Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Ella
He comes in at nine-fourteen.
I know this because I've been watching the door since nine, which is information about myself I'm not proud of. The breakfast rush thins out around eight-forty and by nine the counter is mostly empty and I have no reason to keep checking the door except that I've been checking it.
He comes in at nine-fourteen and takes his stool and I bring him coffee without being asked, because I always bring him coffee without being asked, and this time when I set it down he says, "Thank you, Ella," and I nearly drop the pot.
He's never used my name before.
I set the pot down on the warmer and I go back to the kitchen and I stand at the grill for a minute doing nothing, which I cannot afford to do on a Thursday morning, and then I pull myself together and start on the prep work for the lunch special.
Lena's on the floor today. She's the better waitress of the two, technically, faster, more accurate on orders, doesn't forget the drink refills. What she is not is someone I can stop watching. Becca is loud about being awful. Lena is quiet about it, which is a different category of problem.
She's at a two-top near the window, an older couple I know by sight, the Hatfields from up past the cut.
I hear her laugh at something the man says, the customer-service laugh, easy and warm.
She's good at that sound. I've been working alongside it for two years and I still check, every time, to see if it's real.
It never quite is.
The grill needs cleaning on the left side. I do that. I restock the pass-through with plates. I do not look through the kitchen window at the counter.
I look through the kitchen window at the counter.
He's got his coffee in both hands, not drinking it yet, just holding it, and he's looking at the menu board on the wall.
My father wrote that board when he opened the place, with a chalk pen, the kind with the chisel tip, and the lettering is slightly uneven in the way of someone who was very careful but not trained.
I've repainted the board three times because the paint chips, but I always trace the same letters, the same sizing, the same slight lean to the right on anything over four syllables. I can't bring myself to fix it.
I go back to my prep work. I'm fine.
When the Hatfields leave and Lena heads to the back to run their dishes, I come out to the floor to do the coffee circuit. He's the only one at the counter.
I top off his cup. I'm about to move on when he says, "Your dad build this place himself?"
I stop.
I look at him. He's looking at the counter: the barn-wood surface, the three knots in the grain near the center that have been there since my father laid it. He's not looking at me, which makes it easier to answer.
"With some help," I say. "Four other men and a borrowed truck. 1996."
He nods once, like he's filing that away. "The wood's local."
"Salvage from the Hensley barn, up past Coldiron. The barn came down in a storm and my dad bought the lumber off them for two hundred dollars."
He runs one finger along the edge of the counter, not the surface, the underside lip, where the wood is rough and unfinished. Nobody does that. Nobody touches that part.
"Good wood," he says.
I don't know what to say to that so I say, "You want anything else? We've got biscuits this morning."
"Did you make them?"
"Yes."
"Then yes."
I bring him the biscuits. I'm very deliberate about where I put my eyes.
He eats one and he says, "You grow up in the diner?"
"Pretty much." I'm at the coffee warmer, my back half to him, which is easier. "My dad watched me from behind the counter when I was little. I had a spot under the pass-through where I'd do homework."
"What changed."
It's not exactly a question. It lands like one anyway, open-ended, waiting.
I turn around. "My dad died," I say. "Three years ago."
He looks at me the way he looked at the counter. Steady, full attention, no hurry to it. "I'm sorry," he says, and it sounds like he means it the way people mean things when they've lost something themselves, not the polite kind.
"He built this place," I say, which I've already told him, but it's the true center of the answer so I say it again. "He built it and it was his and then it wasn't and then I came back to run it." I stop. I didn't mean to say that last part. "It's a long story."
"I'm not going anywhere."
I look at him. He's not performing patience. He's just sitting there with his coffee and his second biscuit and his complete, undemonstrative attention, and I have the strangest feeling of being held still by it. Like the attention itself is a hand on my shoulder.
"The cherry," I say instead. "I told you Tuesday they were my dad's recipes.
The cherry's older than the rest. It came down from his grandmother, on his side.
" I'm not sure why the lineage matters, only that it does, and getting it right feels like the least I owe her.
