In the sudden quiet of the kitchen, I made decorative peaks in the meringue with the back of a large kitchen spoon, then checked each of the six pies. Good, they had meringue all the way to the edges. It helped keep them from weeping, a peculiar pitfall of meringue. I’d been making six lemon meringue pies almost every day for the past ten years. My dad, Marty, the diner’s chief cook, handled everything else food related with the help of his assistant cook, Julio, but I made our famous pies, the best in Seattle. Only I knew my mom’s secret recipe. She’d made me memorize it the night before she passed away.
Popping the pies into the industrial oven, I set the timer and glanced at the clock. Still an hour until the doors opened at eight. Soon Dad and Julio would be in to start prepping for the day. My diary lay on the counter, a blast from the past with neon unicorns jumping over a bright rainbow spangled with stars. At thirteen I had loved that LisaFrank diary with its luridly cheerful cover, its crisp lined pages just waiting to be filled with the dreams and aspirations of my young, idealistic heart. Daphne had unearthed it a few days ago in a box of our childhood memorabilia.
I touched the cover with my fingers, lightly, wistfully, torn between wanting to toss it away and crack it open to eagerly devour every line. If I did, could I relive, if only for a moment, the confidence of endless possibilities, the naive presumption that just because I wished for something it was bound to happen? How brash that seemed now. And yet, still, how alluring.
I sniffed. Beneath the citrus scent of the pies beginning to bake I caught a whiff of regret, pungent and bitter as rosemary. I clicked on the old-school combination radio/CD player sitting under the window, tuning it to a classic country station, and opened the back door to get some fresh air, but in gusted a cool, wet wind that smelled like sorrow, sharp and briny as the sea. On second thought, I shut the door again and turned up the radio. Nostalgia was no match for Shania Twain’s rockabilly girl power.
Scooping up the diary, I crossed the kitchen and tossed it onto my desk in the converted walk-in pantry I used as an office, then shut the door firmly. I had a family to care for and a struggling diner to keep afloat. I had no time for nostalgia or regret.
2
“Is that fresh potof coffee ready?” Aunt Gert barked, bursting through the swinging kitchen door an hour after we opened for breakfast. “Norman is asking for another refill already.” She clucked her tongue in disapproval.
“New pot should be ready by now. I started it.” Dad looked up from a cutting board piled high with potatoes. Both he and Julio were up to their elbows in prep for the day. I stuck my head out the door of my little office, where I’d been crunching depressing financial figures.
“I’ll get it.”
Our breakfast offerings were simple—pastries from Petit Pierre, the French bakery down the street, and endless refills of mediocre diner-quality coffee. It was easy to handle the morning rush, although in the past few years,rushwas too generous a word for the skimpy trickle of customers who darkened our doorway before lunch. Now, in the doldrums of winter, it was even slower than usual.
Aunt Gert gave me a regal nod. “Much obliged.”
This morning she was wearing an orange-patterned caftan heavily bedecked with wooden beads that clacked as she moved. A matchingturban perched over her wispy white hair. Beneath it, her hawk nose and icy blue eyes gave her the visage of a highly ornamented bird of prey, a falcon perhaps.
Dr.Gertrude Lund, my great-aunt on my mother’s side, was an eighty-year-old esteemed professor emeritus of religion and mythology who had relocated from New England to live in the tiny cottage in our backyard almost two years ago. She was an opinionated, stubborn character with outrageous fashion sense and a razor-sharp intellect. Although her acerbic personality wasn’t particularly suited to waitressing, she insisted on helping out at the diner, pulling her weight, as she put it. Regular customers had learned to fear the heavy tread of her orthopedic shoes.
I grabbed the pot of coffee from its place by the door, and Aunt Gert followed me into the dining room. “That old coot’s just cheap if you ask me. Coming in here every morning and taking up a booth for hours and only ordering a cup of coffee.” She pursed her lips and scowled in the direction of Norman, one of our morning regulars, who was occupying his usual table by the big plate-glass front window.
“I think he’s just lonely. It hasn’t even been a year since Mabel died,” I reminded her. I had a soft spot for Norman and regularly slipped him day-old pieces of coffee cake if we had any left over. I understood grief, and while a piece of coffee cake couldn’t soothe the pain of his wife’s passing, I knew from experience that little acts of kindness were often a balm for hurting hearts.
Behind me Aunt Gert harrumphed. “You, my dear, are entirely too tenderhearted,” she said. Then, pitching her voice loudly enough so Norman could hear across the room, she added, “You know what the Bhagavad Gita says about greedy people? Lust, anger, and greed are the three doors to hell. Not my words. Lord Krishna’s.”
“What a cheerful thought.” I passed a middle-aged couple in hiking gear who were sitting in one of the booths, watching our exchangequizzically. Aunt Gert stumped behind me in her incongruously sensible black oxfords.
In the pale morning light, the diner looked quaint but a little down-at-the-heels.
The original warm, golden fir floor was scuffed and worn from more than sixty years of foot traffic. Some of the mint-green piping at the edges of the white vinyl booths was flaking at the edges, but the diner still retained much of its nostalgic charm.
The Eatery had been in our family since my maternal grandparents opened it as newlyweds in the 1950s, using their honeymoon money as a down payment on this little spot. It was located on the main street of the charming village of Magnolia, a quiet neighborhood nestled on the far west side of Seattle, swathed by Puget Sound on three sides. Magnolia was the kind of place where neighbors would pop by to drop off a pound of Manila littlenecks after an afternoon of clamming on Hood Canal, where you always recognized friends and neighbors standing in line at Petit Pierre for chocolate croissants on Saturday morning, and where the local bookshop, Magnolia’s Bookstore, was ready with the perfect recommendation as soon as you came through the door.
I loved Magnolia and the Eatery. I’d grown up here in this diner, learning to walk by tottering from the vinyl booths to the round barstools tucked below the long white Formica counter. This was home. I inhaled sharply, taking in the decades-old scent of strong, bitter coffee and cracked vinyl overlaid with just a whiff of tangy lemon meringue pie. The scent of my childhood.
“Good morning, Norman.” I topped up his coffee.
“Morning, Lolly,” Norman greeted me. He was struggling to open a paper packet of sugar.
“Can I help? Those can be tricky.” I tore the paper off the top of the packet and handed it to him.
Norman took the sugar and patted my hand. “You’re a good girl, Lolly. And pretty as a picture. Why hasn’t some fella scooped you up by now?”
“She’s not lentils in a dry-goods bin. ‘Scooped her up’ indeed.” Aunt Gert snorted from behind me. She had never married and had strong opinions on the subject of women’s rights. She’d once shared a podium with Gloria Steinem at a women’s liberation rally.
Swallowing a smile, I replied as neutrally as I could, “I don’t have time for love right now, Norman. I’ve got my family and the diner. I’m very busy.”
Norman blinked up at me with rheumy eyes, then looked thoughtfully past my shoulder for a moment as if trying to recall something. “Whatever happened to that boy, the one who was so sweet on you? He used to work here all those years ago, bussing tables as I recall. Such a nice young man, so polite. Had hair like a shiny new penny. What was his name?”
For a moment my mouth went dry. I had not uttered that name aloud in years. “Rory. Rory Shaw.”
Norman’s face brightened. “That’s it. He seemed so smitten with you. Mabel always said he reminded her of a sunflower and you the sun. Whenever you’d come in the room, she said, he turned toward you like he was following the light.”
