Chapter 5: The Anniversary
Lou found the date waiting in the kitchen the way it always did, chalked on the order board in Marco's handwriting. OCT 23, three years old and still his. She wiped it off with her sleeve and wrote nothing in its place.
Bea came in at six and took one look at her and said, "Happy anniversary, then."
"Don't," Lou said.
"I wasn't wishing," Bea said. "I was observing. There's a difference, and I expect a cook to know words."
Lou tied her apron. The diner smelled like grease and coffee, like the mornings Marco had hummed coming down the back stairs. She had not heard that humming in three years and she still listened for it.
Behind the pantry door, the bills waited on her desk. The bank's letter sat on top. Marco's hospital bills, refinanced after the funeral, were due in one lump the Beacon could not cover. Howard Pike had written his sympathy in the first paragraph and his numbers in the second. Lou hated him a little for the letterhead.
"You want me on the floor today," Bea said, not quite asking.
"I want you wherever you stand," Lou said. "You stand, I cook. That's the deal."
"It's your anniversary, Lou."
"It's a Thursday," Lou said. "Flip the sign."
The lunch rush behaved like a favor. Old Harlan told his halibut story and nobody interrupted him. At four, a school bus hissed past, and Lou's hands stopped on a tray of buns. The day carried her: the heart attack in the walk-in, the phone call, the apron Marco never took off. All of it rising in her like something that would not stay down.
She worked because her hands could work while the rest of her drowned.
Lila came at six-fifteen, rattling the back screen door in her rhythm. Two quick shakes, a pause, one more. The diner was quiet, and for one terrible second the quiet was a place Lou could crawl inside.
She opened the back door three inches. Lila stood on the step, backpack over one shoulder, a leaf stuck to her sleeve, grinning like the grin was currency and she was rich.
"Hey," Lila said. "I practiced the flip with a spatula. Mrs. Crandall says spatulas are for serving, not circus acts. I told her the circus is closed on Thursdays."
"Lila," Lou said.
"What's wrong with your face," Lila said. It was not a question.
"Not tonight, kid," Lou said.
The grin did not fall. It just went out, the way a light goes out in a window when someone leaves the room. "What?"
"Not tonight," Lou said. "Go on home. There's school in the morning."
"I can stay quiet," Lila said quickly. "I won't flip anything. I can just sit on the crate. The crate doesn't mind me."
Lou felt the true words building, too big and too ugly to hand a nine-year-old. I am broke. Today is the day he died. I cannot be kind tonight, not even to you. So she handed her the small ones instead.
"Go on," Lou said. "Don't make me say it twice."
Lila looked past her into the warm kitchen. "Did I do something?"
"No."
"Is it the pancake thing? I can stop coming if it's the pancake thing. I don't need the pancake."
Lou's chest made a sound that was not crying. "Kiddo, it's nothing you did. I just need the kitchen to myself tonight."
Lila nodded too fast, the way kids nod when they have decided not to ask for anything. "Okay," she said in a very small voice, and walked down the alley with her backpack bumping against her back, and did not look back.
Lou closed the door. She locked it. She stood with her forehead against the steel for a full minute.
"She'll be fine," Bea said, gentle as Bea ever got. "It's one night, Lou."
"She asked if she did something," Lou said.
"I know, honey. I heard."
"Lock up," Lou said. "All of you, get out."
Bea did not argue. That was the worst of it. Frankie killed the grill and left, and Bea locked the front, and the diner emptied out. Lou stood alone in the kitchen she had worked in for thirty years with a man who was dead.
She turned off the lights until only the streetlamp bled through the windows. She sat at the corner booth and cried the way you cry when nobody is watching, shaking the table with her shoulders, without dignity.
When it slowed, she took Marco's framed photo down from the shelf by the register. The harbor festival, him in his stupid paper crown, laughing at something out of frame. She set it on the table across from her.
"Three years," she said. "You'd think three years would be the charm. But time does not do things, Marco. It just walks past and leaves the mess."
The photo said nothing, which was not like him.
"The bank wants the money," she said. "The medical money. I signed the papers at the funeral home, and now they want it and I don't have it." She wiped her face. "And tonight I sent that kid away. She rattled the door and I sent her away because I couldn't look at her. Because she looks at me like I know how to fix things."
She held the photo close. "You'd have fed her," she said. "Pancake in the pan before the door finished swinging. And you'd have looked at me like I was being a fool."
A truck went by on the harbor road.
"I'm sorry," Lou said to Marco, to Lila, to the empty kitchen. "I'm sorry."
She put the photo back and walked home through the dark. All the way up the hill she heard the screen door rattling: two quick shakes, a pause, one more, and the small voice saying okay, okay. And every step hardened the guilt in her like concrete around a fence post, set for twenty years.