Chapter 3
Emily Harlow opened the diner at six, as she did five mornings a week.
She unlocked the front door, flipped the sign, turned on the grill hood, and set the coffee to brew.
Jimmy arrived at six-fifteen with his thermos and his bad knee and his usual complaint about the weather.
Denise came at seven with her makeup half done and her opinions fully formed.
Rosy’s had been in Margaret’s family since 1962. Margaret was Rosie’s daughter, sixty-one years old and built like a fire hydrant, and she still came in on Saturdays to count the register and tell stories about customers who had died. The diner paid Emily eleven dollars an hour plus tips. The tips were good in the morning. The morning was the only thing that was good about the arrangement.
By eight, Emily had already refilled thirty cups of coffee. By nine, she had mediated a dispute between two old men over a crossword puzzle and wiped applesauce off a toddler’s chin. By ten, her feet ached and her apron had a coffee stain shaped like Ohio.
She liked it. She did not like admitting that she liked it.
She had wanted to teach. She had the degree in childhood education and the student loans to prove it, but the certification exams had cost money she did not have, and the year she was supposed to student-teach, her grandmother had fallen in the shower and broken a hip, and Emily had moved into the apartment above the laundromat to be close enough to drive her to appointments. The teaching job had become a someday job. The diner had become a now job. Now had lasted five years.
At ten-forty, Denise came back from the counter with a knowing look.
“Your fancy family is here.”
“They’re not my family.”
“The way that man tips, he’s everyone’s something.”
Emily looked up. Through the front window, she could see the black Escalade pulling into the lot. Tony got out first, scanned the street, then opened the rear door. Vincent Romano stepped out in a gray coat. Then the boy.
Luca was wearing a dark green sweater today. He held his father’s hand. He walked into the diner like a small ghost, making no impression on the room, and slid into the same booth he had sat in three days earlier.
Emily grabbed two menus and the coffee pot.
“Morning, gentlemen,” she said. “The usual?”
Vincent looked tired. More than tired. There were shadows under his eyes that had not been there on Tuesday.
“Please,” he said. “Though I think Luca might try the blueberry today. What do you think, son?”
The boy did not answer. Vincent did not seem to expect him to.
“Blueberry it is,” Emily said. “And I have something for you.”
She reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a small coloring book—a cheap one from the corner store, animals and cars and lighthouses—along with a box of eight crayons. She set them on the table in front of Luca.
“No pressure,” she said. “Just thought you might like something to do while the grown-ups talk about boring things.”
Luca’s eyes fixed on the coloring book. His hand hovered over it, not quite touching, as if testing whether it was real.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Vincent said quietly.
“It was three dollars.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Then what is the point?”
Vincent looked at her for a moment. “People don’t usually notice.”
“I notice everything,” Emily said. “It’s the job.”
She walked away to put in the order. When she came back with their coffee, she found Luca turning the pages of the coloring book slowly, examining each picture with serious concentration. He stopped on a page showing a lighthouse by the ocean. His finger traced the outline of the tower, following the spiral of the light at the top.
“Good choice,” Emily said. “Lighthouses are cool. They help ships find their way home when it’s dark and stormy.”
Luca did not look up, but his finger stopped moving. He was listening.
“I saw a real one once,” Emily went on. “Cape May. I was about your age. It was so tall I got dizzy looking up at it.”
She set down their plates and left them alone.
Vincent ate without tasting anything. He watched his son color—the slow, deliberate strokes, the way Luca stayed inside the lines—and felt something he had not felt in a long time. Not hope. Hope was too loud. This was quieter. This was the possibility of hope, which was almost harder to bear.
“You’re staring,” Emily said, passing with a coffee pot.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s a good thing to stare at.”
She refilled his cup. “He’s not what you think he is, you know.”
Vincent looked up. “What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s not empty.” Emily’s voice was matter-of-fact. “He’s just quiet. There’s a difference.”
She moved on before he could answer.
Later, when the breakfast rush had thinned and the diner had settled into its mid-morning lull, Emily found herself at their booth again.
Vincent was watching Luca color.
The boy had filled in the ocean around the lighthouse in a careful blue.
“Can I ask you something?” Emily said.
Vincent looked up. “Yes.”
“His mother. What happened?”
The question was blunt, but her voice was not unkind.
Vincent was silent for a moment.
Then he said, “She died two years ago. A brain aneurysm. It was sudden. She was in the garden. Luca was inside. Maria found her.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I was in Chicago.” The words came out flat, as if he had said them to himself a thousand times. “I was closing a deal. She called me that morning and I didn’t answer. I told myself I’d call her back that night.”
Emily did not say anything. She did not offer him a platitude. She just stood there, holding the coffee pot, and let him have the silence.
“My brother stopped talking once,” she said finally.
Vincent looked up.
“Danny. He was ten. Our father left, and Danny just—stopped. Eight months.
Not a word. My mother took him to doctors, specialists, a priest.
Nothing worked.” She shrugged. “Then one day I took him to a diner—not this one, a place in Bayonne—and I gave him a quarter for the jukebox.
He looked at the songs for about five minutes and then he said, ‘Which one?’”
Vincent’s throat tightened. “Just like that?”
“Just like that.” Emily smiled. “He didn’t need to be fixed. He needed to feel safe enough to come back. That’s all.”
“How do you make someone feel safe?”
Emily considered the question. “You stop acting like their silence is a bomb you’re waiting to go off.”
She left him with that.
At eleven-thirty, the diner door jingled and Diane Whitfield walked in.
She was dressed more casually than she had been in the parking lot—a soft gray sweater, no envelope—but she still looked out of place among the construction workers and the retirees.
She stood in the doorway for a moment, scanning the room, and then her eyes found the booth by the window.
Vincent rose halfway out of his seat. “Diane.”
“I’m not here to fight,” she said. She looked at Luca. “I’m here to see my grandson.”
Luca had gone still. His crayon hovered above the page.
Diane slid into the booth across from him, careful and slow, as if approaching a wild animal. “Hello, sweetheart. Do you remember Gigi?”
Nothing.
“I used to sing to you. ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ Do you remember?”
Luca’s hand closed around the crayon. He did not look at her.
Diane’s composure held for another few seconds. Then her chin trembled, and she pressed her lips together, and Emily saw the exact moment she decided not to cry in public.
“I’m sorry,” Diane said, though it was not clear to whom. She stood. “I’ll go.”
At the door, she stopped beside Vincent. “I’m not doing this to hurt you,” she said quietly. “I’m doing it because she asked me to.”
Vincent went very still. “What are you talking about?”
“Catherine wrote it down.” Diane’s eyes were wet now, but her voice was steady. “She gave it to me before she died. I have it, Vincent. I’ve had it for two years.”
“What does that mean?”
May you like
“It means she knew you.” Diane pulled her coat tighter. “She knew exactly what you would do.”
She walked out. The bell jingled behind her.
