Epilogue
JOELLE
Idrive to the diner at six on Christmas morning because I don't know how not to.
The diner is closed. I put the sign up myself yesterday
MERRY CHRISTMAS
in the marker that's going dry. The folding tables are still up from last night. The candle stubs sit in their tin holders, the wicks drowned in their own wax.
I don't need to be here. Rosie's at Carla’s. It’s her Christmas present to me, a morning that's mine. And I've spent the start of it driving to my own closed diner in the dark, because a morning with nothing to carry turns out to be the one thing I don't know how to hold.
I pull into the lot expecting it empty.
Colt's truck is there.
He's in the cab with the engine running.
When my headlights swing across his windshield he cuts the engine and gets out in jeans, flannel, work boots, no coat heavy enough for the cold he's clearly been sitting in.
He's holding two gas station coffees in styrofoam cups, the kind that taste like they were brewed in 1987 and reheated every day since.
I get out of my truck. Christmas morning, thin blue light, the mountains gone white behind the town. The air smells like woodsmoke and bad coffee.
"Hey," I say.
"Hey." He holds out a cup.
I take it. It's warm in my hand. The lid is on crooked and a thin drip has run down the side. He’s wrapped a napkin around the bottom so it won't burn my fingers. It wouldn't. He did it anyway.
I unlock the diner. I flip the lights. The overhead fluorescents, not the Christmas lights. The fluorescents buzz and stutter and come on in their grudging sequence.
The place always looks different empty. Bigger. The folding tables make it feel like a room that's waiting for something, or has just finished something, which is closer to the truth.
He follows me in and goes to his booth. Sits down on his side.
And I look at the counter where I stand, where I've stood every working morning for two years, where there's a coffeepot and a barrier and a whole self I built out of being the one on the working side of it but then I go and sit down across from him instead.
His booth. I have wiped this table ten thousand times and sat at it exactly once, a few nights ago, and here I am again.
Rosie's everywhere I look. A strand of tinsel stuck to the counter.
A potato handprint on the window, five small ghost-smudges, fingers spread.
A crescent dent bitten into the vinyl of the booth cushion, where she gnawed on it during the dinner.
I watched her do it and decided some battles aren't worth fighting on Christmas Eve.
I pretend I don't see it. The diner is quietly turning into a place that has a kid in it.
I take a sip of the coffee.
It's terrible. Actively, aggressively terrible, burnt and bitter and somehow also watery, which I would not have thought possible. I make a face. I take another sip.
"This is the worst coffee I've ever had," I say.
"I know," he says.
And that's the whole thing, right there, in two words across a table.
He knows. He's not telling me it's good. There was a morning this week he sat in this exact booth and told me the coffee was good when it wasn’t.
It was the only sentence he could get past the wall.
We both knew it was a lie and we were both stuck on the wrong sides of it.
This is the other thing. This is the coffee being terrible and both of us saying so and it not costing either of us a single thing.
"How long were you sitting out there?"
He looks at the table. "A while."
"Before six?"
"Wasn't keeping track."
He was keeping track.
I drink the coffee. All of it. Because he drove to the gas station on Christmas morning and bought two of these and parked in my empty lot and waited in the cold on a maybe.
The gesture is as good as the coffee is terrible.
"I'm picking up Rosie at nine," I say.
He nods.
"Carla bought her a stuffed elephant. She's going to eat the ribbon and ignore the elephant."
He smiles and it gets me, how much of his face it uses, this thing I spent two years trying to earn over the rim of a cup.
"I can't cook," he says.
I look at him.
"Christmas dinner. I can't cook. I can't even peel a potato, you saw how that went." He's looking down into his coffee. "But I could come by your place. I could hold Rosie while you cook. I could do the dishes after."
It's the longest run of words I've ever heard come out of him. It's clumsy. It offers me nothing I can't already do for myself. I can cook. I can hold my own kid. I have washed every dish I have ever dirtied. It is, by every measure I used to keep, useless.
It is exactly right.
Because he didn't offer to buy the dinner. He didn't offer to fix anything or solve anything or carry anything in from his truck. He offered to be in the room. He offered the one thing he never knew how to give and the only thing I ever actually wanted.
"Rosie's going to throw food at you," I say.
"I know."
"She bit you hard enough to leave a mark for two days."
"I remember."
"She'll probably do it again."
"Okay."
I sit in the booth. He sits across from me.
The window is right beside us, and anyone who drives by on this empty Christmas morning could look in and see me, Joelle, not in an apron, not behind the counter, not carrying anything, not pouring anything for anyone.
Just a woman sitting down, on the customer's side of the glass, drinking a terrible coffee a man got up in the dark to bring her.
Let them look.
It's Christmas Day.
The diner is closed.
He is here to stay, and so am I.
Ihope you enjoyed my Sweet Mountain Man. If you did, please be kind enough to leave a review to help other readers discover this series.
The next book in this series is The Christmas Market