"She's something," Claire said, wrapping the wool blanket Mae had left around her shoulders. It smelled of mothballs and cinnamon and the particular cleanliness of things washed by hand.
"She's everything left," Jack answered, then grimaced and rubbed his jaw. "That sounded gloomier than I meant. She's also the reason this place still has a pulse. After the accident, people from town brought casseroles for weeks. Then the casseroles stopped, the way kindness eventually has to go back to its own kitchen. Mae never stopped. She opened at six every morning like grief was just another shift. I followed her lead because leading looked impossible and following looked like love."
"It sounded honest," Claire said. "Gloomy honesty still counts as honesty."
He poured the last of the coffee into two mugs—coffee that had gone slightly bitter with age, the way late-night diner coffee always did—and sat across from her in the booth by the heater. Snow whispered against the glass with the intimacy of a secret. Claire's coat hung drying on a hook by the door; her rust turtleneck smelled faintly of cold air and diner steam. She had wiped melted snow from her cheek earlier and smeared her rosy blush into a softer pink; she did not care. Jack's white apron was folded on the counter. Without it he looked younger and more tired, a man of thirty who had inherited a kitchen and a grief in the same cruel season and was still learning the recipes for both.
"The gravy," Claire said carefully, turning her mug in slow circles. "There's more to it than Depression scraps, isn't there? You went nervous when I asked who made it. Nervous like a man guarding a chapel."