Chapter 9: Friday Morning
Claire opened the diner at five-thirty on Friday morning with her keys steady in her hand, and she was prouder of that steadiness than of anything she had done all year.
The taped star caught the first light and threw it in pieces across the counter. She looked at it, and then she looked away, and got to work, because work was the country she lived in. Coffee first, always coffee first β the big urn her grandfather had bought used in 1962 and her father had kept alive with swearing. Then the griddle. Then the pies out of the case to breathe: apple, blueberry, a lemon that was June's recipe and June's alone. She set the tables. She filled the napkin holders, and her hands stopped, for one second, on the word *napkin*, and moved on.
June arrived at six with her strawberry apron already on and a thermos of her own coffee, which she drank on principle in front of the urn, as she had for forty years, because June Donnelly trusted exactly one coffee in this world and she had made it herself.
"You slept," June observed.
"I lay down decoratively," Claire said. "There's a difference."
"There's grits if anybody asks. There'll be a rush at seven, there always is, and half of them will ask about the window."
"Then half of them get told a stone did it."
"Did a stone do it, Claire?"
"A stone or a man." Claire flipped the sign to OPEN with more ceremony than the act usually got. "Today we don't have to know. Today we just have to be open."
The regulars came in with the morning the way weather comes in, gradually and then all at once, and June had called it exactly right: they looked at the taped star, and they looked at Claire, and then β being the kind of people who had eaten in this room through her grandfather's heart attack and her father's funeral and every thin year since β they mostly didn't ask. Old Mr. Abernathy, eighty-one, who had taken the same stool since the Bicentennial, studied the window over his glasses and said, "Star's kind of pretty, in the light," and ordered his eggs like a man paying a compliment to the whole enterprise. Two deputies Claire knew by sight came in at eight, which they did sometimes, and ordered coffee and paid for it, which they did always, and if they took the booth by the window and stayed a little longer than deputies usually stayed, that could have been the pie. It could have been the pie. By noon the room had the feeling of a held note β ordinary on the surface, humming underneath.
At ten, a florist's van from the next town delivered a dozen yellow roses with no card, and Claire stood holding them with flour on her hands, entirely undone for three seconds, before June took them gently and said, "Secret admirers are a nuisance. Vase is under the sink. Whoever sent them has taste and no sense of timing," and that was all either of them said about it, because some kindnesses you have to walk past quickly or you'll never get the lunch rush done.
The lunch rush came and went. The afternoon went the way Friday afternoons at the diner always went, in a long, thinning sigh β the last trucker at two, the last coffee at three, the room settling into that held-breath quiet that comes before close. Only today there was no close. Today close was six o'clock, and six o'clock was not a closing time at all. It was an appointment.
At four, Claire changed the coffee. At four-thirty, she changed it again, because her hands needed it. Claire wiped the same stretch of counter for the third time and made herself stop. At five, June came out of the kitchen drying her hands on her apron and stood beside her daughter at the counter, and the two of them looked out the front windows at Route 9 in the late light β the road emptying east and west, the mountains going blue, a day like any other day deciding what it was going to be.
"You don't have to stay beside me every minute," Claire said.
"I know," said June. "That's how I know I can."
"Whatever walks inβ"
"Walks into a diner," June finished. "Where two Donnelly women are working. Your grandfather faced down a blizzard and a health inspector in the same week in this room, baby. Whatever it is, it walks into *us*."
Claire took her mother's hand, briefly, the way you check a railing β not because you think it will fail, but because it is good to know it is there.
At ten minutes to five, the first sound came down the road from the west, low and far off, like weather remembering itself. June heard it too. Neither of them said anything at all.