Chapter 1 #2
"But I signed a thing," Dante went on, softer still, apologetic and immovable at the same time, a combination Nick hadn't known was available.
"We both did. It's a real thing, with a real notary.
I didn't come out here to hold you to a piece of paper on the worst — during a hard time.
That's not — I'd never." He spread his clean hands.
"But I own fifteen percent of this diner, Nick.
Which means I can't exactly let it go under either. "
And there it was. Out loud, in the kitchen, in the gray light. The thing Nick had been not-thinking about, right next to the number he'd been not-thinking about, the two of them shaking hands.
He gave a stranger fifteen percent and a stollen, Nick thought, and he gave me the books and a funeral.
He didn't say it. He'd never say it. It wasn't even fair — he knew it wasn't fair, knew the shape of his own grief well enough by now to see when it was reaching for the nearest available face. It just happened to be a very good face.
"You can't fire me," Dante said, "is the short version.
And you can't afford me, which — believe me, I heard you.
So here's what I think we've got." He nodded at the letter on the counter, face-down, which Nick had forgotten he could see over the pass.
"That's a bad envelope. I can read a bad envelope from across a room, it's a skill you pick up.
And that" — the empty stool, seat number one, without even looking, like he already knew — "is a place I'm not going to touch.
So mostly what we've got is a diner two people love and neither one of us can save by ourselves. That's my read. Tell me I'm wrong."
Out on the floor, the bell over the front door went.
Once, then again. Six-fifteen. Manny, probably, and behind him Delfin, and behind Delfin the whole slow tide of people who had eaten breakfast in this room every day of their adult lives and would, when the time came, want to know what had happened to it and why nobody had told them.
Nick didn't tell Dante he was wrong.
That was the thing he'd think about later — that the very first thing this man ever really asked him, he couldn't do it. Couldn't get the word out. Wrong. Two letters and a lie and he just stood there with it stuck behind his teeth like a fishbone.
"Coffee's up," he said instead, which was not an answer, and turned to go work the floor.
***
He meant to keep him back there. That was the plan, such as it was — put the guy in the kitchen where the regulars couldn't get a good look and start a conversation with their mouths full, and figure out the rest of his life later, at some point, when he had a spare one.
It lasted four minutes.
Nick was refilling Manny's cup and taking Delfin's order — the same order, the Skylark Scramble, dry rye, the man had ordered the same breakfast since the Reagan administration.
Manny tipped his head toward the pass, where the new sounds were coming from — a pan, a flame, that citrus smell working its way out onto the floor. "Who's cooking?"
"Nobody," Nick said.
"Smells like somebody." Manny was seventy-six and had spent forty years unloading ships two blocks down and did not, as a rule, waste words. He took a slow sip of his coffee and looked at Nick over the rim of the cup. "Wing's still out on your dad's sign."
"I know the wing's out."
"Whole street knows." He said it kindly, which was worse. "You want it fixed, you say the word. My grandson does signs now. Give you the family rate."
"I'll let you know, Manny."
He wouldn't, and Manny knew he wouldn't, and they left it there the way you leave a lot of things there when you've known a man since you were tall enough to see over his booth. Nick started down the counter with the pot.
That was when he clocked movement at the front of the house.
Dante, out from behind the pass, drifting down the length of the windows with his hands in his pockets, taking the place in like a man walking through a house he might buy.
He stopped at the front door. He looked out at the sign — the dead wing, the gloom, the CLOSED card still hanging crooked in the glass from last night.
And he flipped it.
Turned the little sign over on its string so the street could see OPEN, easy, unthinking, the most natural gesture in the world, the gesture Nick's father had made ten thousand times and Nick had made three thousand and this man had made exactly zero, until now.
Like he owned the place.
He owned fifteen percent of the place.
Nick stood there with the coffee pot in his hand and felt the whole thing settle over him at once, the letter and the stool and the stranger and the gray morning and the fifteen weeks — three months to save a diner he wasn't allowed to change, with a partner he hadn't chosen and couldn't get rid of, who baked and grinned and apparently could not walk past a door without deciding it was open.
"Don't," he started.
Dante turned around, already grinning, spreading his arms to take in the whole gray glad-to-see-you room.
"Too late. We're open." He was already walking backward toward the kitchen, toward his knives, toward the flat-top he'd called gorgeous.
"Fair warning — I'm going to make you a scramble, and it's going to have exactly one thing in it your dad's recipe doesn't, and you're going to be so mad about how good it is. "
"The scramble stays," Nick said. "The scramble does not change."
"The scramble stays," Dante agreed cheerfully, disappearing through the pass. "I'm just going to put something next to it."
By the time Nick got the coffee poured, the kitchen had already started to smell like something he didn't have a name for — garlic, and heat, and underneath it something bright and sharp and citrus he'd never once smelled in his father's kitchen in thirty-five years.
He hated that it smelled good.
He set his jaw, and picked up his order pad, and went to tell the whole slow tide of Fourth Street that yeah — somehow, against the odds and the envelope and his own better judgment — the Skylark was open.