She carried the folder and the drive out through the dining room. Through the grease-fogged front window, I watched the cruisers back down the gravel driveway, their red tail-lights painting long crimson streaks across the wet asphalt of Route 9 before they turned north toward the highway junction.
The diner was quiet again.
Nora sat down on an overturned pickle bucket by the vegetable sink, her head bowed into her hands. The adrenaline that had carried her through the woods, across the highway, and into my front door seemed to leave her all at once, leaving only the thin frame of a nineteen-year-old girl who had spent four months sleeping on a friend's pull-out couch while her former employer threatened to put her in county jail for grand larceny.
I walked to the pantry, found a dry dishtowel, and wet the corner under the cold tap. I walked back over and held it against the scrape on her cheek where she had stumbled in the brush.
"He's not coming back, Nora," I said gently.
"His brother still has cousins on the school board, Calvin," she whispered, without looking up. "They know where my mother lives."
"His brother doesn't have an operating bond," I said, handing her the towel so she could hold it herself. "Without the fuel rebate, their hauling company owes the state four hundred thousand dollars in uncollected road tax. By next week, nobody on the board will take their phone calls. That's how this valley works. People only stand behind a thief while his diesel is cheap."
I walked back into the dining room, took the mop and the galvanized bucket from the service closet, and carried them to the middle of the floor. The linoleum under booth four was still sticky with dark coffee and slick with fragments of brown glass. I knelt down with the dustpan, sweeping the broken shards into the galvanized tin with slow, steady scrapes.
My left shoulder ached where Rowe had driven me into the door frame, and the scrape across my palm throbbed in rhythm with my pulse. It was five in the morning now. The eastern sky behind the pine ridge was turning the pale, cold blue of slate. In two hours, the morning log trucks from the upper valley would begin rolling down Route 9 on their way toward the river mill.
They wouldn't stop today. The sign in my window still said CLOSED, and the grease in the deep fat fryer had been cold for three months. The ceiling plaster in the corner by the pie carousel still had the water stain from the heavy snows in December, and my checking account had thirty-four dollars in it until the state vacated the tax assessment against my pumps.
Nora came out of the kitchen with a fresh pot of tap water and set it on the cold burner of the station. She picked up a clean rag from behind the counter and began wiping the dried salt and grease off the laminated menus stacked by the register. She didn't ask if I was hiring, and I didn't tell her I couldn't afford to pay eight dollars an hour. She simply set the first four clean menus in the wooden rack, turned around, and began wiping the fingerprints off the pie carousel glass.
I carried the dustpan full of broken glass out the back door and dumped it into the heavy iron dumpster behind the kitchen. The morning air was sharp, smelling of wet sage, river mud, and pine needles. The rain had finally stopped, leaving small, clean pools of sky caught in the gravel ruts where Rowe’s cruiser had spun its tires twenty minutes ago.
Across the highway, the hills stood gray and permanent against the coming sun. A deer stepped out of the alder thicket near the drainage ditch, sniffed the wind toward the pavement, and walked back into the brush without hurrying.
I went back inside, latched the screen door, and slid the iron bolt home. It wasn't a fortress, and it wouldn't stop a man who truly wanted to do damage with an axe or an engine, but the brass cylinder sat deep in the oak frame, tight and unbroken.
I picked up the mop, dropped it into the soapy water, and began dragging the gray yarn across the linoleum, working my way from the kitchen pass-through all the way down to the front entrance, washing out the boot tracks until the white surface showed clean under the pale morning light.
FINAL THANK-YOU NOTE
Thank you for making room for these pages today.