Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Ella
Darlene's house smells like plug-in air freshener and something Lena's been baking since noon, a cobbler from the look of it, the good kind with the crisp top, the kind that takes actual effort. Lena bakes when she's performing. I've learned to read the kitchen output like weather.
I come in through the back door because I always come in through the back door, which started as habit and has calcified into statement, mine or theirs, I'm no longer sure.
I set the rolls I made this morning on the counter.
Darlene expects a contribution, and I stopped bringing store-bought after the second time she mentioned it in front of company.
I wash my hands at the kitchen sink and I don't say anything to Lena, who is pulling the cobbler out of the oven, because Lena and I don't talk in kitchens. We've established that.
"You're late," she says.
"Diner closed at three."
"It's three-forty."
It's a twelve-minute drive. I don't say this.
The house is nicer than it should be. I've been doing the diner's books long enough to know what the margins look like, and the margins don't account for the new sectional in the living room or the kitchen renovation Darlene put in last spring or the vehicle in the driveway that Becca drives and which costs more per month than I make in two weeks.
There's a version of this math that works out fine, where Dale contributes and the household runs on combined income and everything is ordinary and above board.
I've been trying to make that version add up for three years. It doesn't add up.
I know the number the diner makes, because I'm the one who makes it.
I know what comes in on a good Saturday and what the walk-in costs to run and what's left after the vendors are paid, and I know the distance between that number and this house is a gap you could drive Becca's car through.
The diner is mine on a piece of paper in a drawer somewhere that I have never been allowed to read.
Everything the diner earns is Darlene's, by an arrangement nobody has ever shown me the terms of, and the two or three times I worked up the nerve to ask to see those terms I was told, in the patient voice, that it was complicated and I shouldn't trouble myself with it.
I've stopped asking out loud. I haven't stopped wanting to see the paper.
Becca is on the couch with her phone, horizontal, in the attitude of someone who has not moved since noon. She raises a hand when I come through the doorway, not a wave, just an acknowledgment of my existence, which is more than she manages at the diner so I take it.
Dale is at the table with a glass of something that isn't sweet tea.
He looks up when I sit down. He has the face of a man who is solving a problem in his head constantly, a low-level continuous calculation that never quite resolves, and it makes him appear permanently distracted even when he's looking right at you.
He's been wearing that face for about a year now.
Before that he was warmer, or something that functioned like warmth.
Engaged, at least, present in the room in a way that registered.
I take the seat across the table from him, not the one beside him, which is a thing I started doing sometime in the last year without ever deciding to, the way the body decides things and tells you about them later, if it tells you at all.
"Ella," he says.
"Dale."
He looks back at his glass. The calculation resumes.
Darlene comes in from the hallway with the smooth unhurried energy she carries everywhere, the energy of a woman who has decided she is in charge and has been vindicated by events.
She's put together the way she always is, not formal, just deliberate, nothing accidentally chosen.
She looks at the rolls I brought, then at me, in that order.
"Honey wheat?" she says.
"Plain. Ran out of honey wheat at the diner Friday and didn't reorder yet."
She accepts this with a small nod that means she's noting it for later. I've spent three years cataloging Darlene's small nods and what they mean. This one means: you should have planned better, and I won't say so now, but I'll say so eventually.
We sit down to dinner.
The food is fine. The cobbler is genuinely good.
Lena has a talent she doesn't get credit for, which is ironic in a way I don't have the energy to appreciate.
Becca comes to the table, still on her phone, eating with one hand, contributing nothing to the conversation except a periodic sound of amusement at something on her screen that the rest of us aren't part of.
Dale eats two bites and pushes the food around. His glass gets refilled once, by himself, from a bottle he brought to the table, which Darlene observes and does not comment on.
"The weekend numbers came in," Darlene says to me. "Friday was down."
"There was weather Friday. People stayed home."
"There was weather last November and we were up eleven percent."
"Last November was the week before Thanksgiving." I eat a roll. "People stock up before the holiday. It's a different variable."
She considers this with the expression she uses when she's deciding whether to accept an explanation or note it as an excuse. "Well. We'll see how next weekend looks."
I say nothing. I eat.
Across the table Dale takes his phone out of his breast pocket and checks it with the quick motion of someone who has been waiting for a message and hasn't gotten it.
He puts it back. He does this three times in the span of dinner.
The third time, whatever he sees on the screen makes him go still for a moment in a way nobody else at the table notices because nobody else is watching.
I'm watching.
He puts the phone back. He picks up his fork. He sets it back down and excuses himself from the table, and Darlene says, "Dale, we haven't had dessert," and he says he'll be right back, and he goes down the hall, and I hear the back door open and close.
