Chapter 22: The Anniversary
The Blue Plate Diner turned forty on a Saturday, and Hartwell turned out for it the way Hartwell turned out for very little else β completely, and with folding chairs.
Ruth had bunting up by seven in the morning, red-white-and-blue swags that Sal hung from a ladder while complaining steadily about federal holidays, gravity, and the American flag industry. By ten there were old photographs taped in a crooked line along the wall by the register: the diner as a gravel lot in '85, Ruth at twenty-three with a beehive and a mortgage, the great flood year with water up to the bottom step, generations of waitresses, generations of regulars, a hundred birthday cakes. People stood in front of the wall all day pointing at their younger selves.
"There's me," said Mr. Abernathy, who was eighty-nine, "with hair. Somebody ought to have warned me."
The Iron Mile Riders came in their colors and Ruth put them to work. That had been her condition and Dale had agreed to it with a handshake: you want forty bikes in my lot for your photograph, you can bus tables while you're at it. So the anniversary of the Blue Plate was served, in large part, by enormous men in leather vests carrying coffee pots with exaggerated care, calling elderly ladies *ma'am* and meaning it, and refilling iced tea like it was a sacred trust. Sal ran the grill in a paper hat that said BOSS, which he had made himself and which no one was allowed to comment on.
Ruth made her speech at noon standing on a milk crate by the pie case, because she refused the microphone Dale had brought.
"Forty years," she said. "I have fed this town through two recessions, one tornado, four mayors, and the entire low-carb era, which we do not discuss." Laughter. "I have buried husbands and I have married people β two weddings in that booth over there, and one of them took." More laughter. "This place isn't mine. It never was. It's just a room where Hartwell happens to itself. I'm only the woman who keeps the coffee hot. Thank you for forty years of letting me."
She stopped there, deliberately, because she could see Sal at the pass-through with his face already crumpling, and Sal crying would set off the whole kitchen. She stepped down to applause and somebody's grandchild ringing the order bell forty times in a row, which seemed correct.
Walt worked the lot. That was his assignment and he was grateful for it β parking bikes in rows, directing cars, finding a booster seat, carrying a case of soda from Ruth's car. Work kept his hands steady. Every time the screen door banged he looked up, and every time it was somebody else, and he told himself what Megan had told him that morning while tying his apron strings behind his back like he was a child: *Mid-afternoon, Walt. They said mid-afternoon. Quit watching the door and let the door do its job.*
Hannah came at twenty past three, through the lot, in the middle of the ice run.
She parked her gray sedan at the far edge where the gravel gave out, and she sat in it a moment with the engine off β Walt saw her do it, and he saw her check the mirror, and fix something about her face, and take a breath the way a person does before water that's cold. Then she got out and opened the back door, and a small boy climbed down holding a plastic dinosaur in one fist, wearing a red shirt and an expression of tremendous seriousness.
Walt did not go to them. Megan had arranged that too, the way she had quietly arranged everything about the day β no fuss, no announcement, no line of bikers turning to stare. "Let her cross the room herself," Megan had said. "She's been crossing it for eight years. Let her finish."
So Walt stood by the ice machine with a bag leaking in his arms and watched his daughter walk his grandson through the anniversary crowd, past the wall of photographs, past the booths, and Hannah looked neither left nor right until she reached the counter, where Megan was waiting with two menus and the face of a woman for whom nothing unusual was happening at all.
"Table for two?" Megan said. "Or is it three?"
Hannah's voice, when it came, was steady. "Three," she said. "But the third one's still pretending to carry ice."
"Booth six," Megan said. "Best seat in the house. Somebody'll be along."
Walt set the ice down very carefully, like it was made of glass. He took off the apron. He wiped his hands on a towel, and then on his jeans, and then on the towel again. And Dale, passing with a bus tub, said out of the side of his mouth, not slowing down: "Go on, then, Grandpa Bike."