“What can I get for you?” she asked as she made it up to the booth. The yelling voice came again from the back. She clenched her eyes shut for a moment, then blinked them open at me again.
“You know,” I said. “I think I’m just going to grab a burger and fries and take them home.”
“Very good idea,” she said. “Same as the usual?”
“You know me,” I said. “I don’t ever change.”
“You and Deacon both. Like clocks, you two are,” she said, turning away in a wide circle to accommodate for her protruding belly. She looked like she was smuggling a basketball.
When she brought my food out, I paid for it and headed back to my truck, snacking on fries while I drove.
I headed back to my newish home, which was Rebecca’s old place, just up the way from where I had lived with Deacon when I moved to Ashford, Tennessee. By the time I walked in the door, one bag of fries was long gone and the second was nearly through too.
2
HELEN
Last week at this time, I was cooking on a line in one of the most prestigious restaurants in Chicago, looking forward to a meeting with an investor about possibly opening up my own place on the north side near Wrigley and trying to figure out if I could take time off during the summer to watch games. It was just a few steps shy of everything I had ever wanted as a career.
Then Dad called, and everything changed. Not only was he sick—and had he been for some time—but there were other problems too. My sister, Carrie, had tried and failed to take over the diner that I grew up in. The diner I called home. The first place I ever cooked, the first place I ever created a menu item, the first place I had ever realized what it was I was meant to do in life. She had mismanaged everything so spectacularly that she had given up, which resulted in her decision to move to Florida, and Mom was having to go try to keep all the staff from quitting and the regular customers from never coming back.
It was a nightmare, and Dad needed me to come back home to Ashford. He needed me to run Dina’s Diner.
Dina was my mom, and most of my life, she had worked at her diner cultivating a selection of eclectic customers who would come at the same time on the same days out of habit. A few of them came every weekend before or after church. Others on Saturday mornings. Others every other day to grab lunch. There were little old men who sat at the counter who came in for coffee and company every day, taking up stools that were never changed and bore the permanent imprint of their rear ends.
Mom worked hard to build the legacy of the diner as its face, but it was Dad who loved it more than anything. He bought the diner and made Mom the face when they were a young married couple. After years of raising their family in it, they had mostly hired people to run it for them in their later years. When Dad first got sick when I was in culinary school, they backed off so much that Mom only went in once a week, to great fanfare.
But now with a couple of big staff losses in the past few years and then Carrie scaring off some of the ones who were left, the diner needed help. Dad only had one person to call. He hated doing it as much as I hated the idea of telling him no. But he made the call anyway and I didn’t deny him.
Instead, I turned in my notice and explained the situation to the head chef, who was far more understanding than he had any right to be, and to the investors, who seemed like they were fine moving on to their next choice.
I packed up everything I owned, which was depressingly little, and shoved it into a moving truck. I was thankful that I only had a month left on the lease anyway. I had planned on renewing. Instead, the landlord let me out early. There was always someone else who would want it.
Driving nine hours straight, I made it to Ashford, Tennessee, hungry, tired, and resigned to working my ass off in the pursuit of someone else’s dream. Rather than find a place of my own, Dad asked me to move back home with them, at least for a while. When I talked to Mom, it seemed a bit more like they could use someone around the house with them. I agreed and moved right back into the bedroom I had as a teenager.
Thankfully without Carrie around, it meant I had the room to myself. The room that had once been a playroom for us and turned into a hangout space in our teen years was now like my own living room. It wasn’t much smaller than my apartment in Chicago when I added the three rooms together. Plus, I had a kitchen that was always stocked and my parents around to be with. Admittedly as much as I loved Chicago, I had been getting a little lonely.