3. The Long Way Round #2
I log it before I mean to — old habit, the kind that doesn't quit just because the war did — the room going quiet for a breath, a fork pausing, two old men at the counter turning their heads at the same time and then turning them back slow, like they'd meant to look at the pie case all along.
A woman about my age in an apron, looking me over from the pass-through with frank, friendly interest and no intention of hiding it.
Fifteen years I was the one watching the room. In Coldwater the room watches me.
And there's nothing under it. That's the strange part.
They're just curious — the way people are curious in a place where everybody knows everybody and a new face is the best thing to come through the door since the last one.
I'd forgotten a man could be looked at for no reason but plain human interest.
"Coffee?" She's already pouring it. "You're the one who broke down past the cutoff. Walt towed you in."
"Word travels."
"Honey, word doesn't travel out here. Word's already waiting for you." She sets the cup down. "Cole, isn't it?"
Not even a day in town, and the diner has my first name.
"Yes, ma'am."
"Eat something. You've got the look of a man who forgets to." And she's gone, hollering an order through the pass before I can tell her I'm not hungry.
I drink the coffee — better than it has any business being.
Then Rena sets a plate down in front of me without asking what I want: eggs, bacon cut thick as a thumb, two slabs of homemade bread still warm enough to melt the butter.
It's the best plate of food I've had in fifteen years.
Maybe ever. You forget, living on chow lines and field rations, that a meal can be a thing a person makes for you on purpose.
I'd meant to spend an hour at Ed's checking on the truck. I spend the day.
I walked over to see my own problem with my own eyes — old habit — and found Ed on a creeper under somebody's Silverado, losing a fight with a seized bolt. I lasted about a minute. A man can't stand and watch another man fight a bolt with his hands in his pockets.
"You want a hand, or you want to keep losing to it?"
Ed slid out, looked at me, looked at my hands, slid back under. "Box is on the bench. Don't touch my coffee."
So I work. I haven't had a wrench in my hand in over a year — there's not much to fix in the kind of drifting I've been doing — and it comes back easy, fifteen years of engines living in my hands.
Timing chains. Brake lines. A radiator on a hay truck older than I am.
Ed talks when he's got something to say and goes quiet when he doesn't, which is the only company I can stand.
And the noise in my head goes quiet with him.
Hands busy, a problem I can actually solve in front of me — and for the first time in longer than I can name, the grief backs off. I'm just a man under a hood with grease to the elbows, and the only thing in the world that needs me is a stripped bolt.
I don't think about the mountains once.
I think about her three times. I let myself.
When I wash up, the light's gone gold and long down Main. Ed says the part won't be in till Friday, maybe Monday.
It doesn't land like bad news.
Eleanor's on the porch when I come back at dusk, in the same rocker, with what I'm starting to understand is a bottomless cup of tea.
"Evening, Mrs. Voss."
"Eleanor." A correction she's clearly made before. "Anyone who sleeps under my roof and eats my pie is a friend, and my friends call me Eleanor. I'll expect you to."
"Eleanor," I say.
"Good." She nods at the door. "Now — there's pie in the kitchen. Cut yourself a piece and bring it out here, and don't argue with me about it. Too fine a night to sit indoors, and the town's just settling in. Worth watching."
"Yes, ma'am."
I cut the pie. I carry it out and take the second rocker…
Except my eye keeps going back to the same place.
Down at the end of Main, The Devil's Daughter is the only set of windows in town getting brighter instead of darker — gone warm and gold, headlights swinging into her lot one after another, the night crowd rolling in while the rest of Coldwater turns in.
Her place, waking up while everything else lies down.
She's in there. I don't have to see her to know it.
Eleanor lets me get a few bites in before she starts. I'll give her that.
The pie's strawberry rhubarb. The crust breaks soft and buttery, the inside sweet with a sour bite chasing it, and I'm three bites deep before I catch myself eating.
My grandmother used to make pie like this — flour to her elbows, cold butter, the whole kitchen smelling the way Eleanor's must have all afternoon.
I haven't tasted anything like it since I was a boy at her table.
I didn't expect to find it here. I didn't expect to find a lot of things here.
She waits until my mouth's full, then opens up like she's been saving the questions all day. She has.
"Where you from?"
"Texas. Long time ago."
"How long were you in?"
"Fifteen."
"What branch?"
"Navy."
"Married?" She's already shaking her head before I can answer it for her. "No. I can see that. Forget I asked." She sips. "And where's all this taking you?"
"The Cirque. Up the Wind Rivers."
"Pretty country to walk into alone." Same mild voice she's used for every question since I sat down, eyes on her tea, each one rolling easy into the next — which is how the last one nearly gets past me, riding in on the exact same cadence as the rest:
"And what's that wrapped in a blanket on the floor of my front bedroom, that you carried in like it might wake up."
I set the fork down.
I have sat across a table from men whose whole job was getting things out of other men. I did not give those men what this woman just walked up and asked me for over pie.
"A friend," I say.
She nods like that's the whole of it and not a tenth. "The mountains?"
"He wanted to see them. Didn't get to."
"So you're taking him."
"That was the deal."
She lets me have the dark. Then she picks the talk back up — I get the sense she's not a woman who leaves a quiet alone for long — and walks it straight to the one name I'd never have raised myself. The one I wouldn't even give Reyes last night, when he came digging.
"You met Sloane."
Not a question. "Had a drink at her bar."
"'Course you did. Walt drove you right past it.
" She smiles into her tea. "She came to us ten years back, give or take.
Walt's girl. She had a hard road before she landed here — harder than I'll sit on a porch and say, because that's hers to tell, not mine to hand around.
But land she did. Took that falling-down wreck on the corner and turned it into the best bar in three counties, with her own two hands.
" She sets her cup down. "She doesn't let people close, Cole.
You'd want to know that going in. If you're the kind of man who's going in. "
"I didn't say I was going anywhere."
"No," Eleanor agrees, pleasant as anything. "You didn't."
She rocks. I drink the tea I didn't ask for. It's got honey in it. I don't care for honey in my tea.
I drink it anyway.
Eleanor takes herself to bed before I do. I sit in her rocker with the empty cup and watch the town put itself out one window at a time — the diner, the houses up Third, the lamp over Ed's lot.
Everything goes dark but the one place that won't.
Down at the end of Main her windows still burn gold, the last thing awake in the valley. I can't see her from here. I don't need to. I know she's in there the way I know weather's coming before it turns the air.
Doesn't let anybody close, Eleanor said, and said it like a warning. I heard it like a dare.
When the cold's worked through my jacket I head up.
He's where I left him, wrapped by the window.
I crouch and square the blanket, make sure the urn's sitting solid where it can't tip — the way I'd check a man's gear before we stepped off.
He'd have given me hell for it. Three days up that mountain, brother, and I set you down where you always wanted to be.
Last thing you ever asked me. I don't leave a brother's last ask sitting.
Friday the truck's fixed. Monday at the worst. Then the trailhead, then the mountain, then back down it on my own — the way it goes when the unit's gone and you're the one left standing to carry them home. That's the deal. I made it to a brother, and a brother gets it kept.
Clean deal, this morning. Had it all the way nailed down.
Then a town I broke down in by accident fed me pie I didn't ask for, put a wrench back in my hand, and stood a five-foot-two woman at the end of a bar who held my eyes a moment too long and then never once looked back.
The bed's no better than last night. I take the floor again, back to the wall, where I can keep that one gold light in the corner of my eye without lifting my head off the throw.
I don't sleep. Didn't last night either — and not for the dead. For her.
One night, a man can blame the bed. Two nights running, he's out of excuses.