Chapter 1
Georgia
Forty covers is a good day.
I want to be honest about the number, because I've caught myself lying about it, and not to anybody else.
To myself, in the truck, in the dark, on the way in.
We do all right. We do not do all right.
We do eleven covers on a Tuesday and forty on the day of the Cold Fork Christmas parade, which is one day, and which involves a fire truck and a llama.
Today is a Tuesday.
"Georgia."
"Mm."
"Georgia, the pie case is doing the thing."
"The buzzing thing or the crying thing?"
Dot considers this from her stool at the counter with the seriousness of a woman evaluating wine.
Dot Pruitt is seventy-nine and has occupied that particular stool since the Ford administration, and I have never once charged her full price for anything, and she has never once let me get away with it.
"The crying thing," she decides.
"Then it's fine."
"It doesn't sound fine."
"Nothing in here sounds fine, Dot. The building has a personality."
Her husband Merle doesn't look up from his paper. Merle Pruitt has been reading the same six-page Cold Fork Sentinel for eleven years — a new one every Thursday, but you'd never know from the pace. "Building's got a personality," he agrees. "Personality's bitter."
"You're a guest here, Merle."
"I'm an institution."
"You're an occupancy hazard."
He turns a page, pleased. That's the game. That's been the game for four years, since the funeral, since the two of them decided without ever saying it out loud that somebody ought to be in this room at eight in the morning so that I'm not in it alone.
The sign outside says BOONE'S. Under it, smaller, RIVER ROAD DINER, and under that a vacancy sign belonging to the motel across the highway, which is not our sign but has been broken so long it's become ours by adoption.
It says VACANC. The Y burned out during the Obama administration and Ray Delgado over there says he'll fix it when somebody complains.
Nobody complains. There's nobody to complain.
Here's my day, in case you're wondering how a person gets to forty-one.
Up at four-twenty. In at five. Fryers on, flat-top on, first pot at five-fifteen, and the first pot is always bad because the machine needs to get its opinions out of the way.
Bread order Tuesday and Friday. Meat Tuesday.
Produce whenever Hector's truck feels like it, which is a thing I've stopped fighting because Hector's mother is ninety-one and lives in Redmond and I'd rather have late lettuce than a man who doesn't visit his mother.
Prep till seven. Open at six-thirty, which is a contradiction I resolve by doing prep in front of Dot Pruitt while she talks.
Lunch is eleven to one-thirty and lunch is where the money is, or would be, if there were people. Then the dead hour. Then the dinner run, which in Cold Fork means four covers and a family that took the wrong exit off 26 and has now committed.
Close at nine. Home by ten-forty. Bed by eleven.
Five and a half hours, and I do it six days, and on the seventh I do the books, which is worse.
Danny's been dead four years and one month and his name is still on that sign, and everyone in this town assumes that's grief, and it is, but it's also the ninety dollars it costs to have a man come out from Bend with a ladder. Grief and ninety dollars look identical from the road.
"Order in," I say to nobody, because Kiki's got the flat-top and Kiki's fourteen and my sister's problem and mine on weekends. There's no order in. It's a reflex. I do it the way you'd flick a light switch in a house with no power.
The bell over the door goes at 8:52 p.m.
We close at nine.
I know that bell. That bell has a vocabulary — there's the tourist yank, the local nudge, the Merle-shoulder-check. This is a sound I've never heard it make. Somebody opened the door slowly, like it was a question.
He fills the frame. That's the first thing.
Six-three, maybe six-four, in a leather cut with a black raven on the back that I don't see until later, and hair going grey at the temples in a way that would look distinguished on a man who cared, and this man plainly does not care.
Beard. Forearms like bridge cable. Something wrong with the eyes — not wrong wrong. Tired in a way that's older than he is.
He stands on the mat.
"We're open till nine," I say.
He nods.
"You're welcome to sit."
He sits.
Not at the counter. In the corner booth, back to the wall, which is where cops and criminals and my late husband all used to sit and I have never met a fourth category.
