The Room Upstairs

Nobody in the Blue Ladder breathes.

Zebulon Treharne, who has sat on the third stool every morning since 1994 behind the same sports section, lowers his newspaper. It's the first time you've seen his whole face since you were nine.

"Well," says Zebulon. "That's new."

Valentin doesn't move from the doorway. He's waiting. He's always waiting, for the client to finish, for the room to understand that he's the one who decides when the meeting starts. Except this isn't a conference room. It's your mother's diner, and the meeting is you, standing behind the counter with half a stick of purple chalk in each hand.

"What are you doing here?" Your voice comes out higher than you want.

"Ordering coffee."

"In Pippin."

"I'm aware of where I am. There was a sign." His eyes flick to the specials board. PIE THAT WILL FIX YOUR. "You didn't finish."

"Valentin."

"Coming!" Your mother sails out of the kitchen with a pot of coffee and a smile like Christmas morning. She pours him a mug, black, sets it on the counter in front of the stool by the register, and pats the seat. "Sit, sit. You found us! How was the drive from Wenatchee? Did the GPS try to send you up the orchard road? It does that."

"It did that," says Valentin. He sits.

You stare at your mother.

Your mother hums.

"Mom," you say. "Kitchen. Now."

"I was going to tell you," Maudie says, in the walk-in fridge, which is the only room in the Blue Ladder with a door that closes all the way.

"When?"

"When he got here. Which is now. So I'm telling you." She tucks a strand of gray-blond hair behind her ear. "He called Thursday. The diner phone."

"He doesn't have the diner phone."

"Honey, he's had the diner phone for three years. I'm your emergency contact. Every time you didn't pick up your cell at some ungodly hour, he called here looking for you." Her face softens. "We talked. Not much, he's not a talker. But he always asked how the pie was doing. Who asks that?"

You open your mouth. Nothing comes out.

"Thursday he said he had a work trip in the valley, a month maybe, and did I know anywhere decent to stay, because the motel in Wenatchee has reviews that frighten him." Your mother folds her arms. "I have an empty room upstairs and a pink envelope from the county. So I said I do."

"Mom. He's my boss."

"Was. You quit. By email, he said." She raises her eyebrows. "Two lines. Really, Ava?"

"He told you that?"

"He asked if you'd mind him staying here. I said you'd mind but you'd get over it." She pushes the fridge door open, and cold air rolls out around her ankles. "Go talk to him. He's been sitting very straight out there for ten minutes. I think he's nervous."

"He doesn't get nervous."

Your mother just looks at you, the way she did when you were sixteen and swore you'd never date anyone from Pippin.

You find him in the alley behind the diner, where he's gone to take a phone call and is now standing between the dumpster and a stack of apple crates like a cologne ad someone photoshopped into the wrong picture. He hangs up when he sees you.

"I didn't know you'd be in the diner," he says. "I knew you'd be in Pippin. I didn't know you'd be in the diner the morning I arrived."

"Where else would I be? It's my mother's diner."

"I'm aware." A pause. "That was badly put."

You fold your arms. Up close he looks tired, which you've never seen. A faint shadow under the gray-green eyes. A crease in the coat, as if he slept in the car.

"Why are you here, Valentin?"

"Work. A client in the valley. I'll be on site for a few weeks." He says it like a line from a brief. "I'm calling it a working sabbatical. Ravenna is calling it something less polite."

"What client?"

"Confidential."

Of course it is. You've signed his NDAs. You know the drill.

He looks at the crates, then at you. "I'll say this once, because I should have said it before I got in the car. If you don't want me here, say the word. There's a motel in Wenatchee. I'll be gone in an hour and you'll never see me on Main Street." He meets your eyes, steady. "I'm not here to make you come back."

It's the longest speech you've heard him make that wasn't to a client.

You think about the pink envelope in your mother's apron. You think about the duct tape on the booth.

"How much did she charge you?"

He tells you. It's insultingly low.

"Double it," you say. "Pay three months up front, cash or check, to her, not me. You stay out of the kitchen unless you're invited. You stay out of my way. And you are not my boss here. Not for one second. I don't fetch your coffee. I don't book your calls."

"Understood."

"I mean it."

"I know you do." Something moves at the corner of his mouth. It isn't a smile. Valentin doesn't smile. "You wrote two lines, Ava. I've read them several hundred times. I understand you mean things."

He walks past you back into the diner. Through the screen door you watch him take a checkbook out of his coat, write without hesitating, tear the check out and hand it to your mother.

Maudie looks at it. She sits down on a stool very suddenly.

It's more than the number on the pink envelope.

By noon all of Pippin knows.

The lunch rush is the biggest in a month, and none of them came for the meatloaf. They came to sit in a booth and look at the man at the end of the counter typing on a laptop with a cup of black coffee at his left hand, exactly where you'd have put it.

You didn't put it there. You want that on the record.

"He's unreal," Gilly whispers, refilling ketchups beside you. "Like, structurally. Is that his real face? Does he sleep in a freezer? He hasn't smiled once. Not even at your mom, and everybody smiles at your mom." She narrows her eyes. "Mr. Cold. That's his name now."

"Gilly."

"Mr. Cold followed you home, Ava."

"He didn't follow me. Mom rented him a room. He's here for a client."

"Mm-hm." Gilly watches him over the ketchup bottle. "Which client?"

You don't answer.

At two, Mayor Loveday Fahey, who is four foot eleven and seventy-one years old, marches in with her goose under one arm, stands in front of Valentin and inspects him like a heifer at the county fair. The goose, whose name is Monsignor, hisses.

"You're the New Yorker," says Loveday.

"I am."

"You any good at anything?"

Valentin considers this seriously. "Selling things to people who didn't know they wanted them."

Loveday thinks about that. "Huh," she says, and leaves, and Monsignor honks at him all the way out the door.

That night you can't sleep again. Around midnight you give up and cross the yard in your pajamas to get the bread dough started for the morning, the way your mother used to before her knees got bad.

The diner lights are on.

Through the back window you can see him at the counter, alone, in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow, a slice of your mother's apple pie beside the laptop. He's eaten half of it. He's frowning at the screen with the full, terrifying focus you've watched turn rooms of executives into puddles.

You push the door open. The bell rings.

He looks up. For half a second, before his face goes still, he looks almost caught.

Then he closes the laptop.

But not fast enough. Because you've spent three years reading over his shoulder, and you saw it: one word, center screen, in the heavy serif font he only uses for the deck title.

PIPPIN.