He walked her in. That was all. He held the diner door, and she pushed the pink bike to the rack by the window herself, because some things a girl does herself no matter who's offering, and then she went to the booth by the jukebox — her booth, the one with the torn seam — and Hank went to the counter and sat where he could see both her and the door.
Wes Callahan, his vice president, slid onto the next stool and looked at him the way a man looks at a friend who has just seen a ghost at close range. "You all right, brother?"
"Fine," Hank said.
"You're a liar, but you're a tidy one. I'll give you that."
June came down the counter with the pot. She was sixty-one and had waitressed at Bookie's since the sign out front had all its letters working, and she poured Hank's coffee without asking and said, "Her chain again?"
"Again," Hank said.
"It'll keep coming off till somebody teaches her to tend it. Tom always—" She stopped. The whole counter heard her stop. June was not a woman who stopped. She set the pot down a little hard and said, "Well," and went to take the truckers' order, and that was the end of it and not the end of it at all.
Grace came out of the kitchen with two plates on her arm.
Fourteen months, and Hank had seen her maybe a dozen times — across the street, through a windshield, once at the cemetery from a distance he is not proud of. He had not seen her like this: close, in the diner's fluorescent light, her hair pinned up, her apron pocket full of pens and other people's ketchup packets, moving with the efficient tiredness of a woman doing two jobs in one body. Double shifts. June had told him once, not kindly: She's on doubles till September, Hank. Then doubles again, probably.
Grace set the plates down at booth three, turned, and saw him at the counter.
It lasted a second. Maybe less. Something crossed her face that wasn't welcome and wasn't anger either — it was the look of a person who has found a photograph in a drawer she wasn't opening on purpose.
Then she was a waitress again. "Morning, Hank."
"Grace."
"You eating, or just warming the stool?"
"Warming it's fine," he said. "Coffee's enough."
She poured him a refill he didn't need, and her hand was steady, and he hated that it was steady, because Tom used to say Grace could pour coffee in an earthquake and because steadiness like that is a thing a person builds out of having no other choice.
In the booth by the jukebox, Ellie ate her pancakes with a paperback propped against the napkin holder, swinging her legs, scraped knees already scabbing over. Every so often she looked out the window at the pink bike, standing straight in the rack with its chain running true.
Hank drank his coffee. Wes, beside him, said nothing for a while, which for Wes was a form of prayer.
He watched Grace work the room the way he'd watched Tom work a crowded shop — head up, hands busy, every person greeted like the work and the person were the same thing. She carried three plates without a tray. She knew that the trucker in the CAT hat wanted his eggs wrecked and his toast barely introduced to the toaster, that the farmer by the window was on his second hip and liked his check early, that the kid in the back booth was doing homework he didn't understand and could be helped with question four while the bacon finished. Half the town was in her head, filed and tended. It was Tom's gift in a different uniform, and Hank sat there understanding, with a clarity that hurt, that the town had not lost its maintenance schedule after all. It had just been running on one woman for fourteen months, and she was wearing out in the places nobody was allowed to see.
"Your hands are still dirty," June said, passing with a rack of glasses, quiet for once, just for him. "Grease under every nail. She saw it. I watched her see it."
"I know," Hank said.
"She asked me last week if I thought you were mad at them." The glasses clinked. "Fourteen months, and that's what that woman thinks — that you're mad. I nearly told her the truth right over the pie case."
"What's the truth, June?"
"That you're the biggest coward in three counties, and you love them so much you turned it into a haunting." She moved on down the counter. "Eat something, Hank. You're making the regulars nervous. You look like a gargoyle somebody ordered for a warning."
"You know what Tom would say," Wes said at last.
"Yeah," Hank said. "I know exactly what Tom would say. That's the problem with dead friends, Wes. They never shut up."
What Tom would say was: She's seven, Hank. She doesn't need a guardian angel across the street. She needs somebody to show up on a Saturday.
Hank left two twenties under his mug for a three-dollar coffee. June saw it and opened her mouth, and he looked at her, and she closed it again, because some arguments you have with a man later, in private, with better ammunition.