Dot has gone completely still. Merle has lowered the Sentinel by exactly two inches, which for Merle is a standing ovation.
I bring the menu over. He doesn't take it.
"Pie," he says.
"That's a start. We've got cherry, we've got apple, we've got a marionberry that I will personally vouch for, and we've got a lemon meringue that has been in that case since Sunday and has entered a stage of life I'd describe as contemplative."
Nothing. Not a flicker.
Tough room.
"Marionberry," he says.
"Good choice. That's the one with the self-respect. Coffee?"
"Yes."
"Cream?"
"No."
I write it down, which I do not need to do, but a woman needs somewhere to put her hands.
"You want that heated?"
"No."
"Ice cream?"
"No."
"You want to say a fifth word tonight, or are we rationing?"
And there it is — a twitch. Bottom left corner of the mouth, quarter of an inch, gone in half a second.
I have been serving food to strangers for nineteen years. That twitch is a five-star review.
On the way past the counter Dot catches my sleeve.
"Georgia."
"Don't."
"I'm only going to say one thing."
"That has never once been true."
"He wiped his boots," she whispers. "On the mat. Twice."
"That's not a personality trait, Dot, that's hygiene."
"Honey," she says, "in this town it's practically a marriage proposal."
I bring the pie. I bring the coffee. I go back behind the counter and pretend to reconcile a drawer that reconciled itself an hour ago, and I watch him in the reflection of the pie case because I am a coward with excellent peripheral vision.
He does not eat the pie.
He picks up the fork. He turns it over. He sets it down beside the plate, squared up, tines aligned with the edge of the table like a man setting a place for somebody who isn't coming.
He drinks the coffee, all of it, black, in the manner of a man who has drunk a lot of bad coffee and stopped noticing.
And he looks out the window.
Not at anything. At the highway. At the dark. He looks out that window for thirty-five minutes with the attention most people reserve for a house fire.
At 9:27 he stands up.
"Pie was untouched," I say, before I can stop myself. "You want it boxed?"
"No, ma'am."
"Was it —" And I hate this, I hate that my voice does what it does, but the diner does eleven covers on a Tuesday and I have a very specific relationship with the phrase was something wrong with the food. "Was it all right?"
He looks at the pie. He looks at me. He takes a long breath in through his nose like the question deserves a real answer and he's checking his inventory to see if he's got one.
"Wasn't hungry," he says.
"Then why'd you order it?"
"Wanted a reason to sit down."
And he puts money on the table and he goes.
I don't count it till the door shuts. Then I count it twice.
Sixty dollars.
For a four-dollar slice of pie and a dollar-fifty coffee.
I stand in the middle of my own dining room holding sixty dollars in my hand like it's a bird that flew into the window.
"Well," says Dot.
"Don't."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said well."
"Well isn't anything."
"Well is a whole novel, Dot."
Merle folds the Sentinel and gets his hat off the hook and says, on his way out the door, with the timing of a man who has waited eleven years for exactly this: "Sixty dollars for pie he didn't eat. Georgia, honey, I've been eating your pie for a decade and I'd pay sixty dollars to not eat it too."
"Get out of my restaurant, Merle."
"Night, Georgia."
The power bill is eighty-one dollars. It's on the desk in the office under a mug. Sixty dollars is not eighty-one dollars, but sixty dollars is the difference between paying it and having a conversation with a man named Gordon at the utility company about the meaning of the word soon.
I put it in the drawer. I turn off the fryer. I go home.
He comes back the next night.
8:50. Same booth. Same order — and this time he says the word marionberry himself, all four syllables of it, which from him is practically a monologue.
"You want the fork again?" I ask. "Or are we skipping the middleman?"
"Fork's fine."
"You're not going to use it."
"Probably not."
"Then it's theater."
"Everything's theater," he says. "That's why it works."
And I stand there, order pad in hand, in the dead middle of my own eleven-cover Wednesday, and I think: oh no.