Darlene watches the hallway for a moment. Then she turns to me with the transition that means we're changing subjects, smooth and deliberate like a river finding a new channel. "I've been meaning to talk to you about the counter display. The pie case."
"What about it."
"Becca says it looks cluttered. Too many labels."
"The labels say what's in the pies. People want to know what they're eating."
"People also want to feel like they're somewhere nice." She reaches over and serves herself cobbler. "It's a small thing. Just something to think about."
I think about it. I think about it for exactly as long as it takes me to understand that this is not about the pie case.
The Reaper at the counter. Lena was on the floor the morning he stayed, and Lena carries things to Darlene the way water finds the low ground, without ever seeming to move at all. The pie case is just the polite door in. Becca's never cared about a pie case in her life, hers or anybody else's.
"The display's been the same for six years," I say.
"And we've been talking about refreshing the look for six years.
" She holds my eyes. Pleasant, light, without any particular pressure.
That's Darlene's best move: the absence of pressure that functions as pressure.
"There's also the matter of the clientele.
I got a call from the Holbrooks this week.
They saw motorcycles out front on a Tuesday and turned around. "
"The Holbrooks drove fifteen minutes out of their way to eat here and they turned around because of bikes in the lot."
"They're particular."
"They've been coming here since my father opened. I don't think they're that particular."
"Ella." Her voice stays level. "I'm not asking you to do anything. I'm passing along what I heard. We both want what's best for the diner."
We look at each other across the cobbler.
"He's a paying customer," I say. "Same as everyone."
She serves herself another spoonful. "Well," she says, the same way she always says it, the word doing work it doesn't announce. "Paying isn't everything."
Becca scrolls. Lena eats. Dale does not come back from the hallway.
I stay through the cobbler because leaving early costs more than staying, which is the calculation that governs almost every decision I make in this house.
I help Lena with the dishes because not helping would become a story, and I say goodnight to Darlene, and I go out through the back door the same way I came in.
Dale is in the driveway. He's on the phone, turned away from the house, and when I come out the door he turns and sees me and something moves across his face, not guilt, not quite, more like a man interrupted in a private moment who wasn't expecting a witness.
He wraps up the call with two words I don't catch and puts the phone in his pocket.
"Night, Ella," he says.
"Night, Dale."
He goes past me into the house. I stand in the driveway for a second in the cool dark and I think about that look on his face and what's underneath it, and I think about the way he kept checking his phone at the table like a man waiting on a verdict, and I think about the bottle he brought to another man's table because he couldn't get through the meal without it.
Whatever's been eating Dale has been eating him for a year, and it's worse than it was.
A year ago I might have had something like sympathy to spare for him.
I've learned to spend my worry where it does some good, and Dale stopped being a place where it does any good around the same time he started looking at all of us like we were standing between him and something he was owed.
I drive back to the diner in the dark with the window down, the mountain air cooling the way it does once the sun drops behind the ridge even in July, the dark loud with crickets and the far-off downshift of a truck working the grade, and I go upstairs and I sit on the edge of my bed and I take out the boots.
E.S. / R.S.
I turn the left boot in my hands and look at my initials and my father's initials side by side in the leather, and I think about how he had them put there because he said the boots should know who made them possible.
I've heard about the Black Ridge Rally every year for six years.
One of the Caudill boys goes every year and comes back talking about it for weeks.
A band, a bonfire, bikes from six counties, the whole ridge lit up.
My father went once, before I was born, and he said it was the best night he'd had in a county that had given him some good nights.
He told it like a story he'd polished, the bonfire you could see from the next ridge over, a man he'd known from the service turning up out of nowhere, a band that played until the sky went gray.
I used to ask for that story the way kids ask for the same story over and over, and he told it the same way every time, and the sameness was the whole point of it.
Darlene says the Rally is rough. Darlene says it's not the kind of thing that's good for business. Darlene says a lot of things and most of them have the shape of a reason and the substance of a fence.
The Rally is the last Saturday in October. Months off still, far enough that wanting to go doesn't have to mean anything yet, which is maybe why I let myself do it.
I've never gone. I've never let myself want to go, which is different from not wanting to, and I'm only now noticing the difference, which means something about where I am or where I've been or maybe just the fact of a man asking me what time I get off on Saturdays in the same tone he uses to report road conditions.
Diner's closed Saturday nights.
He said it like he'd looked it up. Like he'd thought about it before he said it.
I put the boots back in the box. I put the box under the bed. I lie down with the ceiling above me and the diner below me and the mountain dark outside the window, and I think: October.
I don't let myself finish the thought. But I don't stop it either, and that's new, and I'm aware enough to know it's new, which means something has shifted and I'm not entirely sure when it happened or what to do about the fact that it has.
I go to sleep thinking about it.
I don't decide anything.
But I don't not decide, either.