I looked at Heather.
Heather had the look of a woman who had seen something that had rearranged the furniture in her own chest. Who had reevaluated things.
“Maple,” she said. “Your tenant is a strange man.”
“How.”
“He just — appeared on the porch. Stood there for like a minute holding the bike. Theo Jr.opened the door because Theo Jr.always opens the door and he should not be the one who opens the door, but here we are. Knox saidthe wheel is bent. I will fix it.Past tense, future tense, all in one sentence. He took the bike. Then he came back forty minutes later. The wheel was straight. He said — and I am quoting —that is how a wheel goes. Tell your mother.And then he left. He didn’t even look at me. He was completely focused on the fact that this child had a bent bike wheel and apparently this was a problem that required solving.”
Mira, behind us at booth four, started laughing into her coffee.
“What,” I said.
“He’s not even trying,” Mira said. “He isnot even trying.He’s fixing wheels like wheels are his spiritual practice or something. He iscasuallyfixing a child’s bike. Withtools.Onthe wayto take out his trash, probably. Sugar.Sugar.This man is six-foot-five and he took the time to fix a five-year-old’s bike wheel.”
“He fixed a child’s bike.”
“Hecasuallyfixed a child’s bike. Withintention.Sugar. If that doesn’t signal something I don’t know what does. The man is sending you messages through children’s vehicles.”
Theo Jr.tugged on my apron strap.
“Maple.”
“Yes, Junior.”
“His teeth are okay.”
“What.”
“Mr.Grumpus’s teeth. I asked him. They’re good. They’re not bad like my dad says all hockey men have. They’re just regular teeth. He was nice about me asking though. He didn’t say ‘that’s a weird question.’ He just crouched down and showed me.”
I had to turn around and face the espresso machine for a minute because I did not know what my face was doing, and I needed to put my back to my best friend and my next-door-neighbor and a five-year-old boy who had personally renamed the man who was renting the apartment over my garage, and I needed to get my face back in order before I turned around. Before I had to pretend to be normal.
I got it in order. I have had practice.
I made Heather’s coffee. I made Theo Jr.’s pancakes. I made them perfectly. The butter was melting in exact pools. The syrup was the right temperature.
I did not, at any point in the next forty minutes, look across the parking lot at the apartment over my garage.
The day went.
Dale came in at nine-thirty with a thermos of his wife’s chicken soup, which he uses when his throat hurts the way other men use whiskey, and we ran the rest of the breakfast and lunch shift together. His voice was rough. He kept coughing into his elbow. Mira left at noon to open the post office. The lunch crowd was thin. Everyone was waiting for the weather service to make its announcement official.
The radio over the griddle had the National Weather Service on it more than not, and they had stopped sayingsignificantand started sayinghistoric.The Dakota system was now a Minnesotasystem. Eighteen to twenty-four inches by Friday morning. Power outages possible. Stay home if you can.
At three-forty-five the last lunch customer left. He was an elderly man who came in every Wednesday and ordered tomato soup. He left his usual five dollar tip under his saucer.
At four o’clock my regular three-pie afternoon order from the senior center got picked up by their van driver, who told me they were closing the senior center for two days because of the storm. His voice was tight. The town was preparing for something.
At five o’clock I had three customers, none of whom stayed past five-thirty. They ordered coffee. They did not chat. They drank and left and did not come back.
At six o’clock the diner was empty. The lights of town were flickering slightly. The generator at the power plant was probably working overtime.
At six-thirty I locked the front door an hour and a half early and turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED for the first weekday in seven months.
I walked home in the snow.
The snow was beautiful, in the way snow is beautiful right before it ruins your week. The kind of snow that promises something. The kind of snow that the meteorologists have been trying to warn about.
