Page 6 of Honeyfires

"Thank you. Her name is Daisy." She patted the roof with genuine affection. "She's not as exciting as your motorcycle, but we have an understanding."

"What kind of understanding?"

"She doesn't break down somewhere too inconvenient, and I talk to her nicely and name her after flowers."

"Does that work?"

"Mostly. She had one incident in Flagstaff." A pause. "We don't talk about Flagstaff."

"What happened in Flagstaff?"

She looked at me. "We don't talk about Flagstaff."

I held the diner door open. She walked through, and the warm smell of coffee and frying onions folded around us both, familiar as an old argument, reliable as gravity. Classic Rosie's. Unchanged since 1984. The kind of place that had outlasted everything else in San Jacinto by simply refusing to become anything different.

We slid into a red vinyl booth, and the waitress poured coffee without being asked. Vera wrapped both hands around her mug and looked around the diner with the particular satisfaction of someone discovering that a place actually resembles the idea they had of it.

"This is perfect," she said.

"It's a diner."

"It's a perfect diner." She looked at me. "There's a difference. Some diners are just places that have eggs. This one has character."

"It has a jukebox that hasn't worked since 2003 and a pie display that rotates the same four pies in a different order every day."

"That's what I said." She wrapped her hands tighter around her mug. "Character."

I looked at her. She looked at the pie display with genuine admiration and respect.

"What brought you to San Jacinto?" I asked. "Originally."

"Honestly?" She traced the rim of her mug with one finger. "I wanted somewhere that felt like the books I grew up reading. Small town, slow pace, everyone knows everyone. The kind of place where things happen at a human speed." She paused, watching the steam rise from her coffee. "I wanted somewhere I could put roots down without them bouncing back."

"And is it?"

"Mostly." She smiled across the table, that full, unguarded one, the one I'd already started registering against my better judgment. "Though I didn't expect to meet someone like you."

"Someone like me, meaning?"

"Someone who makes me actually want to stick around."

I stared at her, trying to process how a person could be so goddamn direct and still not scare the absolute living shit out of me.

"I… Okay."

Vera smiled. "I know we just met. But I believe in saying what I mean."

I looked at her across the table, this woman who said things like that with the same ease she breathed, and felt something in me quietly rearrange itself. Like tectonic plates resettling, creating mountains where before there had only been plains.

"No," I said. "It's not too much."

Her smile could have lit up the whole building. The whole town, maybe.

We ordered burgers and discovered we both apparently only knew how to order burgers, and fell into the kind of conversation that had no business being as easy as it was. She told me about the library: the reading programs she was building, the children's hours, the book club she was planning, the joy of placing exactly the right book in exactly the right hands at exactly the right moment. The way she spoke about it, her hands moving, her eyes animated, I got the feeling she wasn't describing a job. She was describing a vocation. A calling.

"It sounds like rescue work," I said.

She pointed at me. "Yes! That's exactly what it is. Narrative rescue." She looked pleased I understood, the way you look when someone puts into words something you'd only ever been able to feel. "What about you? What does a person have to do for a living to get biceps like that? And don't say CrossFit, I'll be devastated."