She thought about calling Al, but it was late, and Al had enough worries of his own. The diner was his whole life, the same way Rosa was hers, and Maya knew that telling him about Cole's threats would keep him awake. She decided to wait until morning, when the light was better and the night's fear had thinned a little, and she told herself that one night of worry would not change anything.
Earl watched her, and he seemed to understand what she was thinking, the way old men sometimes understand things without being told. "You know," he said gently, "I have been in a few tight spots in my life. More than a few. And I have learned that the people who stand up when it costs them something are the rarest people there are. You stood up tonight, and I won't forget it. Nobody who was here tonight will forget it."
Maya managed a small smile. "I just did what anyone would do," she said.
"No," Earl said. "You did what most people wish they would do. There's a difference."
He finished his coffee and stood up slowly, reaching for his cane, and he settled his jacket over his shoulders with the care of a man who has done it a thousand times. He thanked Luis and Hank, and he thanked Maya again, and he walked to the door with his steady limp, the cane tapping softly on the linoleum. Maya watched him go, and she thought that he looked smaller than he had when he came in, as if the night had taken something out of him, and she felt a fresh wave of guilt. She had tried to protect him, but she had also dragged him into the middle of a fight he had not asked for, and she wondered if he would ever come back to the Desert Star.
Outside, the rain had softened to a drizzle, and the parking lot glistened under the neon star. Earl walked to his motorcycle, the battered 1982 Harley-Davidson FXR, and he stood beside it for a moment with his hand on the handlebar, looking out at the dark highway. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and took out a phone, an old flip phone with a cracked screen, and he dialed a number from memory. Maya watched him through the window, curious and a little worried, because it was late and because the old man's shoulders were set in a way she had not seen before, square and serious, as if he were preparing for something.
She could not hear what he said. She saw him speak for less than a minute, his voice too low to carry through the glass, and she saw him nod once, and then he closed the phone and put it back in his pocket. He stood there a moment longer, looking up at the sky, and then he swung his leg over the motorcycle with a grunt and a wince, and he started the engine. It rumbled to life, deep and steady, and he rode out of the parking lot and onto Route 66, his taillight fading into the rain like a small red star. Maya watched until he was gone, and then she went back to wiping the counter, and she tried not to think about what she had seen.
But the worry stayed with her, a small cold knot under her ribs. She worried about retaliation, about Cole and his friends coming back, about Victor Brennan and his lawyers and his plans for the diner's lot. She worried about her grandmother and the bills and the job she might have just put at risk. She locked the door when the last customer left, and she counted the register with hands that still shook a little, and she drove home through the wet dark to the small stucco house where Rosa slept. She told herself that the night was over, and that tomorrow would be an ordinary day, and that the four young men would forget about the diner and the old man and the waitress who had stood up to them. She did not believe it. Somewhere in the back of her mind, a small voice kept telling her that the phone call she had watched through the window was the beginning of something, and that the quiet of the diner that night was only the quiet before a storm.
Chapter 6: Home
The drive home took eleven minutes, and Maya counted every one of them by the landmarks she had known since childhood. The abandoned gas station with the sun-bleached sign. The Joshua tree that leaned like it was listening to the wind. Then the turn onto the dirt road, and the small house with the peeling blue paint that had been home for as long as she could remember.
She parked beside the mailbox and sat for a moment with the engine off. The desert evening settled around her in layers of purple and orange. The house was dark except for the kitchen window, where a warm yellow square of light told her that Rosa was still awake.
Inside, the air smelled of beans and cumin and the pills lined up on the counter. Rosa sat at the kitchen table in her flowered housecoat, a deck of cards spread in front of her, playing solitaire while she waited up. She looked up when Maya came in, and her whole face softened.
"There you are, mija," Rosa said. "You look tired."
"I am tired," Maya said, and bent to kiss her grandmother's cheek. "But I brought home pie. Al sent it."
Rosa laughed, a sound that still carried music in it despite everything. "Sit down. Tell me about your day."
Maya sat. She told her grandmother about the regulars, about the trucker who left a five-dollar tip on a two-dollar coffee, about the couple from Ohio who had asked her to take their picture in front of the jukebox. But Maya could see the tiredness in her grandmother's eyes too, the way her hand trembled slightly when she reached for her glass of water.
"Did you take your medicine?" Maya asked.
"Yes, yes," Rosa said. "The big white one, the little pink one, all of them. Your grandmother is not a child."