“Technically, it’s Dina’s diner.” He turns his laptop on. “I asked her. She said it was fine.”
“You asked?” I turn to look at the kitchen and shout, “Traitorous bitch.”
“Who loves you!” He leans and brushes his lips against mine. A thrill goes up my spine and hits my lady parts. “Like I do.”
He goes back to his screen and starts typing.
“Fox.”
“Take your pills, Lucy.”
I do.
He doesn’t leave.
In fact, he stays there, working from Dina’s for the next week, while I cook the new items I’ve added to the menu, because we’re at the end of summer and slowly moving into fall, which is a relief, as everyone is sick and tired of the sticky heat.
Nashville in late August into September means the last of the good tomatoes—and I mean the ugly heirloom ones from the farmers at the East Nashville market, so ripe they split if you look at them wrong—so I make a tomato tart with a cornmeal crust and a whipped goat cheese base before they’re goneentirely. It’s the kind of dish that only exists for three weeks a year.
The figs are coming in, which means the fig-and-prosciutto flatbread goes back on.
I also make fig preserves for the cheese board.
Sweet potatoes are starting to show up, not quite at their peak but close enough, so I add a sweet potato bisque with a little smoked paprika and a swirl of crème fraîche to the menu, which becomes the soup of the week and sells out by Thursday. I serve tomato bisque on that Friday and the weekend.
The muscadine grapes—fat, wild-tasting that grow all over middle Tennessee—I use for a sauce over duck breast that I add as a weekend special, because duck and muscadines are one of those combinations that tastes like it was always supposed to exist.
And because summer isn’t entirely gone yet, because the okra is still good and the corn is still sweet for another few weeks, I keep both on as sides—fried okra because Dina’s customers would riot otherwise, and a creamed corn that I make with a little fresh thyme and a splash of bourbon because everything is better with a splash of bourbon.
Fox sits at the counter with his laptop or in the kitchen while I’m cooking.
He follows me around with the determination of a stalker who smiles, makes me rest, makes me take my pills, and ensures that I eat three proper meals a day.
He takes his calls from Dina’s office if there are lots of people in the kitchen, but if it’s just me, he doesn’t bother to leave.
Percy comes to the diner, too, and some other colleagues of Fox. They have lunch meetings.
“They’re bringing business. I have nothing to complain about,” Dina tells me when I protest their presence.
The staff at Dina’s have opinions about this.
Annie, who has been waitressing for Dina for six years and has the observational accuracy of someone whose livelihood depends on reading rooms correctly, tells me while Fox can listen because he’s sitting in the damned kitchen where I’m cooking, “He’s in love with you.”
Fox raises his coffee cup in a toast. “Thanks for noticing, darling.”
I send him a sideways glance that could light a fuse. “He’s a pain in my ass.”
“Hon, he’s working from a diner, on a stool.” She waves in his general direction. “That man has an office. A nice one, I’m sure. And still, he’s sitting on a diner stool because he wants to be where you are.” She picks up her order pad. “I’m just saying.”
“Go away, Annie.”
“And”—she drops her voice to a very loud whisper—“he’s also extremely handsome. Hon, if you don’t want him, I’m happy to climb him like a tree.”
Fox chuckles, amused and entertained. “That’s so nice of you to say, Annie, but I am alas married and a one-woman man.”
Henry, who does the morning prep with me, keeps looking at Fox, then at me, then back at Fox. “Is he working here?”
“Yes.”
