Sue Hartwell stayed where she was, watching me. She had a look on her face I had not seen since my grandmother’s wake. It was the look of someone who had just witnessed something important.
“You’re going to have your hands full, sugar,” she said.
“Sue,” I said. “I am running a diner that is being foreclosed on. I am twenty-six years old. I have been having my hands full since I was sixteen.”
“That is true,” she said. “But I would like to point out, just for the record, that until five minutes ago you had room for one more thing.”
The bell over the door chimed again. It was Eli, the panicking Frostbite team assistant, slipping out behind Sue with his hot chocolate in a to-go cup. He waved at me apologetically. He was a good kid.
The diner was empty.
I stood behind the counter and looked at the pile of cash and the empty mug and the second twenty.
I picked up the rent. I picked up the tip. I put both in the register, my hands moving through the familiar motion. The cash drawer slid open with a soft ding. The bills went into their slot. The drawer slid shut.
I picked up the pie I’d offered, the slice I’d already plated for him. The crust was perfect. My grandmother’s recipe — butter and ice water and the kind of patience I didn’t have but she’d instilled anyway. There was nothing wrong with it. It had not deserved the way he’d looked at it.
I ate it standing up at the counter, with my fingers, looking out the window at his truck pulling out of my parking lot in the dark.
It was four minutes past six in the morning.
The first customer of the actual day — Mira’s father, who comes in at six-oh-five every weekday for the Tuesday-paper-and-eggs special even though it’s Monday — was about to walk in.
I had ninety seconds to put on lipstick. To wash my hands. To become the version of myself that people saw.
I did not put on lipstick.
I stood in the empty diner and I said, out loud, to my grandmother who was no longer there to hear me, “Joan Sutton. I just rented your apartment to a man who scares me. Is this a sign? Is this a sign, Grandma? Because if this is a sign I would appreciate something a little less six-foot-five and a little morehere is a check for fifty-eight thousand dollars.”
Joan Sutton, dead since April, did not answer.
The bell over the door chimed.
Mira’s father said, “Mornin’, Maple,” and shook the snow off his hat onto my mat.
I said, “Morning, Mr.Halpern. Tuesday paper, eggs over easy, four sausage links, sourdough toast, no jam.”
“That’s the one,” he said.
“Coming right up, sugar,” I said.
I put on a fresh pot of coffee.
I did not throw out the pot Knox Kovak had drunk from. I let it sit on the warmer. I told myself it was because I might want it later, because I needed to study the failure, because something in me needed proof that it had happened.
I told myself a lot of things at five-thirty in the morning, on Mondays, in late January, in a diner that was being foreclosed on.
Most of them weren’t true.
This was the first one that wasn’t.
2
KNOX
The driveway was empty when I got there.
I killed the engine and sat for a long minute with the cab heater still running. Five-fourteen on Monday afternoon. The snow had started about ten miles back. The gauge on the dashboard said eighteen degrees and falling. The radio had been going on for twenty minutes about a system out of the Dakotas the meteorologists were already naming.
