Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Ella
Icount the money twice.
Forty dollars. One twenty, one ten, two fives. Tucked under the edge of the coffee saucer like it wasn't anything, like a man in a road captain's cut leaves forty dollars on a twelve-dollar bill every Tuesday and doesn't look back.
I stand at the counter with it in my hand and I don't move for longer than I should.
Becca's on her way out. Her shift technically ends at two and she started watching the clock at one-forty, same as always.
On the way past the dessert case she lifts the lid on the tin where the by-the-slice money goes and takes the folding bills out of it, leaves the coins, tucks the rest into her back pocket without breaking stride.
She doesn't look at me. There's no reason to.
I count that tin at open and we both know I won't say anything, and the not-saying is so old between us that it's stopped feeling like losing. It feels like weather.
The door swings shut behind her. The diner is mine now, mine to close, mine to mop, mine to prep for tomorrow's open. This is how it goes on Tuesdays. I don't mind Tuesdays.
I put twenty-eight dollars in the register.
Twelve of it is the bill. The rest is Darlene's cut, which she calls a split and which has never once split even.
I've been arguing this policy in my head for two years and out loud exactly once, and I know what out loud cost me, so I put the twenty-eight in the register and I don't argue.
The other twelve goes in my apron pocket.
I stand there for another second. Then I take out ten more from the register, look at it, put it back.
Take it out again. My father used to say that a person's character is what they do when nobody's watching, and I think about that every time I stand at this register at the end of a shift, tallying what's mine against what's claimed.
I put the ten back. I'm not there yet, whatever there is. I'll know it when I get to it.
The diner closes down around me the way it always does, familiar as breathing.
The grill comes first, while it's still warm enough to give up the day without a fight.
I scrape it down to bare steel and push the night's char into the trough, and the smell comes up the way it always does, scorched grease and old coffee and the iron underneath, and I oil the surface so it won't pit before morning.
My hands know the order of it without me.
Hood fan off. Pilot lights checked. Fryer baskets hung to drip.
The cold line broken down into the walk-in, labeled and dated in my own writing, because nobody else dates anything and spoiled product comes out of my pay and not Darlene's.
Then the front. Flip the sign. Wipe the booths and run a rag along the chrome edge of the counter until it throws the overhead lights back at me.
I stack the chairs on two tables and leave the rest, because tomorrow's a Wednesday and Wednesdays are slow and I'll want somewhere to sit and do the supply order before the breakfast rush.
I run the last of the dishes. And then I listen.
I know every sound this building makes. The refrigerator compressor that kicks on loud and then settles.
The third floorboard from the left near the coffee station that creaks no matter how you step on it.
The way the front windows rattle a little when a semi goes past on the highway, the glass loose in its frames since before I was born.
When the dish machine cuts off and the fan winds down, the place goes quiet in layers, one system at a time, until it's just the compressor and the highway and me.
This is the part nobody fights me for. Nobody wants the diner in the dead hour after the lunch crowd clears, chairs up and the floor still wet.
It costs and pays nothing and asks for hands, and it is the only stretch of any day that is entirely, uncontestedly mine.
My father built this place with four other men and a borrowed truck, 1996, the year before my mother left and two years before I came along. He used to say the barn-wood counter was the best decision he ever made and I was the second. I used to pretend to be offended by that ordering.
I wipe down the counter and I'm not thinking about the man who sat at the end of it.
The road name on his cut is ASH. I've seen it a hundred times.
The Reapers come in twice a week, most of them, rotating who shows up and who doesn't, loud and easy and better tippers than half the county suits.
I'm not afraid of them. I've never been afraid of them.
I've watched Wolf himself sit at that corner booth for two hours one January morning, drinking coffee and reading something on his phone, and he nodded at me when he left and that was the whole of it.
A fence, my father would have said. You don't fear a fence.
You understand what it's keeping in and what it's keeping out and you appreciate the difference.
This one, Ash, has been coming in longer than most of the others.
Always the same stool. Always the same order until today.
I've refilled his coffee enough times that I know he takes it black and he doesn't hurry it and he sits with his back to the wall the way men do when they've been somewhere that taught them to.
