Ruthie stops dead and sets a hand on her hip. "I should hope so. I made it." She tops up my cup. "I do cakes on the side, honey. Birthdays, weddings, anniversaries. Three days' notice, more if you want tiers. Please have some more, that cake was meant to feed thirty." And she's off to the next table, coffee pot swinging.
I have a second slice and try to work out how Ruthie does it. The diner six days a week, open before dawn, every service at that church, the entire private business of everyone within ten miles known and distributed at speed, and somewhere in there, a cake business. I try to picture when she sleeps and can't as there aren't enough hours in the day.
I'm about to comment to Maggie about it when the choir starts up. I don't know who begins it but others join in over their coffee, and within thirty seconds half the diner is singing a hymn. Despite the dodgy harmonies I nearly choke up at the camaraderie of it — a dozen filthy, tired people singing together after a shitty day — gets right under my ribs.
Then Dennis Hurley comes in two beats late and a full semitone flat. The hymn lurches and one of the altos tries to follow him down and the whole thing buckles in the middle. For one glorious bar half the diner is singing several slightly different songs, and Dennis sails on serenely, utterly committed.
I glance at Maggie and she's already looking at me, her mouth pressed into a tight line, her eyes watering with the effort of holding in a laugh.
"Don't," she murmurs, barely moving her lips. She looks down at her coffee, her shoulders shaking.
The hymn limps to its end and everyone claps for themselves, Dennis included, and the room goes back to its happy roar.
An old man eases himself into the seat beside Maggie with a grunt, and Maggie introduces him as Earl, her neighbor from across the field.
"So that was your friend, then. The one in the helicopter," he says, studying me.
"That was her."
"Some fancy friends you've got. She offered me a real handsome sum to put it down in my field. I told her it wasn't necessary, but she insisted." Earl takes a sip of his coffee. "Wasn't going to argue with a lady that determined. A big storm a few months back took half of my barn roof out, but I can afford to repair it now. The Lord provides." He nods, and I decide not to point out that the Lord, in this instance, was a socialite with more money than sense.
Ruthie's passing and catches the tail of it. "Well," she says, not breaking stride, "she's welcome to land it on the church next time. We need a new roof too." And she's gone again, and the whole table laughs.
I sit there, amused, with my bad coffee and my retirement cake, listening to Earl and the man next to me argue about which storm over the years did the worst of it — the hail in '91 thatshredded somebody's almond blossom, the flood in '86 that put water up to the diner's windowsills and had everyone eating cold food by candlelight. Earl says it was '85. The other man disputes whether there were ever candles. The argument is plainly older than I am and nobody actually wants it settled.
No one takes my picture and no one lowers their voice when I look over. Maggie catches my eye and brushes her foot against mine under the table.
"You okay?" she asks, low, under the noise.
I take a sip of my terrible coffee and smile. "Yeah," I say. "I'm happy."
56
MAGGIE
Ipull the truck into the Dusty Rose lot and it's nearly full, which I've never seen — people stranded somewhere between here and Bakersfield with nowhere else to land. The old motel is having its busiest night of the decade.
Sloane goes to grab some clothes from her room, and I cut the engine and get out too.
"I've heard so much about this place," I say, following her. "I want to see it for myself."
"Okay. Your funeral." When she opens the door, she stops dead on the threshold. "Oh, no," she says. "Oh, no, no, no."
I come up behind her and look over her shoulder. She left the window open.
The room is brown and everything is covered in dust. The carpet, the bed, even the walls.
"I wanted to air it and forgot to close it before I left," she says faintly, picking a T-shirt off the chair. She shakes it, and a cloud comes off it. She puts it down again, defeated. "I couldn't sleep in this even if I wanted to."
"Well, luckily you don't have to." I open the closet and it's the one clean thing in the room.
"At least I had the sense to put most of my clothes away," Sloane says, pulling a few things off the hangers. The white T-shirt she's holding is immediately stained by her fingers, two grubby prints right across the front. She looks at them, then at her hands, then holds the shirt up to me like evidence.
That sets me off, and she starts laughing too. It's the stupid helpless kind of laughter that feeds on itself and it takes me a while to recover. I look around at the disaster and sigh. "Well, bring whatever's clean and we'll deal with the rest another day. Is the reception still open?"
"Yeah, I should tell them." She grabs a few items, closes the window, then straightens her shoulders like she's bracing herself.
I follow her to reception, because I know the woman, Patty, and I have a feeling Sloane's about to need backup.
