It came on a Tuesday, in the thin hour between the lunch crowd and the lull, with the certified-mail sticker on it the exact green of a traffic light that means trouble.
Ruth signed for it at the counter because the mail carrier, Eddie Voss, who had held the route for nineteen years, brought it inside personally instead of leaving it in the box, and he set it down in front of her with the apologetic care of a man delivering bad weather.
"Needs a signature, Ruthie," he said. "Came from a law office in Indianapolis."
"A law office." Ruth signed, and printed her name beneath, neatly, the way she did everything. "Well. Haven't I come up in the world."
Eddie waited a moment, in case there was anything else, and then he went out into the grey afternoon, and the bell over the door rang him away.
Ruth opened the letter standing at the register, with a steak knife for a letter opener, because the diner did not contain a letter opener and Ruth had never seen the need. She read it once through, standing very still. Then she read it again, more slowly, with her glasses pulled down from the top of her head, while Sal's spatula went quiet in the kitchen behind her and the two customers at the counter β old Mr. Abernathy and a traveling salesman β studied their plates with sudden interest.
The letter was three paragraphs long and used the word regrettably twice. The lot on which the Blue Plate Diner stood, it said β the lot her landlord of twenty-six years, the Haverford estate, had leased to her through two renewals and one handshake extension β had been sold, effective the first of the month, to Meridian Growth Partners, a development company of Indianapolis. Meridian did not intend to renew the diner's lease. Meridian intended, in the letter's phrase, to reposition the parcel. The diner was to vacate the premises within ninety days of the date of the letter.
Ninety days. Ruth did the arithmetic the way she had been doing arithmetic all her life, instantly and without sentiment. Ninety days took her to the middle of January. Past Christmas. Past the toy run.
She folded the letter back into its envelope with care, and then folded it again, smaller, and slid it into the pocket of her apron, where it rested against her hip like a stone she had decided to carry personally.
Sal appeared in the pass-through with a plate in his hands that nobody had ordered. He looked at her face and set the plate down.
"Ruth," he said.
"The Haverfords sold the lot," Ruth said, in the voice she used for reading out specials. "To a development outfit. Lease isn't being renewed. We've got ninety days."
Sal was quiet a moment. Then he said, "The building?"
"The building's mine. The ground under it isn't. Never was. I leased ground and built a life on it, Sal. Twenty-six years." She untied her apron and retied it, a gesture with no purpose except occupation. "Now listen to me. Not a word. Not to Megan, not to the regulars, not to anybody. People have enough to worry about without carrying this around for three months β and I'm not having this place die by inches with everybody whispering over the coffee. When I know what I'm doing, I'll tell them. Till then it didn't happen."
"And what are you going to do?" Sal said.
"I don't know yet," Ruth said. "That's why it's a secret. Secrets are just plans that haven't decided."
She worked the dinner rush that night the way she had worked ten thousand dinner rushes β seating, pouring, calling orders, remembering that the Abernathys' grandson had a nut allergy and that the salesman liked his eggs over hard. Megan worked the floor with her, bright and tireless, and Sophie colored at her booth, and Walt, at his stool, ate meatloaf and read the racing page and never noticed a thing, because Ruth Calloway, when she chose to, could hide an ocean in a teacup.
After closing, when the chairs were up and the floor mopped and the pie case dark, Ruth stood alone behind the counter in the pool of light from the lamp over the register. She took the letter out of her apron and smoothed it flat on the counter, and read the three paragraphs one more time, as if the words might have reconsidered.
They hadn't.
"Well," Ruth said to the empty diner, and folded the letter away. "Ninety days."
Then she did what she had done every night for twenty-six years: she checked the pie case, set the coffee machine for morning, and turned the sign in the window to CLOSED with a hand that did not shake. Whatever was coming, it would find the Blue Plate with its floors clean. Outside, Route 40 ran dark and empty past the wide gravel lot, and the sign hummed.
Chapter 6: The Developer