Loafers in the Orchard

"It's a valley project," Valentin says, before you can ask. "Go to bed, Ava."

"Your deck says Pippin."

"The valley is called Pippin. I don't name the valleys." He tucks the laptop under his arm and stands. "The pie is very good. Tell your mother."

"Tell her yourself."

"I did. Twice. She told me to stop saying it and eat." He walks past you to the stairs that lead up to the room, and pauses with one hand on the rail. "Good night."

The door upstairs closes. You stand in the empty diner with the hum of the pie case and the half slice he left on the plate, and you have the strangest feeling that he wanted to say something else.

You eat the rest of the pie. It's not like he's going to.

Sunday, Pippin decides to break him.

It starts at seven, when Gilly tells him the best view of the valley is from the top of the Keogh orchard road and he believes her. He comes back at nine with mud to the ankles of his Italian loafers and a leaf in his hair that nobody tells him about for an hour.

"It was a good view," he says, sitting at the counter.

"You walked up the orchard road?" Gilly is crying with laughter behind the pie case. "In those?"

"You said it was a road." He looks down at his shoes. "It was not a road. It was a theory of a road."

At ten, Loveday Fahey comes in for her Sunday coffee with Monsignor under her arm, and the goose takes one look at Valentin and decides he is the enemy of all geese. You watch the most feared creative director on Madison Avenue walk very fast around the outside of the diner with a white bird honking at his heels, while Loveday yells, "He can smell fear! Stop being afraid!"

"I'm not afraid," Valentin says, passing the window for the second time. "I'm strategic."

Zebulon Treharne turns a page. "Goose is winning."

At eleven, he tries to make himself toast in the kitchen without being invited, because the girl at the counter is busy and he doesn't want to bother anyone. The smoke alarm goes off. Kjell Engstrom, six foot five and silent as a mountain, takes the black slice out of the toaster with his bare fingers, looks at it, looks at Valentin, and drops it in the trash.

Then he hands Valentin an egg.

Valentin looks at the egg like it's a client brief in a language he doesn't speak.

Kjell takes a second egg, cracks it one-handed on the edge of the griddle, opens his fingers, and lets it fall onto the hot steel in a perfect circle. He points at the egg in Valentin's hand.

"Is this a test," says Valentin.

Kjell says nothing.

Valentin cracks the egg. Shell everywhere. Yolk on his shirt cuff. Kjell hands him another one.

You watch from the pass-through. Twenty-one eggs later, the most arrogant man you have ever worked for cracks one cleanly, one-handed, onto the griddle, and stands back from it like he's just won a Clio.

Kjell nods once.

Valentin, very quietly, says, "Thank you."

You almost drop the plates you're carrying. In three years you never heard him say those two words. He says them to a line cook over an egg in your mother's kitchen like it's nothing.

The after-church crowd comes in at noon, and with it the cannery people. Eskil Hatchett, the line foreman, gray beard and forearms like hams, takes the corner booth with four guys from the day shift, and you bring them coffee and catch the end of what they're saying.

"...somebody out of California. Or Chicago. Big outfit."

"Castellano wouldn't sell. Not the old man."

"Old man's not signing the checks anymore. His niece is."

"Ask me, they buy it, they shut it. That's what they do."

Eskil sees you and smiles, tired. "Hey, kiddo. Heard you were back. Your dad would be glad." He looks at the end of the counter. "Who's the suit?"

"A guest," you say. "Mom's renting him the room."

"Huh." Eskil watches Valentin type. "Looks like a lawyer."

"Worse," says Gilly, passing. "Advertising."

It's after the rush, when you're wiping down the counter, that Valentin asks you the first question.

"The cannery. How many people work there?"

"Two hundred and twelve," you say, because everyone in Pippin knows that number the way they know their own birthday.

"How many of them eat here?"

"Most."

"How old is the equipment?"

You stop wiping. "Why?"

"Curious." He's typing. "What do they make? Applesauce, pie filling. Cider? Under the Pippin Valley label, or private label for other brands?"

"Valentin."

"Does the town own any of it? Is there a union?"

"Valentin." You slap the rag down on the counter. Two booths go quiet. "Stop. This is my dad's cannery. People I grew up with work there. They're scared out of their minds and you're sitting in my mother's diner typing their lives into a spreadsheet like they're a market segment."

He stops typing.

For a long moment he just looks at you. You know that look. It's the one he gives a pitch right before he tears it apart.

"Your specials board," he says.

"What?"

"'Pie that will fix your life.'" He nods at it. You finished it this morning: PIE THAT WILL FIX YOUR LIFE (OR AT LEAST YOUR AFTERNOON). "It's the best line I've read in a month. I've read a great many lines this month. You were wasted on my calendar, Ava."

Then he picks up his laptop and goes upstairs, and you're left standing there with the rag in your hand and your heart doing something stupid.

That evening, your mother does something unforgivable.

You're in the kitchen putting away the pie tins when you hear her at the register. "Here. That's her cell. For emergencies. If the water heater goes, or the goose gets in, or you get lost up the orchard road again. She'll kill me, so don't make me regret it."

You come out of the kitchen too late. Valentin is standing at the register with your number on a green order ticket in your mother's handwriting.

He looks at you over it. Then he folds the ticket in half, exactly in half, and puts it in his shirt pocket.

"I'll only use it if it's important," he says.

"Mom," you say, when he's gone.

"What?" Maudie counts the drawer with a perfectly innocent face. "The water heater's very old."

At 11:48 p.m., you're lying in your childhood bed under the plastic stars, not sleeping, absolutely not thinking about the way he said thank you to Kjell, when your phone lights up on the nightstand.

Unknown number. New York area code.

Across the yard, through your window, his light is still on in the room above the diner.

You pick up the phone.