I pushed my vintage cat-eye glasses up the bridge of my nose, careful to keep my face pleasantly blank. I could feel Gert eyeing me curiously, and Norman too. The truth was, Rory had had the same effect on me. We’d been each other’s flowers. We’d been each other’s suns. On the lists of regrets in my life, Rory Shaw easily topped them all.
“I guess some things just aren’t meant to be,” I said finally, giving Norman a small smile, trying to brush off his comment even though Rory’s name sent a needle-fine dart of remorse straight through my heart.
“Well, I hope you meet another nice fella soon. Mabel and I were married for almost sixty years. We were so happy together. You deserve your own happiness, Lolly.”
I nodded, wondering with a touch of chagrin just what it was about today that was bringing up so many reminders of my unfulfilled aspirations. “Someday maybe I’ll be so lucky,” I told him.
I glanced up and met Aunt Gert’s shrewd gaze. She was watching me closely beneath the puckered folds of her turban, eyes narrowed as though trying to crack some cryptic code.
“Maybe you will,” Aunt Gert said mysteriously. “Or maybe you’ll choose another path altogether.”
I glanced at her, surprised. Her tone seemed laden with significance. She couldn’t possibly know about the life goals list sitting in my office. I looked away from her discerning gaze, afraid of what she might see. The disappointment, the longing. I felt laid bare today. I needed to pull myself together.
“Say, Lolly, you have any leftover pie?” Norman asked hopefully. “This morning I think I’d like a nice slice with my coffee.”
“Sure, Norman. Let me check and see.” I walked over to the glass-fronted refrigerated pie case that faced the front door, positioned to lure customers in as soon as they set foot inside. It was a strategy that had been working pretty well for more than sixty years. We rarely had pie left over at the end of the day. There was one lone slice of yesterday’s lemon meringue pie sitting on a dessert plate inside. I pulled it out for Norman and then stopped, struck by a memory so vivid it rooted me to the spot. I’d been standing in this exact spot when I’d first laid eyes on Rory Shaw.
3
NINETEEN YEARS AGO
JULY
“Lolly, this is Rory,the new neighbors’ boy I was telling you about.” My mother stood in front of the pie case, her hand on the shoulder of a boy about my age. “He’s just turned fourteen, so I’m sure you’ll be friends.”
I stopped squirting vinegar cleaner on the glass front of the pie case and surveyed the newcomer. He was tall and gangly, with pants that were a little too short, as though he’d shot up in the night and surprised everyone. His hair was a bright coppery auburn, like a new penny that still had some shine to it, and cut close to his head so that it tufted up a bit at the back. He had freckles and warm brown eyes. I couldn’t decide if he looked geeky or cool. Maybe a little of both.
When I glanced at him my stomach did a funny little flip. I wasn’t interested in boys like my best friend, Ashley, who had sported a parade of boyfriends since the fifth grade. But there was something about Rory’s face I was drawn to instantly. Looking at him felt familiar, like walking into a warm room from the chill of a rainy afternoon. It wasn’t love at first sight with Rory Shaw. But it was certainly a strong like. I backed up a little, feeling suddenly self-conscious. I was thirteen, allponytail and flat training bra and pointy elbows. Boys were foreign territory.
“Want some help?” he asked, gesturing to the bottle of cleaner in my hand. I met his eyes, the color of root beer, I noticed, and just as lively.
“Okay.” I showed him how to crumple pages of newspaper, and together we wiped down the plate-glass window at the front of the dining room while our mothers sat in a booth and had coffee. My mom gave us each a quarter, and we took turns choosing songs on the jukebox. The jukebox had been a splurge for my parents when they took over the diner the first year they were married. My mother adored old country and western music, and they’d found it cheap when a western-themed bar had gone out of business in Tacoma. It seemed incongruous in a diner that served Danish food, but my mother hadn’t cared a bit. She always kept quarters in her pocket just so she could hear track C9, Tanya Tucker crooning “What’s Your Mama’s Name.” I’d grown up on Johnny Cash and Hank Williams and Loretta Lynn singing about love and heartbreak and feeling so true and so blue while my mom served customers the flaeskesteg daily special.
I chose track F4 on the jukebox menu, Dolly Parton’s song “I Will Always Love You,” which I thought was the most tragic and romantic song in the universe. Then Rory picked a Johnny Cash song. Over the music I eavesdropped on the adults’ conversation as my mother cheerfully interrogated Rory’s mom, Nancy. In the first week of July the Shaws had moved from the Bay Area into the 1950s rambler across the street, and my mom, a self-appointed welcome wagon for any new neighbors, had promptly taken them a lemon pound cake and invited them to stop in at the Eatery. Which they’d done this afternoon. By the end of their conversation my mother was already planning to hire Rory as a busboy at the diner when he was old enough and had invitedthe Shaws over for a cookout that weekend. My mother had a plan for everyone’s life.
While our mothers talked, Rory and I worked together silently. He was lanky but not awkward. He seemed remarkably easy in his own skin. It made me breathe easier just to be around him. I could smell him—the laundry scent of his soccer jersey and, beneath that, a hint of boyish clean sweat. There was something else too, something that reminded me a little of oak leaves and the sweet sun tea my mother brewed on our back deck in the summer. I kept sneaking glances at him as we worked. When our elbows bumped little sparklers of electricity shot down my arm, straight to my stomach. All we were doing was cleaning fingerprints off a window, but I would have cleaned that glass forever if it meant standing next to him.
That was the beginning.
4
Three a.m. andI was back in the diner’s kitchen, rolling out six piecrusts in staccato bursts of agitated energy. I’d tossed and turned for hours in my little gabled bedroom before giving up on sleep, quietly slipping past our snoring basset hound, Bertha, and walking the half mile to the Eatery through the silent, chilly streets of Magnolia. Now I was making the daily pies and listening to Johnny Cash’s greatest hits turned down low, trying to calm the tumult of my heart. I couldn’t get that life goals list out of my mind.
I eyed the diary sitting on the stainless-steel countertop next to a slab of French butter, the frolicking happy unicorns oblivious to my inner turmoil. Wiping my hands on my apron, I flipped it open to the place where Daphne had stopped reading. In glittering purple letters the list read:
Lolly’s Life Goals
1. Live in another country
2. Own my own restaurant somewhere amazing
3. Fall in love
4. Help my family be happy together 4 ever
5. Get my own horse
I smiled ruefully at number five.Get my own horse.The desire to have a horse had faded away about the time I got my driver’s license, but in those early teenage years I’d dreamed of being an equestrian champion.
