Chapter 55
SLOANE
We finish the church just as the light goes.
The drift really was up past my knee, packed hard against the doors, and it took eleven of us the better part of two hours to clear it — shoveling, sweeping, hauling it away in wheelbarrows that a teenage boy named Cody kept tipping over.
By the end there's a clear path up the steps and the doors swing again.
Doris has gone at the windows with a hose, and a kind of giddy satisfaction has settled over the whole group.
We all stand back and look at the cleared steps, and somebody says well, the Devil can kiss our backsides. Everybody laughs, and then Ruthie claps her hands and announces that the diner is open and the coffee is on and nobody is to argue.
There's a scramble for vehicles in the half-dark. Cody and his friend pile into the back of Maggie's truck without asking, and Maggie jerks her head at me to take the cab. We drive down the Cawley road toward town in a loose caravan of dusty vehicles.
I'm covered in dust, there's grit in my mouth, my hair is a total disaster, and I have never in my life wanted a coffee, a glass of ice water, and a slice of cake as desperately as I want them right now. The thought of all three is almost erotic.
Maggie looks sexy when she's driving. One hand loose at the top of the wheel, the other resting on the gearstick between us, her arm brown and dust-streaked, a muscle moving in it every time she shifts down.
She drives like the truck is just an extension of her and there's nothing to think about.
I glance at her forearm for slightly too long and have to make myself stop.
Today has been one strange thing after another and if this were a movie, I'd tell myself to jump out of the car.
The haze, the caravan, the wholesome church goers welcoming the outsider into the fold.
This is the bit before the city woman realizes the friendly townspeople have been planning to harvest her organs the whole time, or that she's slowly being sucked into a cult, or that nobody who comes to Duster is ever allowed to leave.
The music would curdle and the camera would push in on Ruthie's smiling face and you'd think, oh no, Sloane, run, get out, it was a trap all along.
"You've gone quiet," Maggie says, not taking her eyes off the road.
"I'm planning my escape. Everyone has been nothing but lovely, which is exactly how it starts. I'm worried I'm about to be sacrificed."
Maggie throws her head back and laughs. "You're safe. We only sacrifice people who can't shovel." Her hand leaves the gearstick and finds mine on the seat between us, the briefest press of fingers, hidden below the window line where Cody and his friend can't see.
The diner glows up ahead, the only lit building in sight. Larry's got the door propped open and the smell of coffee comes out to meet us.
Inside, it's chaos in the best way. Ruthie's commandeered Larry and the girl with the braid and they're moving between tables with pots of coffee and sweating jugs of ice water.
There's pie — apple, cherry, something with meringue gone slightly weepy — and a tray of Doris's cinnamon muffins.
There's also a sheet cake with HAPPY RETIREMENT GARY iced on it in blue, which Ruthie explains was for a party that got canceled by the storm, and Gary's not here, so we might as well.
I get a coffee that's exactly as bad as I've come to love, and a glass of ice water that I drink in one go.
I also help myself to a big slab of Gary's retirement cake and sit in a booth next to a man whose name I keep forgetting, with Maggie across from me.
It's loud and everyone's pleased with themselves, talking over each other about the storm.
The cake is, against all odds, fantastic — moist and buttery under the lurid blue icing, nothing like its sad retirement-party styling.
"Ruthie, this is incredible," I say when she swings past with the coffee pot.
Ruthie stops dead and sets a hand on her hip.
"I should hope so. I made it." She tops up my cup.
"I do cakes on the side, honey. Birthdays, weddings, anniversaries.
Three days' notice, more if you want tiers.
Please have some more, that cake was meant to feed thirty.
" And she's off to the next table, coffee pot swinging.
I have a second slice and try to work out how Ruthie does it.
The diner six days a week, open before dawn, every service at that church, the entire private business of everyone within ten miles known and distributed at speed, and somewhere in there, a cake business.
I try to picture when she sleeps and can't as there aren't enough hours in the day.
I'm about to comment to Maggie about it when the choir starts up.
I don't know who begins it but others join in over their coffee, and within thirty seconds half the diner is singing a hymn.
Despite the dodgy harmonies I nearly choke up at the camaraderie of it — a dozen filthy, tired people singing together after a shitty day — gets right under my ribs.
Then Dennis Hurley comes in two beats late and a full semitone flat.
The hymn lurches and one of the altos tries to follow him down and the whole thing buckles in the middle.
For one glorious bar half the diner is singing several slightly different songs, and Dennis sails on serenely, utterly committed.
I glance at Maggie and she's already looking at me, her mouth pressed into a tight line, her eyes watering with the effort of holding in a laugh.
"Don't," she murmurs, barely moving her lips. She looks down at her coffee, her shoulders shaking.
The hymn limps to its end and everyone claps for themselves, Dennis included, and the room goes back to its happy roar.
An old man eases himself into the seat beside Maggie with a grunt, and Maggie introduces him as Earl, her neighbor from across the field.
"So that was your friend, then. The one in the helicopter," he says, studying me.
"That was her."
"Some fancy friends you've got. She offered me a real handsome sum to put it down in my field.
I told her it wasn't necessary, but she insisted.
" Earl takes a sip of his coffee. "Wasn't going to argue with a lady that determined.
A big storm a few months back took half of my barn roof out, but I can afford to repair it now.
The Lord provides." He nods, and I decide not to point out that the Lord, in this instance, was a socialite with more money than sense.
Ruthie's passing and catches the tail of it. "Well," she says, not breaking stride, "she's welcome to land it on the church next time. We need a new roof too." And she's gone again, and the whole table laughs.
I sit there, amused, with my bad coffee and my retirement cake, listening to Earl and the man next to me argue about which storm over the years did the worst of it — the hail in '91 that shredded somebody's almond blossom, the flood in '86 that put water up to the diner's windowsills and had everyone eating cold food by candlelight.
Earl says it was '85. The other man disputes whether there were ever candles.
The argument is plainly older than I am and nobody actually wants it settled.
No one takes my picture and no one lowers their voice when I look over. Maggie catches my eye and brushes her foot against mine under the table.
"You okay?" she asks, low, under the noise.
I take a sip of my terrible coffee and smile. "Yeah," I say. "I'm happy."