It began, the way most lasting things begin, without Walt deciding anything. The Blue Plate sat on his road home from the machine-shop supply run in Richmond, and then it sat on his road to everywhere, because once a man has found a place where the coffee is honest and the pie is an argument for civilization, his routes rearrange themselves around it.
He stopped in on the following Thursday. Then the Tuesday after that. By the end of the month, Megan had his order memorized β coffee, black; pie, whatever Sal felt like; eggs any style if he'd ridden far β and Ruth had taken to calling his stool "the annex," and the corner booth's card had acquired, in Sal's handwriting on the back, a second line: WALT'S STOOL IS AT THE COUNTER. DO NOT DISCUSS.
Sophie did her homework at the booth nearest the kitchen after school, in the care of the whole staff by a system older than she was. Her mother worked the floor; Ruth checked her spelling words at the register; Sal slid her a plate of fries cut in shapes when her fractions went hard. She waved at Walt through the window every time his cruiser rolled into the gravel, and he waved back from the saddle before he'd even cut the engine, and if he was honest β which Walt, in his private accounting, generally tried to be β he had begun to time some of his rides so that he would arrive while she was still there to wave.
Megan watched him for the first few weeks. He saw it and did not blame her; he would have thought less of her if she hadn't. She watched how he spoke to her daughter β across the room, mostly, a wave and a word about the bicycle, nothing more, the whole thing conducted in the open diner daylight β and she watched how he treated Ruth, and Sal, and the truckers and the teenagers, and the watchfulness went out of her shoulders. What the whole diner could see, she saw too: that the big man was simply kind all the way through, the way some men are tall all the way through, as a fact of construction.
"She's studying," Megan told him once, bringing coffee during a lull, nodding toward the booth where Sophie bent over a workbook, tongue in the corner of her mouth. "After her shift, I mean. Megan. I'm β " She laughed at herself. "Sorry. Third person. Double shifts do that. I'm studying for my nursing-assistant certificate. Nights, mostly. Ruth lets me use the back booth."
"That's a good trade to have," Walt said. "Hands that know things. World always needs them."
"That's what my mother said. She was a nurse for thirty years." Megan refilled his mug. "Costs a fortune in little pieces, though. Books. Fees. The exam. It adds up like groceries."
Walt said nothing to that, but he filed it where he filed things. He had a system for such filings: things a man might do something about later, quietly, when nobody was making a fuss about it. The file had grown over the years, and most of what was in it had eventually been done.
He fixed the diner's wobbling counter stool one afternoon by the expedient of producing a wrench from his saddlebag and tightening the ring bolts while sitting on the floor, to the applause of two regulars and the suspicion of Sal, who maintained that the wobble had been load-bearing. The following week he rehung the restroom door so it stopped sticking in damp weather, and planed the front door's bottom edge where it had dragged for a decade, and replaced the burnt-out bulb over the pie case, and refused, with courtesy and finality, every attempt at payment.
"You can't keep working for pie, Walt," Ruth told him.
"Watch me," said Walt, eating pie. "It's a buyer's market."
Dale Kershner rode in with two of the Iron Mile boys and found him there, and Dale β sixty-one, president of the club, a man whose voice could fill a fairground β stood in the doorway and laughed like a drain.
"So this is where the road captain disappears to," Dale said, taking the booth. "Briggs. You've gone domestic."
"I stop for coffee," Walt said.
"You stop for coffee at a place forty minutes out of your way, twice a week, where they keep your stool warm." Dale accepted the mug Ruth brought him with the ease of long acquaintance. "Son, I've known you twenty years. That's not a coffee stop. That's a parish."
Walt looked around the diner β at Sophie waving at him over her workbook, at Megan laughing at something Sal had said through the pass, at Ruth ruling her small warm kingdom from the register β and found he had no rebuttal worth making.
"It is what it is," he said.
"Yeah," Dale said, more gently. "I can see that."
Chapter 5: The Letter