Chapter 3
JOELLE
I pour his coffee and don't look at him. He doesn't look at me either. The distance between those two acts of not-looking is about three feet of laminate countertop and a parking lot conversation that neither of us mentions. It is the loudest three feet iever.
I'm clipped, professional. I refill his mug once without asking, same as everyone else, exactly the same.
I make sure it's exactly the same, and move on.
He eats. He leaves. Cash under the mug. A five and two ones, the usual.
No check. I pick up the bills and stand there for a second, and what I feel is relief, plain and stupid: he put it back the way it was.
He didn't try to fix me again. And then I feel stupid for being relieved, because being relieved means I was braced, and being braced means I care what he does, and caring what he does is precisely the line I told myself last night I wasn't going to cross.
I pocket the seven dollars and go wipe a table that's clean.
But then he comes back for lunch.
I almost don't register it. The lunch crowd is different from the breakfast regulars.
Construction guys from the highway project, a few teachers from the elementary school, whoever's passing through.
Colt has never been a lunch person. In two years he has never once been a lunch person.
But there he is at 11:45, ordering a burger and reading a section of the paper he must have saved from that morning, folded to a crease I recognize.
I bring him his food and say, "You're here."
"Yep," he says.
I wait for more. I stand there longer than the plate requires, because some part of me thinks that if I leave the silence open he might walk into it this time, might say the one sentence that would make all of this make sense.
There is no more.
I go back to the kitchen and I am annoyed at the size of the disappointment, which is out of all proportion to a burger.
He comes for lunch the next day too.
And the day after.
His timber crews are shut down for the holiday week.
I heard this secondhand from Marie, who heard it from somebody at the hardware store.
So apparently he has nowhere to be except the one place that serves food in a forty-minute radius.
That's the reasonable explanation. I reach for it the way I reach for the coffeepot, because it lets me set the question down.
A man with no crew and no kitchen eats where there's food. It means nothing.
It does not mean nothing. A man with no crew and no kitchen could eat once and go home.
He does not need a burger at 11:45 three days running, in a booth he picks for its view of the counter, reading a paper he's already read.
I know the difference between a person who is hungry and a person who is staying.
I have spent my whole working life learning to tell them apart at a glance, and I am choosing, deliberately, not to look at this one straight on.
My mind is wrestling with fifty pounds of potatoes and twelve pies and a seating chart for a hundred people, and that is a real and legitimate reason to be busy, and it is also a very convenient place to keep my eyes.
Old Hank, who has never kept his eyes anywhere convenient in his life, notices.
"You been here for lunch three days running," Hank says to Colt, who's four booths away. Hank's voice carries the way his opinions do, without effort or apology.
Colt looks up. "The meatloaf's fine."
"Uh-huh."
Marie, drying a glass behind the counter: "The meatloaf hasn't changed in years."
Hank turns a page. "And yet he's discovering it now."
I wipe down the counter and don't say anything, which is unusual enough that Marie gives me a look, not Hank's look, which is a spotlight, but Marie's, which is a thermometer.
Marie has been running this diner since before I was born.
She shares her opinions selectively, which makes her the opposite of Hank and exactly the kind of person I trust, and right now she is reading my temperature off the back of my neck and I can feel her doing it. I scrub a spot that isn't there.
He's thirty-five. I'm twenty-five. Ten years.
Everybody in the diner can count, and I can count better than any of them, because I'm the one who'll be doing the math at three in the morning.
Ten years means he had a whole marriage and a whole divorce while I was still deciding what I wanted to be.
It means he's a finished thing and I'm a single mother with a toddler and a budget written on receipt paper.
There are a hundred reasons this is a bad idea, and I have always been good at reasons.
Reasons are how I've kept everyone at the distance where they can't leave me, because you can't be left by someone you never let close.
I have a reason for him too. I just notice that I keep him at arm's length and find I've memorized his hands anyway.
Then he starts showing up after closing.
I did not ask.
I'm setting up for the Christmas dinner, taping streamers to the ceiling, dragging the extra chairs out of storage, trying to figure out how to seat a hundred people in a room that comfortably holds sixty.
