Chapter 4
Thirty Years of Mornings
Alma Torres woke at four-thirty every morning, and her hands woke five minutes later.
That was the joke she told herself, anyway, standing at the kitchen sink in her apartment over the hardware store, running hot water over her knuckles until the joints loosened enough to make a fist. Arthritis. The doctor had a longer name for it and a prescription she couldn't afford to fill regularly, so she did the hot water and the cheap drugstore cream and got on with it. The grill didn't care about her hands. The grill cared about timing, and timing lived in her shoulders, her hips, the soles of her feet β thirty years of mornings stored in muscle.
The ritual had its own choreography by now. Kettle on, water hot but not scalding. Hands under the stream, fingers spread, counting to sixty while the heat worked in. Then the cream, rubbed into each knuckle with her thumbs.
She had started at the Copper Kettle in 1975, twenty years old, newly married, pregnant with Lena. The Pembertons owned it then β old Mr. Pemberton with his suspenders and his wife who made the pies and called everyone "sugar." Alma had been hired to wash dishes. Within a year she was on the grill. Within five she was the reason people came. "Alma's mornings," the regulars called them. Truckers planned routes around them. The bell over the door rang for her, in a way.
Mrs. Pemberton had taught her the gravy herself, standing shoulder to shoulder at the stove in the winter of '76. "A little patience, sugar," the old woman had said, covering Alma's hand with her own to slow the stirring. "Gravy can't be hurried and neither can people." Alma had never forgotten it. The first morning Mrs. Pemberton let her run the grill alone, Alma was twenty-one and terrified, and the regulars had applauded her first clean flip like she'd won something.
Lena had been born in the spring of 1976, a furious red baby who screamed through the night and grew into a furious bright girl who read under the covers with a flashlight. Alma had loved her with everything she had, which turned out to be the problem β or so Lena said, years later, in the last real conversation they ever had. You loved the diner more than us. Dad died and you just kept flipping pancakes. That wasn't true, or wasn't the whole truth, but Alma had never found the words to argue it, and Lena had left for Cleveland in 1995 with a duffel bag and hadn't come back.
The apartment was quiet. It had been quiet for a long time. Lena's room was at the end of the hall, the door kept closed β not as a shrine, Alma told herself, just as a room she didn't use. But she dusted it. Every Sunday, she dusted it: the school photograph on the dresser, the bookshelf still holding the flashlight-read novels, the quilt Alma's mother had made, folded at the foot of the bed.
Alma ate standing up β toast, coffee β and walked the six blocks to the diner in the dark, past the river, past the houses with their porch lights still on. April dark had a particular smell: wet earth, the river running high with snowmelt. The bakery truck rumbled past her on Ferry, and the newspaper boy nodded to her like a fellow traveler. At five o'clock the church bell counted the hour over the empty streets, and Alma counted with it under her breath. She unlocked the back door at five-fifteen, tied her apron, and started the grill. The first hiss of the morning was the best sound she knew. It meant the day had a shape.
The opening had its own order, older than any manager's checklist. Hood fan on. Coffee urn started. The sign flipped in the front window. Salt shakers checked and filled β Danny was supposed to do that, and mostly didn't. She arranged her tools: spatula, tongs, the dented egg ring she'd used since 1983.
Danny was already there, counting the register, twenty-two and cocky and trying. He'd been short with the little girl yesterday β Alma had seen his face afterward, the way he'd avoided her eyes. He was a good kid underneath the performance. They were all good kids underneath. That was the thing Alma had learned in thirty years of mornings: everybody was good underneath. The trick was catching them before the day got to them.
"Morning," Danny said.
"Morning." Alma cracked the first eggs. "You short with any more nine-year-olds today, I'm docking your pay."
He flushed. "I didn't β Pike said β"
"I know what Pike said." She slid the eggs onto a plate. "I'm just telling you there's a better way to be. You'll figure it out."
"She was just a kid," he said finally, not looking up. "I felt like a heel."
"You were doing what you thought the job was." Alma wiped her hands on her apron. "The job's the people, Danny. The food's just how we get to them."
The bell rang. The day began. The oatmeal man took his usual stool, and the night-shift nurses came in still wearing their scrubs. Alma worked the grill the way she always did, steady as a metronome, and when the breakfast rush finally broke at nine-thirty, she stepped out back for air and looked at the river.
The alley behind the diner smelled of rain and old grease, and the river moved past the end of it, gray-green and unhurried. Alma put her hands in her apron pockets and thought about Lena in Cleveland, and the phone in her apartment that never rang, and the room at the end of the hall that she dusted every Sunday.
Somewhere across town, a little girl was carrying a ketchup sun in her coat pocket. Alma didn't know the girl's name. She found she didn't need to. Somebody pays, somebody eats β that was the whole of it, and it was enough to build a morning on.
Chapter 5
The Girl Who Left
Willa Hart won the county science fair in seventh grade with a bridge made of popsicle sticks that held forty-two pounds.