She opened on a Friday in April, at six in the morning, because six in the morning was when diners in her world opened, and she had decided there would be no ceremony about it — no ribbon, no speech, no photograph in the paper — and the town of Lenoir Falls, which respected a great many things about Mara Bennett, respected that one least of all and ignored it completely.
They came at six. They came, in fact, at five-forty, and stood on the sidewalk in the spring dark in a line that had no business existing for a twelve-item menu, and first among them — by seniority, by conscience, by having driven in from Maple Ridge in the dark in his good suit, holding his hat — was Howard Jessup.
"I want the first ticket in the book," he informed her, at the counter, with the air of a man laying down a marker three years overdue. "Whatever the special is. And I want it understood that I came under my own power, and I intend to be a regular, and a regular is a person who shows up. I have been educated on the subject."
"Then sit down, Mr. Jessup," Mara said, "and I'll educate you about the special. It's meatloaf. It's Thursday's recipe on a Friday, because I make the rules now and the first rule is meatloaf when I say so."
He laughed so hard he had to be helped to his stool by the Delaney sisters, who had come as a pair, as they went everywhere, and ordered in unison — eggs, toast, and the whole morning off from being symbols of anything, thank you very much. The Knoxville truckers' guild sent Big Tom Renner as ambassador, and he took up two stools' worth of counter and ate pie at seven in the morning on principle. Sarah Collins came in uniform, between shifts, and ate standing at the end of the counter the way deputies do, and left a tip that Mara tried once to refuse and then, catching Sarah's eye, understood and accepted: it was not charity, it was the tariff — the price of letting people be in your life on the ordinary terms, which was a currency she was still learning to hold without flinching.
The Iron Valley Riders came at nine, when the first rush had thinned, and they came as customers. That had been Rex's instruction — relayed through Helen, because the two of them were still, by mutual arrangement, communicating like heads of state — and it was obeyed to the letter and the comma: they parked across the street, not in front; they came in four at a time so as not to swamp the room; they ordered off the menu and paid off the menu and tipped like citizens. Moose folded himself into a booth with the care of a man parking a piano. Luis ate two breakfasts and asked, seriously, for the meatloaf recipe, to give to his mother, and Mara told him no with the gravity of a state secret changing hands. Dean photographed the sign, the room, the first ticket in the book — Howard's, meatloaf, 6:02 a.m. — at Mara's request, for the binder, under the tab he'd need to make new: he labeled it, later, in his clerk's hand, FIRST DAY, and under it, in smaller letters, hers, undisputed.
Rex came last, alone, near eleven, when the room had settled into the long ordinary morning. He took the end stool. He ordered coffee and the special, and he ate both with the attention of a man who has opinions about meatloaf and has decided, on this occasion, to keep every one of them to himself, though she saw him look at the plate once with an expression she chose to interpret as respect.
"You didn't put up a sign for us," he said eventually, to his coffee. "Some places do. Riders Welcome, that kind of thing."
"I put up the only sign I need," Mara said, and he looked to the window, where the gold leaf was doing its work in the sun — GOOD FOOD. FAIR PRICES. EVERYBODY'S NAME SPELLED RIGHT. — and she watched him read it twice.
"Reads right," he said.
"It took some getting to."
Outside, the April morning went on doing its impressions of a world at peace: the light traffic, the courthouse clock, Carla's radio in the kitchen playing something with horns. Inside, at the eight tables and the counter, the town ate. And Mara moved among them with the coffeepot the way she had on ten thousand mornings — through the Delaneys' toast, past Big Tom's pie, down the long counter to where the register stood open-faced beside her own black book — because she had kept it, the ledger, State's Exhibit 14 returned to her after sentencing by a clerk with a form; she had kept it on purpose, and it lived now in the drawer under her register with the receipt tape and the rubber bands, empty, its columns ruled and waiting, the book she would keep from now on: every dollar in, every dollar out, in her hand, in her name, for anyone to see who had a right to see it, which was her. Some women keep a stone from the road where the accident happened. Mara kept the arithmetic, domesticated.
"More coffee, Mr. Malone?" she said, at the end of the counter.
Rex turned his cup right side up in its saucer — the universal signal, in diners, in the whole republic of diners — and said, "Yes, ma'am. I believe I will."