous system stood up and applauded.
Twice in one season now, I’ve sat down in my own diner. This town is going to think I’ve gone soft.
They pay, they tip, they go, Theo last, carrying the refilled silverware tray to the back for me like it’s a rescue litter, setting it down gentle, saying nothing, ears pink. I get through the rush on autopilot and good posture.
It’s after close that the reckoning finds me, as it always does, at the sink, in the dark, in the smell of my own warm-crust self rising off my skin like steam off a pie.
Because here’s what I know that this morning’s comedy doesn’t cover.
Smell came back first. Doc said it plain.
Senses first, then the rest. The tide’s going out on schedule, and this morning was the shallow end of it.
Me smelling them. The deep end is coming, the part where the seal lifts all the way, and the street smells me, where three alphas with noses like fine instruments walk through that door some ordinary morning to find the jar’s just open, and every careful beige year of my adult life gets re-shelved in the time it takes a door to chime.
I stand at the front glass with the lights off, breathing my street through it. Bakery, rain, pipe smoke, pine off the ridge if the wind cooperates, and the wind cooperates, like a woman who got glasses at twenty-seven and is out reading every sign on Main by starlight, greedy, catching up.
The seal’s coming off the jar. Nothing on God’s green earth to do about it but what I do about everything.
So I prep, and those men may regret how thoroughly I do it.