1
MAPLE
What’s worse than discovering the only customer at your diner before sunrise is built like a mountain and just as warm?
When he orders black coffee and looks at your grandmother’s apple pie like it personally offended him.
I’d been pulling shots of espresso for the last hour, mostly to keep myself from thinking about the past-due notice tucked under the sugar canister. The diner has been on this corner of Birch Street for forty-three years. My grandmother poured the concrete in the parking lot herself the summer before my mother was born, with my uncle Pete holding the form and the dog she had at the time chewing on the trowel. We have not, at any point in those forty-three years, missed a mortgage payment.
Until now.
Until the bank I’d known my whole life merged with a bigger bank in Chicago. Until the new bank sent a letter I couldn’t pay. Until I had ninety days — eighty-seven now, but who’s counting — to find fifty-eight thousand four hundred and twenty dollarsor watch the only thing my grandmother left me get sold to a developer who wanted to put a parking garage where her booths still are.
I had been counting. Of course I had been counting.
The espresso machine hissed as I pulled another shot, the water hot enough to send steam curling up past my face. The sound was white noise, familiar, the only thing that had kept me from screaming for the last hour. The pre-dawn diner smelled like my grandmother — cinnamon from last week’s pie crust, coffee grounds, the ghost of burnt sugar from the syrup station. My hands were cold, had been cold since November, the kind of cold that lives in your bones and doesn’t leave even when you pour hot water over your wrists.
So when the bell over the front door rang at four-fifty-eight in the morning — two minutes before I was technically open — I should have been thrilled. Customer. Money. Tips. A regular, possibly. Somebody to fill the empty third stool at the counter for the next four months while I figured out how to keep my grandmother’s life from becoming a parking lot.
I should have plastered on the brightest smile in Minnesota and said something like,Coffee’s hot, sit anywhere you like, sugar, the syrup’s on the second shelf.
Instead, I looked up from the espresso machine and froze.
Because the man who’d just walked into my diner was the kind of man who wasn’t supposed to exist outside of hockey magazines and Russian novels.
Six-foot-five, easy. Shoulders that filled the doorframe with about an inch to spare. Dark hair under a black knit cap that he did not take off. A jaw that looked like it had been chiseled by someone with a grudge. A beard, dark, a few days past clean-shaven. A long black coat that had seen weather — the leather was scuffed at the elbows, marked with salt stains along the hem. Boots that left melting snow on my mat. And ice-blue eyesthat swept the room exactly once and decided, with cold and impeccable disdain, that nothing in it was worth his time.
Including me.
His gaze landed on me for half a second, dropped to the menu I’d been pretending to clean for twenty minutes, and dismissed me entirely.
“Coffee,” he said. “Black.”
Not a request. Not a please. Not agood morning.Not even a question of whether I served coffee. Justcoffee, black,like an order in a war room.
I should have been offended.
I was, for the record, very offended.
I was also, for reasons I refuse to examine at five in the morning before the espresso has even kicked in, going to give him the worst cup of coffee in Minnesota and watch him drink it.
“Coming right up,” I said, in my brightest possible voice, the one I use when I’m about to do something petty and want to seem innocent about it. “How do you feel about a slice of pie?”
His eyes met mine. Cold. Immovable. Slightly murderous.
“No.”
“Apple’s fresh,” I said. “Made it this morning.”
“No.”
“Are you sure? It’s award-winning.”
It wasn’t, technically, award-winning. My grandmother had once placed second at the county fair in 1996 and we framed the ribbon, and that ribbon had been hanging by the register for almost thirty years. But this was a man who had clearly never had my grandmother’s apple pie, and he was about to have a very humbling forty-five seconds.
He stared at me like I’d asked him to commit treason.
“I’m. Sure.”
