The notice went up in the diner window on the first Monday of November, in Amy's careful handwriting, because Claire's was a scrawl and June's came out like a court order. On Thanksgiving Day, it said, the Route 9 Diner would serve a full turkey dinner, free, to anybody who walked through the door, from noon until the food ran out. No reservations. No bill. June read it twice and was quiet for a whole minute, which in June's arithmetic was a standing ovation. Then she said, "Then we'll need twenty pies. Not eighteen. Twenty. And I'll want the good nutmeg."
The donations arrived the way everything arrived on Route 9 now, through the network the year had built. The grocery in town gave a dozen turkeys and would not hear of being thanked on paper. A farmer from over the ridge brought a truck bed of potatoes and squash. The Granite Ridge clubhouse took up a collection so thorough that Preacher had to announce, twice, that the ham fund was closed, there were enough hams, heaven knew there were enough hams. Amy's volunteer sheet filled two pages and spilled onto a third, and Sheriff Whitaker lent the department's enormous coffee makers, delivering them herself.
Thanksgiving morning came down cold and clear, with a skim of frost on the patio tables and the smell of woodsmoke. June was in the kitchen by five, in command of the pie station and, by extension, the known universe. Ox carved turkeys at a side table in an apron over his cut, working with the concentration of a man defusing something precious. The booths had been pushed back and the long table set down the middle of the room, plate after plate after plate, until the diner looked less like a restaurant than like someone's enormous, welcoming house. Amy put a sprig of something green at every setting, because a free dinner, she said, was no excuse for a bare table.
They came in twos and threes and family-fulls from noon onward. A long-haul trucker from Ohio, two days from home, who kept saying he only wanted coffee and stayed for three helpings and a slice of every pie. An elderly couple from the Methodist church who ate at the diner every Sunday and had decided, jointly, that this year their table at home was too quiet to bear. Three nurses off the night shift at the county hospital, still in their scrubs. A young family new to Marlow, whose little boy solemnly informed Ryan that the gravy was "the best drink he'd ever had." College kids driving through who had seen the sign and came in half-believing it was a trick, and stayed to wash dishes.
The riders served. It had been Saint's idea, offered the way he offered everything, as a simple statement of fact: the club would work the floor. So Saint stood at the door in a clean shirt under his cut, greeting every guest like the host of the house, and learning names, and remembering them. Preacher said a grace so short it was over before the self-conscious could look down: thanks for the food, thanks for the hands, thanks for the room. Wrench ran the dish pit and sang, off-key and entirely unrepentant. Ryan kept coffee and water moving the length of the long table, and carried plates for anyone whose hands shook, and nobody made a remark about it, which was its own kind of grace.
Midway through the afternoon Claire noticed Mr. Albee, who had eaten alone at the counter every Friday for six years and had never once made conversation beyond the weather, seated in the middle of the long table between a rider named Dutch and Dutch's enormous laugh, deep in an argument about ice fishing that involved both hands and the salt shaker standing in for a bobhouse. Amy caught Claire watching and leaned in. "I sat Dutch next to him on purpose," she whispered. "You taught me that. You seat people like you mean it." Claire had to go into the kitchen for a moment, on the pretense of checking the rolls, and stand by the ovens until the feeling passed.
The pies came out at four to actual applause, twenty of them in procession, and June wiped her hands on her apron and endured the room's gratitude with her chin up and her eyes suspiciously bright. "Eat," she told them all. "It's what they're for." By dark the leftovers were boxed and loaded into a pickup, and a line of riders carried Thanksgiving out into the cold, to the shelter and the night staff at the hospital and the two old men at the motel who hadn't believed the invitation included them. Claire locked the door at last, in the first fine sifting of snow, and June, beside her, already had her coat on and her list out. "Same again next year," June said. "I'll order the turkeys in October. Don't argue."
Chapter 29: The Quiet Friday