Chapter 27 #2
Dale doesn't argue. There's nothing left in him to argue with. He follows Rios toward the road like a man walking out of one life with no clear picture of the next one, except that it has Sandra Fitch in it and a long table of questions.
I turn around.
The diner door is already open. Ella is standing in it, phone in her hand, still on the call. She looks at the empty lot and she looks at me.
She says into the phone: "He's gone. I'll call you in an hour." She puts the phone down.
I go up the steps.
I stop in front of her. She looks up at me and her face is doing the thing it does when she's processing several things at once, the internal inventory, the call, but underneath that something else, something I recognize now, something I've watched three nights running, which is her when she's decided to stop managing and just be in the room.
"It's done," I say.
She looks at me.
"Not the legal part," I say. "That takes time. But this part, Keller in the lot, the pressure, this part's done. He doesn't have a position anymore. He knows it."
She's quiet a moment.
Then she says: "Dale."
"On his way to Sandra's right now. Rios is driving him. He's going to tell her everything, which helps you a good deal more than it helps him." I hold her eyes. "The debt's his to carry. That part was never yours."
"Darlene."
"Same." I pause. "Sandra will be in touch about both. But neither of them has a claim on this building anymore."
She stands in the doorway of her diner and she looks at the empty lot and she breathes.
"Okay," she says.
I look at her. I look at the diner behind her, the barn wood counter through the door, the menu board in her father's handwriting, the boots on her feet.
She put them on this morning before five-thirty when she came down to open, before she knew what was in the lot, because it was going to be that kind of day.
"Okay," I say back.
She looks at me a moment. Then she looks at the lot, the empty lot, her lot.
"Come inside," she says. "I'll make coffee."
I follow her in.
She makes coffee. I sit at the counter, my stool, end, back to the wall, and she moves through the kitchen the way she moves through everything she knows well, and the grill comes up and the coffee comes up and the morning starts the way mornings start here, with her hands and her father's recipes and the particular warmth of a kitchen that's been running since before dawn.
She slides a cup across the barn wood. Black. She knows.
She pours one for herself and comes around the counter and sits on the stool beside mine.
We drink our coffee.
Pope knocks on the glass at five-forty-five, a brief check, and I raise a hand through the window and he goes. Denny texts at six that the highway's clear and I tell him to stand down and he does. Wolf texts at six-ten: Sandra called. AG is moving. Clean.
I show Ella the text.
She reads it. She hands the phone back.
She looks at the barn wood counter, the knots, the three near the register.
"My father told everyone about this counter," she says. "Every new customer, anybody who'd listen. The Hensley barn, the borrowed truck, the four other men." She runs her hand along the grain. "He wanted people to know it had a story."
"Good story," I say.
"It is." She looks at it another moment. Then: "He'd want me to tell it."
"Then tell it," I say. "Every customer who'll listen."
She looks at me.
"Starting today," I say.
She looks at the counter. She looks at the door. She looks at the morning light coming through the front windows, the early November light going gold on the chrome and the barn wood.
She gets up. She unlocks the front door. She flips the sign to OPEN.
She comes back behind the counter.
The first customer comes in at six-seventeen, a county worker I recognize by sight, mud on his boots, the comfortable ease of a man who knows where he eats breakfast. He takes a stool, not mine, and he says, "Morning," and she says, "Morning," and she pours his coffee without being asked, and the diner does what the diner does.
I drink my coffee. I watch.
At six-thirty she puts a slice of cherry pie on the counter in front of me without a word.
Not a plate from the case. She made it this morning, before five-thirty, before she knew what was in the lot.
Made it the way she makes everything, because it's Monday and the recipe is her great-grandmother's and the lattice needs the practice.
I look at the pie.
I look at her.
She's already back at the grill. She doesn't look through the window.
I eat the pie. The cardamom underneath the cherry. The lattice even.
The diner fills up around me and I stay until nine, same as always, and then I put on my jacket and settle my tab and stop at the counter on my way out.
She's at the pass-through window. She looks up.
I tap the barn wood once with two fingers, not a wave, not a gesture that means anything except that I was here and I'll be back, and I go.
Outside the lot is mine and clear and the November sky is hard blue above the mountain and the highway runs both directions the way it always has, east toward Keller's forty miles and west toward the ridge and home.
I put on my helmet.
I ride.