Because that was a sentence. And it was a good one. And a man who can build a sentence like that is a man who has been choosing not to, which is the single most annoying quality a human being can possess.
He leaves eighty dollars.
Thursday he leaves fifty-five. Friday he doesn't come, and I hate the size of the hole that leaves in a Friday, and I hate that I checked the window at 8:50, and I hate that Dot saw me check the window at 8:50 and had the grace to say nothing, and then ruined it by humming.
Saturday he's back.
By the second week I've stopped pretending. I bring the coffee before he asks. I've started slicing the marionberry at 8:40 so it's not the last sad wedge of it. Kiki's caught on and has begun referring to him exclusively as "your boyfriend," which I have addressed with a firmness I did not feel.
By the second week I know four things about him, which is four more than he's given me.
One: he's not staying at the motel, because Ray told me so at the gas pump, at length, with theories.
Two: he's got a bike parked behind the old feed store and it hasn't moved in eleven days, because Cold Fork has one street and no secrets.
Three: he counts the exits. Every time he sits down, before anything else, his eyes go door, kitchen, back hall, window. Same order. Danny used to do that. Danny did two tours and he did it too and he never knew he was doing it.
Four: whatever's behind that window he stares at, it isn't in Oregon.
Cold Fork, meanwhile, has taken a position.
"He's DEA," says Ray Delgado, at the pump, with total confidence.
"Ray."
"Or he's hiding from the DEA. Could go either way. The posture's the same."
"He's a man who likes pie."
"He doesn't eat the pie, Georgia. That's the tell. Nobody buys pie they don't eat unless there's a federal component."
Kiki's theory is that he's a country singer. My sister's theory, delivered by phone at eleven at night, is that I'm being groomed for a timeshare. Dot Pruitt's theory, which she has declined to elaborate on for eleven days, is one word long and the word is "mm."
Merle has no theory. Merle says only, once, from behind the Sentinel: "Man sits with his back to the wall, he's not hiding from anybody. Man hiding sits where he can leave."
And I said, "So what's he doing?"
And Merle said, "Waiting for somebody to come through that door," and turned a page, and would not say another word about it for two weeks.
On the fourteenth night I put the pie down, and instead of walking away I sit down across from him.
He goes very still.
"Relax," I say. "It's a booth, not a proposal."
"Ma'am —"
"Georgia."
"Georgia."
"There it is. Two syllables, you survived." I fold my hands. "Here's my situation. You've tipped me four hundred and thirty dollars in two weeks for pie you have never once eaten. That's not a tip. That's a subscription. And I've decided I need to know what I'm subscribed to."
He looks at the table for a while.
"Money's not for the pie," he says.
"I gathered."
"It's for the chair."
"The chair's free."
"No, it isn't." He says it flat, no self-pity in it at all, which is somehow worse. "Not for me. Never has been."
And I don't have anything for that. I'm a woman who always has something.
I have a line for the health inspector and a line for the propane man and I had a line at my husband's wake that made his mother laugh so hard she had to sit down on the church steps, and I have got absolutely nothing for the man in the corner booth.
So I say the only true thing I've got.
"His name's on the sign," I say. "Outside. Boone. That was my husband. He's been gone four years and I can't afford to take it down and I wouldn't if I could, and I don't know why I just told you that."
He looks at me. Really looks, for the first time — not exits, not the window. Me.
"Because I'm leaving," he says. "People tell things to people who're leaving."
"Are you? Leaving?"
And the man goes quiet in a way I can only describe as structural. Like a building deciding.
"Bike's broken," he says finally.
"Can you fix it?"
"Yes."
"When?"
He picks up the fork. Turns it over. Sets it down, squared to the table edge, tines aligned.
"Haven't," he says.
Behind me, Dot Pruitt says, to nobody, in the tone of a woman calling a horse race: "Ohhh, that's good."
"Dot."
"I'm eating."
"You finished eating at seven."
"I'm savoring, Georgia."