I know all this the way I know everything about this diner: because I pay attention. I pay attention because attention is the only thing I have that's entirely mine. Nobody can skim attention from the register.
I didn't know he was paying attention back.
The cherry pie. Nobody orders the cherry.
It's the one I make most because it moves slowest, and it moves slowest because people see cherry and they think canned filling and a store-bought crust, and they order the apple instead, which is a fine pie but not the one I've spent three years getting right.
My great-grandmother's recipe on my father's side, the one she wrote on a card in pencil that's so faded now I've got it memorized.
Brown sugar instead of white. A pinch of cardamom.
The lattice is the hard part. I still can't get it to lie even.
He said it looked even. I didn't believe him, exactly. But I let myself hear it.
I'm almost done with the mopping when I think about the forty dollars again.
It's not a flirtation. I've had flirtation left on receipts.
Phone numbers, one memorable poem that I genuinely hope was a joke.
This isn't that. This is something else, something I don't have a name for that sits in a different part of my chest. Like someone looked up and saw me.
Not the diner, not the coffee, not whether the saltshaker was filled correctly or the eggs were turned on time.
Me.
I finish mopping. I rinse the mop bucket and hang it on the hook by the back door and I go upstairs to the apartment, which is small and mine and has a window that looks out over the highway if you stand at the right angle.
Two rooms and a bath, the kitchen barely big enough to turn around in, which is funny considering what I do all day.
My father used the apartment for storage when he was alive.
After Darlene papered the will to her satisfaction, I moved up here.
I didn't have anywhere else to go and I wasn't leaving the diner.
I've never told anyone that's why I stayed. That I didn't have anywhere else.
I change out of my work clothes. I sit on the edge of the bed.
Under the bed, in a shoebox my father kept his army discharge papers in, there are two boots.
Custom leather, made by a man in Harlan who has probably been dead for years, made specifically for my father's daughter in a size seven because he measured my foot himself and drove three hours round-trip to place the order.
Dark brown, almost black, with a stacked heel and a low scallop cut into the top of each shaft and stitching so fine and even you'd swear a machine laid it down, until you look close and find the one place the man's hand wandered a thread off true and caught itself on the next pass.
My initials tooled on the outside of the left heel, E.S.
, and his initials on the right, R.S., because he said the boots should know who made them possible.
The soles are barely scuffed. I've put maybe twenty miles on them in my life and every one of them across this apartment floor.
Ray Sutton. My dad.
He gave them to me with no occasion attached, just set the box on the counter between a rush and a slower hour and said a woman who works on her feet all day ought to have one pair made to fit them.
I went into the walk-in so the lunch crowd wouldn't see my face do what it did.
He pretended not to know why I'd gone back there, and he had a fresh cup of coffee waiting when I came out.
I don't wear them outside. I've thought about why that is, and the best I can come up with is that they're the last thing of his that nobody else has touched.
Darlene has the house and the truck and his watch collection and the woodworking tools she sold to a man in Whitesburg.
She has the diner in every practical sense that matters.
She does not have the boots because she doesn't know about the boots, and I intend to keep it that way.
I take them out and hold one in each hand.
The leather's gone soft with the years but still holds its shape, cool and smooth, and it smells the way it has always smelled, of oil and the cedar of the box and faintly, still, of him, or of what I've decided is him.
I run my thumb over the tooled initials the way I always do.
And I think about a man eating cherry pie and not looking away when I answered him.
His road name is Ash. I know this and nothing else about him, except the black coffee and the end stool and the way he sat there today with his cup gone cold while he watched Becca do what Becca does, and the way he put the cup down after.
He didn't slam it. He just set it down. Deliberate. One single careful motion, and then he was still again, and I felt the still of it from across the room, on my skin, the way you feel someone standing close before you turn around and find them there.
I put the boots back in the box. Some things I keep and don't use because using them would mean they could be taken.
From my apron pocket I take out the twelve dollars I kept. I fold it and put it in the box with the boots. Not Darlene's. Not the house's. Not carved out of anything that belongs to this place.
Twelve dollars and a question I don't have language for yet, and the boots, and the knowledge that he'll be back Thursday.
I tell myself this means nothing.
I'm lying, and I know I'm lying, and I go to bed anyway.