"She was from Harlan County. She made it with brown sugar and a pinch of cardamom, which sounds wrong but isn't."
"Cardamom," he repeats.
"Most people can't name it. They just know the pie tastes different."
"Is that why you keep making it even though it doesn't sell."
The observation is so precise I go still for a second. I haven't said anything about it selling. I haven't said anything about making it more than the other pies.
"How do you know it doesn't sell," I say.
"Been here twice a week for seven months. I watch the case." A beat. "Cherry's always the last to go."
I look at him for a moment. Just look at him, taking that in, the fact of it: seven months, twice a week, watching the pie case with enough attention to clock the sales patterns on each variety.
Nobody has ever done that. Nobody has ever paid that kind of attention to anything in this diner except what they were about to put in their mouths.
"It sells eventually," I say. "People just have to be talked into it."
"Why don't you talk them into it."
"That's not really my way." I stop. "I don't like to push."
He looks at me for one second longer than is comfortable, like he's putting that sentence somewhere specific, and then he looks back down at his coffee. "What's the lunch special today."
I tell him. He orders it. He finishes his coffee and I refill it and we don't talk for a while, but it's the kind of not-talking that isn't absence. It's more like he's still in the conversation, just letting it rest between questions.
Lena comes back from the back and stations herself at the wait stand near the door, and I feel the shift in the room the way I always do when she's positioned to watch something. She doesn't look at the counter directly. She doesn't have to.
"The counter's from Harlan County too?" Ash asks.
I pull my attention back. "The lumber? No, I said Coldiron." I stop myself before I map the whole county for him. "Hensley barn. Leslie County line."
"And the recipe's Harlan."
"She was. Harlan first, then Whitesburg when she married." I'm not sure why I know this, except that my father told me these things the way people hand down the things that matter, in pieces, over time, and I kept all of them. "Why."
"I'm from up near Harlan," he says. "My grandmother was too."
It's the first thing he's told me about himself. I feel it land.
"Small world," I say, which is insufficient but it's what comes out.
"Small county," he says. "Few counties." He picks up his coffee cup and then sets it back down without drinking, a decision mid-motion. "She have a name? Your dad's grandmother."
"Sutton," I say, and then hear it for what it is, the married name, mine too. "Beulah Price, before she married in. My dad's grandmother."
He shakes his head, slow. "Don't know that name. But there's a dozen families in those hills I never learned."
He says it without apology, matter-of-fact, like lost connections are just the topography of this county. They're everywhere, they're unremarkable, you note them and move on.
Lena is still at the stand. I can feel her not looking.
Ash finishes his coffee. He finishes the lunch special when it comes up, clean plate, no complaint, and I note that he eats the way he does everything else, without fuss, without performance. He just does the thing in front of him.
He leaves forty dollars again. He's standing up, reaching for his jacket, and he says without particular emphasis, "What time do you get off on Saturdays?"
I open my mouth. I close it.
He's already at the door, jacket half on. He looks back once, not waiting, not pressing, and then he's through it, and I hear the low rumble of the bike in the lot and then the highway.
I stand at the counter with the forty dollars in my hand.
"What'd the biker want?"
I turn. Lena is wiping a table three feet away, her back to me, her voice casual as weather.
"Nothing," I say.
"Mm," she says.
It's the same sound. The same exact sound, and I don't know if that's a coincidence or if there's something in the air of this county that teaches people to say mm when they mean that is not true and we both know it.
I go back to the kitchen.
Lena is going to tell Darlene. She always tells Darlene. That's the arrangement, whether anyone said so out loud or not, the way most arrangements in my life operate, never stated, completely understood, enforced through channels I can't see.
I don't know what Darlene will do with it. I don't know what I would say if she asked.
I never answered the question about Saturday.
I don't know why. I stood there with an answer forming and something in me went sideways, some reflex that says don't, that says this is the kind of thing that gets noticed and costs you, and by the time I'd worked through it he was already gone.
I plate the next order up. I run the grill. I do not think about the way he said I'm not going anywhere like it was a simple fact, a piece of information he was supplying, nothing behind it but truth.
I think about it anyway.