Pie on the Lake Road

You turn left.

It isn't a decision so much as your hands doing what they used to do on the last lap, before your head can vote. The sedan swings away from Halsey Crescent and the route sheet slides off the passenger seat onto the floor.

The phone buzzes.

Good. Lake road north. Stay under the limit. Zaro checks.

You take the lake road. The city falls away behind you in a long smear of lights, and on your right the water opens up, black and enormous, the last of the sunset bleeding out on it in a thin red line. The road curves with the shore. There's no traffic. Your wrist aches, and you notice you don't mind.

Twelve miles north, the phone says: The diner on the right. The one with the pie sign.

It's a low chrome place called the Shoreline, with a neon slice of cherry pie flickering in the window and three pickup trucks in the lot. You park where she tells you, at the far end, facing the lake. Before you can get out to open her door, she's already out, walking toward the diner with her coat open in the wind, not waiting to see if you follow.

You follow.

Inside it's warm and smells of coffee and fryer grease. She takes a booth at the back with a view of the lot and the black sedan in it. A waitress with a pencil in her hair says, "Hey, hon," to Gianna like she's seen her before.

"Two coffees," Gianna says. "Two cherry. Warm. Ice cream on his."

"I don't need—"

"You've been sitting in a car for nine hours." She shrugs out of her coat. Under the diner lights she's even worse, if worse is the word. A man at the counter turns around on his stool to look at her and forgets to turn back. "Eat the pie, Ethan."

So you're sitting across from Gianna Ravello in a diner on the lake road, and for the first time you're allowed to look at her. It's a lot. You look at the sugar dispenser instead.

"Now you won't look at me," she says. "Zaro really drilled it in."

"Rule one."

"Zaro's rule one." She wraps both hands around her coffee when it comes. "There are no mics in the Shoreline. I checked. I check a lot of things."

"Your father bugs your car."

"My father bugs everything. He loves me." She says it without bitterness, like a weather report. "He loved my mother too. That's how he loves. With microphones."

The pie comes. It's very good. You eat it because she's watching you and because you haven't had anything warm since the sandwich.

"Forty-seven point six seconds," she says.

You stop chewing.

"Your qualifying lap at Lakeshore, rookie year. Track record for a debut. It stood for fourteen months." She tilts her head. "Your average lap time in the Harvest 300 was slower than your qualifying by almost a second. You were saving the tires. You were going to take everyone on the last nine laps."

"How do you know that?"

"I read things." She takes a bite of her own pie, small and neat. "Your contract with Varney Motorsports. Your sponsor deal, which died the week after the crash. The season loan you personally guaranteed because old man Varney told you everybody does. Lakefront Capital Recovery bought it from the bank at forty cents on the dollar and now charges you eighteen percent. I do the books for this family. I read everything."

You put the fork down. "Is this where you tell me what you want?"

Something flickers across her face, too quick to name. "Why would I want something?"

"Because nobody brings the help to a diner for no reason."

"You're not the help." She says it sharply. Then, softer, looking out the window at the car: "You're the only person in Lakeshore who's driven me anywhere I asked to go."

The man at the counter is still staring. Gianna doesn't notice, or doesn't care. She looks at the black water past the lot and her face does something you've never seen on a billboard. It looks tired. It looks young.

"Everyone says you're bored," you say. "The driver before me. The guys in the garage."

"I know what they say."

"Are you?"

"No." She meets your eyes for the first time, and it goes through you like a bad gear change. "I'm watched. There's a difference. Bored people want something to happen. Watched people want to be somewhere nothing can see them." She finishes her coffee. "We should go. You've been off the route for twenty-six minutes."

You're off the route for forty-one by the time you pull into the Ravello garage.

Bassani is standing exactly where you knew he'd be, under the skylights, his arms folded. He doesn't look angry. That's worse.

"Out," he says to you. "Miss Ravello, go inside."

Gianna gets out of the back. She doesn't go inside. She walks over to Bassani, close, and you see him make himself not step back.

"I wanted pie, Zaro."

"There's pie in the kitchen."

"I wanted pie on the lake road, at the Shoreline, the way my mother used to take me. I told him to drive and he said no twice, and I told him I'd tell my father he was rude to me, and he drove." Her voice is cool and bored and absolutely certain. "If you want to fire someone, fire me. Otherwise leave him alone. I had a bad fitting."

Bassani looks at her for a long time. Then he looks at you. You keep your face empty and your mouth shut, which is the only thing you have ever been good at outside a car.

"Forty-one minutes, Ethan," Bassani says finally. "Next time it's twenty."

"Next time I'll eat faster," Gianna says, and goes up the three steps into the house without looking back.

She lied for you. Cleanly, without blinking, and made herself look spoiled to do it. You stand in the garage with the keys in your hand and try to work out why.

Bassani watches you a while longer. "Don't make a habit of saying no to her," he says. "And don't make a habit of saying yes."

At home the radiator knocks. The white SUV isn't outside tonight. You check twice.

You lie down on the mattress with your phone on your chest and try not to think about the way she said you're not the help, as if she'd been angry at someone, and it wasn't you.

At 12:04 the phone buzzes.

You looked in the mirror eleven times today. I counted.