The first evening he comes in, I'm standing on a chair with a roll of crepe paper and a staple gun, and the door is unlocked because I didn't think to lock it.
I am, apparently, the kind of woman who forgets to lock a door on the exact nights a particular man might walk through it.
He walks in. Stands there a second, taking in the half-finished crepe paper and the chairs stacked along the wall, the whole impossible arithmetic of the room.
"You need help moving those," he says. Not a question.
"I'm fine."
He picks up two chairs in each hand and moves them to where the tables are going.
Here's the thing nobody warned me about, after Rosie's father walked out: how much of the work is just weight.
Not the hard parts. The hard parts I expected.
It's the weight, lifting the case of canned tomatoes off the truck, dragging the dishwasher out from the wall when a fork falls behind it, the cinderblock that props the back door open in summer and that I move four times a day with my hip.
None of it is hard, individually. All of it together is a tax I pay in my lower back every night, alone, after she's asleep.
And it's not even the back. It's that there's no one to hand the other end to.
You can carry anything if someone takes the other end.
It's carrying every end of everything, by yourself, for years, that wears the specific groove I've got worn in me.
So when he picks up four chairs like they weigh nothing and sets them down exactly where they need to go without asking where that is, because he watched, because he always watches, something in me wants to lie down on the floor and let him carry the rest of it, every end of everything, and that want is so large and so unfamiliar that it frightens me more than the man does.
The Christmas lights blink against his shoulder. I stand on the chair and I watch him and I think about telling him to leave.
I don't.
Rosie complicates everything. The morning childcare arrangement with Carla doesn't extend to evening prep hours, so Rosie is at the diner.
Rosie at the diner after hours is a different creature from Rosie at Carla's house.
At Carla's she has toys and a routine and a woman who speaks to her in Spanish and English and occasionally in a third language Rosie has invented that seems to consist entirely of the word "pitty. "
At the diner she has access to the decoration boxes.
I turn around from stapling a streamer and Rosie is gone. Not gone-gone, the diner is not that big and the door is closed, but gone from the spot on the floor where I set her down with a sippy cup and a board book about a duck.
"Rosie."
Silence. Then a rustling from behind the counter.
Rosie emerges from a box of tinsel like a creature from a low-budget movie. She has tinsel in her hair, around her neck, wound through the straps of her overalls. She looks like a small chandelier.
"PITTY," Rosie says, holding up a fistful of silver strands.
"Rosie, no."
"PITTY."
I pick tinsel out of Rosie's hair for five minutes, individual strands, wound around individual curls, while Rosie squirms and grabs for more and eats a piece before I can stop her. I fish it out of her mouth with one finger and Rosie bites me. It’s investigative rather than mean, and I think, not for the first time, that I am raising a small person who meets the world by putting it in her mouth.
I love her so much it routinely stops my breath.
Colt is done moving chairs and hasn't said a word about the tinsel, hasn't laughed, hasn't commented, hasn't made it a thing I have to manage on top of everything else.
When I look up, holding Rosie on my hip with a strand of silver stuck to my own sleeve, he's carrying a folding table under one arm.
He's good at this part. I'll give him that, standing here with my chandelier of a daughter on my hip, the carrying, the arranging, the showing up with his body.
It's the rest of him I can't get at. He'll lift every table in this room and never tell me a single thing about why, and those two facts are the same fact.
I'm falling for a man whose whole language I've already learned, the hard way, doesn't keep you warm.
Rosie falls asleep in a booth with her head on my coat, all at once, like a dropped phone. The decorations are half-done. The Christmas lights blink in the dark windows against the empty parking lot.
I stand behind the counter. Colt stands across the room, straightening a table he's already straightened.
Just me in jeans and a ponytail, without my apron, and a man who keeps showing up and won't say why.
The apron is the thing I usually have between me and a room.
I notice I'm not wearing it. Neither of us says anything, because saying things is the one move neither of us has got.
I wipe the counter. He straightens the table again.
It is the closest I have felt to another adult in three years, and not one true word has been spoken, and I lie awake that night doing the math on what it would cost me to need this, and I do not like the number, and yet, I cannot stop running it.