The text came at 4:52 in the morning, eight minutes before I would have unlocked the back door of Mom’s cafe and turned on the flat top like I had done for sixteen years.
“Won’t need you on the grill anymore. Vic has it. Lacey.” That was all of it.
My own sister signed her name, like I might not know who was texting me from her number.
I read it sitting on the edge of the bed with one sock on.
Steve was still asleep beside me, because the county did not need him on the road grader until seven, and there had been no snow overnight.
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I drove the six blocks to Main Street in the dark anyway, because sixteen years of habit does not stop for one text message.
The lights were already on in the kitchen. Through the little window in the back door, I could see a big man in a ball cap cracking eggs into a steel bowl with one hand, clumsy at it, shells going in.
That was Vic Porter. I had met him twice, once at Lacey’s birthday and once in the cafe when he came in for coffee and pie and tipped two dollars on a three dollar check.
Lacey was at the front counter, counting the drawer. She had her reading glasses pushed up in her hair and Mom’s old green ledger open beside the register, and she did not look surprised to see me.
“You got my text,” she said. She did not stop counting. She laid the twenties in a stack and squared the edges with two fingers, the same way Mom always did it.
“I got it,” I said. “I came to hear you say it to my face, Lacey. Sixteen years. You could have at least called me after the sun came up.”
She closed the drawer. “It’s my name on the bank card now, Corinne. Mom signed the papers at the hospital. I have to make this place work, and I can’t afford two cooks in January.”
“Then cut Vic,” I said. “He’s breaking yolks into the hash browns. I can hear it from here.”
She looked at me over the counter for a long time. Then she said the thing I would turn over in my head for weeks.
“That’s exactly why it has to be him. You never once let anybody else near that grill.”
I did not scream. I have never been a screamer. I took my apron off the hook by the back door, the white one with Mom’s mending on the pocket, folded it, set it on the shelf above the hand sink, and walked out to my car.
Vic held the back door for me. He did not say anything. I will give him that much now.
He looked at the floor like a man who had been handed something he had not asked for.