“That’s eighteen dollars too much,” I said.
“Keep it,” he said. “I made you waste a pot.”
He went back to his phone.
I went back to pretending to clean the counter.
I had cleaned the same six-inch square of laminate, by my count, somewhere between forty and fifty times since he sat down. The spot was no longer dirty. The spot had not been dirty when I started. The spot was now wetter than the rest of the counter, which was actually less hygienic. My hands moved automatically, the rag going in circles, going nowhere.
I had no idea what to do with my hands.
I was thinking about getting the pie out anyway — just leaving a slice on the counter next to him, no comment, the way you put a saucer of milk out for a feral cat — when the bell over the front door rang again, and the second person of my morning blew in on a gust of cold air.
He was small. Twentyish. Wearing a Frostbite Falls Fury jacket, the red-and-charcoal team monstrosity that made everyone in town look like they’d been drafted into something against their will. He was panicking. You could tell by the way his hat was on sideways and his breathing was too loud.
“Coach Kovak,” he said, before he had even finished walking through the door. His voice was high. Young. “Coach. We need to talk about the practice schedule. Also. Also, your room at the inn flooded. The whole south wing flooded. Sue is — Sue is calling everybody. There are no other rooms in Frostbite Falls until the wing is dry, which she says is, you know, weeks. Weeks. Coach? Are you listening?”
The man at my counter — apparentlyCoach Kovak,apparently Russian-novel-mountain — set down his fresh cup of coffee. He did it slowly, like setting something down carefully was a form of communication.
He looked at the kid for one beat.
He looked at the puddle of melted snow gathering under the kid’s left boot.
He said, “Sit down, Eli. Order something. Breathe. The schedule is the schedule. Sue will figure out the room.”
Eli sat down. Eli ordered hot chocolate. Eli put his face in his hands.
Coach Kovak looked at me. Through me. Past me. Then at the door, which was opening again.
It was Sue.
Of course it was Sue.
She came in like a small Minnesota hurricane, snow clumped on her boots, her gray hair sticking out from under a wool cap, her phone in one hand and a clipboard in the other. Sue Hartwell has run the Frostbite Inn since I was in pigtails. She is built like a mailbox and was, for the entirety of my childhood, my grandmother’s best friend. She also knows the mortgage history of every piece of real estate in Frostbite Falls, which I found out three months ago when she asked me, very gently, if everything was okay at the diner.
It was not okay.
“Maple,” Sue said, before she had even finished walking through the door.
“Sue,” I said.
“About that spare room over your garage.”
“What about it?”
“How fast can you get it ready?”
“For who?”
Sue pointed.
She pointed at the man at my counter.
The man who had, fifteen minutes earlier, called my pie an inconvenience and my coffee bitter.
The man who was now looking back at her with the same blank no-thank-you face he’d been giving the menu.
I said, on autopilot, my brain already doing the math — ninety dollars a week, twelve weeks minimum, that was over a thousand dollars, that was something — “It’s not really set up for a tenant. It’s — it’s mostly storage right now. There’s a bed in there but the heat is iffy. And the bathroom drips. And the floorboards squeak in the bedroom and there’s probably mice nesting in the walls because I’ve been meaning to call the exterminator and?—”
