The town council met on the second Tuesday of the month, in a room that smelled of old coffee and floor wax, and by six-fifteen every folding chair in it was taken. Word had traveled the way it always traveled in Hartwell β through the diner first, then the hardware store, then church β and nobody wanted to hear the news secondhand.
Ruth Calloway sat in the back row with her coat folded over her arm. She had come straight from closing the Blue Plate, and there was still a faint smell of dish soap on her hands. Sal Moretti had wanted to come with her. She had told him to go home and rest his feet. Some things a person did alone, the way she had signed the lease alone, forty years of Aprils ago.
At the front of the room, a young man in a suit that cost more than Ruth's first car set up an easel of glossy boards, and Dale Mercer stood beside it with a laser pointer and the easy smile of a man who had given this talk in eleven towns and buried eleven diners.
"Mercer Hospitality Group is proposing a full-service travel plaza," he said. "Twelve fueling lanes. A convenience market. Two fast-food franchises, national brands. Forty-six jobs, and I want to stress, those are year-round jobs, not seasonal. The tax revenue to the town in year one aloneβ"
The red dot danced across the boards. There was an artist's rendering of the plaza at dusk, all lit up like a small, clean city, palm trees drawn in by somebody in an office who had never seen an Indiana winter. Where the Blue Plate Diner stood in the rendering β Ruth could find it precisely, the corner lot on Route 9 where the road bent β there was a car wash.
Forty-six jobs. She watched heads nod. She could not blame them, and that was the worst of it. She knew every one of those heads. The mayor's son had washed dishes for her one summer and been fired, kindly, for eating more pie than he served. The councilwoman by the window had held her wedding reception breakfast in Ruth's back booth because the hall had flooded. They were not villains. They were tired people in a tired town, being offered a number with a dollar sign in front of it, and the number was real.
"Now, I want to be transparent," Mercer said. "The existing structure on the lot is at end of life. The current tenant has been notified under her lease, and she has ninety days, which we consider generous." He said it the way you would mention the weather. "Ninety days from last Monday."
Somebody in the third row β it was Don Pruitt, who had eaten breakfast at the Blue Plate six days a week for thirty years β said, loud enough for the minutes, "Her name is Ruth."
The mayor asked for order. Mercer's smile did not change. "Of course. Ms. Calloway has been β the diner has been a fixture. We'd hope to honor that somehow. Perhaps a photograph in the plaza. A plaque."
Ruth looked down at her hands. A plaque. She thought of the grill that had cooked four hundred thousand eggs, give or take; of the counter stools worn to a shine by the specific shapes of specific men; of the wall by the register where the photographs went back to her father's day β teams and soldiers, going out and coming home. She thought of the stool at the end where a big grey-bearded man now sat most mornings, a stranger two weeks ago, and how the whole town had started calling him by his first name because of two minutes with a bicycle chain.
The council took no vote. It was an informational session, the mayor said. There would be a hearing in six weeks. People filed out into the October dark, buttoning coats, saying less than they felt, the way people do when a thing is both terrible and possibly necessary.
Ruth walked home the long way, past the lot. The diner was dark except for the small lamp Sal always left burning in the kitchen window, so the place would not look abandoned. The gravel crunched under her shoes. Ninety days, she thought. She had counted them on the calendar that morning, the way you count anything you are afraid of β twice, slowly, as if the second count might come out different.
She unlocked the door and stood a moment in the dark dining room, among the tables she would wipe down in the morning, and she did not cry. She had cried on Monday, efficiently, in the pantry, among the soup cans. Tonight she just stood there, and then she hung her coat on its hook, and she got out the mop, because the floor was dirty whether the world was ending or not.
Chapter 7: The Machinist