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CHAPTER SEVEN
“You seem bright-eyed and bushy-tailed this morning,” Valerie murmured when Heidi opened the back door of the SUV and reached for the infant seat buckles.
“I resent that.” Heidi unlatched the seat and carefully maneuvered Naomi’s noodly little limbs out of the holes. “I’m always cheerful.”
“You certainly pretend to be for the people who don’t know you.”
“I have no idea what you mean.” Heidi closed her eyes and gave Naomi’s head a ritual sniff to ingest her radiating sweetness. She cradled her against her chest and grabbed the blanket next to the seat.
“Mm-hmm.” Valerie climbed down from behind the wheel and fetched the diaper bag from the back.
Very few things could get Heidi out of her house so early on a workday than Valerie and Tim dangling baby bait at her. Heidi had a long day ahead of crunching numbers and tactfully responding to ridiculous emails. She was going to tranquilize herself first with some Naomi love and a slight excess of cholesterol.
Violet’s was a hole-in-the-wall joint at the end of the historic main street in town near the waterfront. Technically, it was around the corner facing the water and not on Broad itself, so it didn’t get as much tourist foot traffic as the places more prominently situated. The locals provided the diner with good business, though, so they never saw the point of paying for advertising.
Tim stepped outside as they approached and held the door open for them.
“When’d you get here?” Heidi asked as she passed.
“Been here since opening,” he grumbled. “Needed to do some employee evaluations for the guys coming off that third shift. Figured I’d buy them breakfast so they could go straight to bed when they get home.”
“You’re a good boss, Tim.”
Tim snorted and let the door swing shut behind her.
They joined Valerie at the seat by the large window where Tim had set up camp.
“How’d the evaluations go?” Valerie settled onto the inside seat facing the door and pulled the neighboring chair out for Heidi. “And how much longer will you be running three shifts?”
“If I were more of a capitalist, I’d say forever. That baby might want to go to college one day, and Lord knows what tuition will look like seventeen years from now. But the more realistic answer is just until we get out of this seasonal surge.”
Heidi grunted in an uncharitable first-world-problems way. “It’s been an unusually busy one. Not just a lot of boats, butbigboats. We had to rent out secondary space to frame out some of them and call former master builders out of retirement.” Heidi checked the time on her phone to make sure she and Tim weren’t going to risk staggering into the factory late and pissing off the first-shift builders. There was no such thing as “Owner’s Prerogative” when the whole business was in frenzied deadline mode. They had to show up on time and look like they gave a damn.
“As to your other question,” Tim said to his wife, “not bad. What do you want, coffee? Want to risk it?”
Valerie grimaced. “Better not. Naomi’s been spitting up a lot. Hot chocolate this time. Bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich.”
“Wheat and cheddar?”
“Of course. Thank you.”
Tim looked at Heidi.
“Coffee, please,” she said brightly. “And I think we have just enough time for me to get an omelet.”
“Same as always?” Tim asked.
“Nah. Trying to spread my feeling of gut grossness more across the day this time, so regular cheese and not double. I want white bread for my toast, though.”
“Okay.” Tim headed to the counter to put the order in.
Violet’s had once had table service, but when Violet retired, and her daughter took over, there wasn’t anyone left in the family to drift in the dining room and take orders. If folks wanted to eat, they had to go up to the counter and wait for LaDonna to finish whatever she was doing. The locals knew to bus their own tables, wipe them down, and leave their money by the register. Newcomers who didn’t know the system were quickly trained by the impatient diners waiting to get their grease fix.
“Thanks for letting me hold your baby,” Heidi said to Valerie.
“You’re welcome. You’ll be holding her plenty soon enough, anyway. I don’t know how you’ll ever manage to get any work done.”
“It’s a special kind of multitasking, that’s for sure. The good thing about babies at this age is that they really don’t need that much of your brain. They’re either snoozing, eating, or staring. The staring part’s when you have to be really on it. Gets tough being creative in stimulating them.”
