“To the new assistant coach for the Fury. The flood. The inn. Sue brought him to the diner at six in the morning yesterday and asked, and I needed the rent, and?—”
“Maple.”
I stopped.
Mira opened her eyes.
She looked at me the way she had looked at me when I was sixteen and I had told her my parents had not, in fact, come home from their drive into Duluth, because their car had not, in fact, made it past the third bend on Highway 61. She had been sitting on the steps of the high school. She had been holding my hand for an hour afterward. She had not let go.
She looked at me the way she had looked at me when I was twenty-five and I had told her my grandmother’s last words weredon’t sell my pies, sugar, don’t ever sell my pies.She had cried harder than I had.
She looked at me the way the people who know you look at you when they are about to ask the question that is going to make you cry.
“Sugar,” she said, in her warmest voice, the one she only used when the situation was actually bad. “Sugar. Did he eat the pie.”
I looked at the napkin dispenser.
“Maple.”
“Mira.”
“Did. He. Eat. The. Pie.”
I put my hands over my face.
“He ate the pie.”
She sat back. The vinyl squeaked. She did not, to her credit, laugh. She just looked at me for a long moment while I was hiding behind my hands, and then she said, with the philosophical resignation of a woman who had now seen a thing that could not be unseen, “OK. Well. You’re cooked.”
“I am not cooked.”
“You are cooked. He’s the new coach. He’s six-five. Sue Hartwell vouched for him. He moved into your grandmother’s apartment. He ate the pie. Maple. Sugar.Sugar.You arecooked.”
“He is atenant.”
“You have atenantwho could pick you up with one hand.”
“I am not interested in being picked up.”
“Sugar. You absolutely are.”
I picked up the gas station coffee and drank it just to make her stop looking at me.
It was still bad.
It was worse now.
The bellover the door rang at eight-thirty-two and saved me.
I knew it was eight-thirty-two because I had been keeping track of the minutes since I had told Mira about the foreclosure, the way you keep track of the minutes after you stub your toe in the middle of the night, hoping the pain will stop being interesting. Eight minutes of Mira’s interrogation. Forty-two seconds of me being cooked. Thirty-one seconds of realizing that she was right.
Heather Park came in with a hat full of snow and Theo Jr.on her hip. The door brought a gust of cold that ruffled the napkins at table six.
Heather has lived next door to me for as long as I have lived in my grandmother’s house, which is to say for the last eleven years. She is thirty-six. Her husband walked out in 2020, which was the year both her parents died and the year she found out she was pregnant with Theo Jr., which was a lot of years to put into one year. She makes rent by working as the parts manager at the Ford dealership two towns over. She has grease under herfingernails most days. She is one of the three or four people in Frostbite Falls who I would die for without thinking about it.
She set Theo Jr.down on the floor. He was in a snowsuit that had come from a thrift store, red with fading stripes, and he immediately bolted toward the counter like he owned the place.
“Maple,” Heather said, in the voice of a woman who had a story. The story was written on her face. Something had happened. Something small, something domestic, something that had shifted the way she was looking at things.
