The Blue Plate Diner had stood on Route 40 since 1962, and it wore its sixty years the way Walt wore his: honestly, and without apology. The sign out front was hand-painted and slightly faded. The door had a bell that announced everyone who entered, regular and stranger alike, and a small handwritten card taped inside the glass that read PIE TODAY: APPLE, SUGAR CREAM, and whatever Sal feels like.
Behind the register, in frames Ruth had hung herself, ran forty years of Hartwell in photographs: Little League teams, wedding parties squeezed into Booth Six, the flood of '93 with the water at the doorstep and Ruth on the counter pouring coffee for the National Guard. Everybody in town was on that wall somewhere, and everybody checked, sooner or later, to make sure they still were.
Inside, it smelled the way a diner is supposed to smell and so few anymore do β coffee and bacon fat and cinnamon, years of it soaked into the wood and the vinyl until the building itself was seasoned. There were nine booths along the windows, red vinyl patched with matching tape, and a counter with eleven stools, and behind the counter, moving with the authority of a harbor pilot, was Ruth Calloway.
Ruth was sixty-three, broad and grey and handsome, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a pencil behind one ear. She had owned the Blue Plate for twenty-six years, since she'd bought it off the estate of the man who built it, and she ran it less like a business than like an agreement with the town of Hartwell. She looked up when the bell rang and took in Walt β all of him, the beard and the leather and the road on him β in one glance, and then she saw Megan behind him and Sophie ducking under the counter gate to her stool by the register, and her eyebrows rose a fraction.
"New friend, Megan?" she said.
"He fixed Sophie's chain out in the lot," Megan said, tying her apron straight and moving behind the counter to the coffee machine with the ease of long practice. "Sat in the gravel and fixed it. I'm putting his coffee on my tab."
"Then it's on my tab," Ruth said, in the tone of a verdict, "and we'll hear no more about anyone's tab." She pointed a finger at Walt, who had taken a stool midway down the counter. "You sit there. You're about to have pie whether you ordered it or not. Sal!"
From the kitchen pass-through came the sound of a spatula against a flattop and a man's voice, deep: "I heard pie. I make pie. It's a whole system we got."
"That's Sal Moretti," Megan told Walt, setting a white mug in front of him and filling it to the brim. "He's been cooking here since before I was born and he runs the kitchen like a submarine. Ruth runs everything else. The corner booth β " she nodded toward the big booth at the far end, where a hand-lettered card in a plastic stand read RESERVED β IRON MILE RIDERS, " β that's your people's booth, I think. They come through on the toy run every December. Washed the dishes once when our dishwasher quit mid-shift, the whole pack of them. Ruth cried."
"Walt Briggs," Ruth said suddenly, from down the counter, and Walt looked up. She was studying him over her glasses. "I thought I knew the beard. You rode sweep on the toy run two years back. Brought up the rear the whole way in the rain so nobody got left."
"Somebody's got to ride last," Walt said, "and check the ditches."
"Well." Ruth poured her own coffee and leaned on the counter in a way that suggested the conversation had only been warming up. "You'll find we're not much for letting a kindness go unexamined around here. Sophie's our diner baby. Half this town watched her learn to walk between those booths while Megan worked. So you'll forgive us if we're grateful at you a little."
Around them the crowd ebbed and flowed the way it had for forty years β farmers with seed caps, two nurses from the clinic, a high-school kid doing algebra over fries. Sophie, installed at the end of the counter with a coloring book and a glass of milk from Ruth, swung her feet and colored with concentration, looking up every so often to make sure the big man was still there, and waving at him once, gravely, when he caught her eye.
Walt waved back, gravely, and turned his attention to the sugar cream pie Sal set before him with the air of a man defying anyone to criticize it.
It was, Walt thought, taking the first bite, exactly the kind of place the road used to be full of. He had only stopped for coffee. He had no intention of becoming a regular.
He stayed an hour.
Chapter 4: The Regular