Wednesday morning broke clear and cold, with frost silvering the iron bridge girders. By ten o’clock there wasn’t enough merchandise left in Dunmore & Son to fill a wheelbarrow: three mismatched trash barrel lids, a box of porcelain lamp sockets, and half a keg of ten-penny galvanized nails nobody needed.
At ten-thirty the cowbell clanked and Theo Brandt walked in from across the street, wearing a white bib apron streaked with pancake batter under his unzipped parka.
“Ruth,” Theo said, leaning on the counter like a man who had been on his feet since four-thirty in the morning. “Tell me you have a three-eighths brass flare nut left in the back. The pilot line on my flat-top is weeping gas and my fry cook walked out twenty minutes ago because I told him he couldn’t smoke in the walk-in. I got forty-two pies ordered for pickup by five o’clock and the Turkey Day breakfast crowd tomorrow.”
Danny was already behind the plumbing drawers before Theo finished the sentence, pulling out the last cardboard tray of brass flare fittings. “Three-eighths male or female, Theo?”
“Female, compression sleeve if you got it,” Theo said, squinting at him. “That you, Danny? Heard you were in town.”
“In the flesh,” Danny said, dropping two brass nuts and three sleeves into a palm-sized envelope. “Don’t put pipe dope on the flare face, just a wrench and a quarter turn past hand-tight.”
Ruth didn’t look up from her final ledger column. “Danny’s a line cook, Theo. Trained in Baltimore. Does two hundred covers a night without burning the home fries.”
Danny shot a look at his mother. Ruth calmly turned a page in the ledger and licked her thumb.
Theo looked from Ruth to Danny, taking in the way Danny was holding the wrench he’d just grabbed from the pegboard. “You got four hours between now and two o’clock, kid? I’ll pay you twenty-five an hour cash out of the register just to get me through the Wednesday lunch rush and par-bake the pie shells.”
Danny looked at Walt on his stool.
Walt waved two fingers toward the street. “Go on. Nothing left in here needs weighed anyway. Bring me back a cup of coffee that didn’t come out of your mother’s twenty-year-old pot.”
Danny crossed Front Street with the wrench in his pocket and stepped behind the stainless steel line of the Riverside Diner at ten forty-five.
By eleven-fifteen, the tickets were hanging twelve deep on the spinner wheel and Danny was home.
The flat-top had a cold spot in the back left corner and the hood fan rattled like a helicopter, and within ten minutes he knew every inch of it. He had four orders of hash browns crisping under an iron bacon press, cabbage and onion soup simmering in the deep well, grilled cheese turning golden on the center steel, and apple pie crusts coming out of the bottom deck oven while he called out “Order up, two specials on the fly, watch your hot pan behind you, Carla!” to the sixty-year-old waitress who had known him when he was in Cub Scouts.
At two-thirty, when the last mill pensioner paid his check and the rush died down to coffee refills, Danny scraped the flat-top down to bright steel with a grill brick, wiped the stainless rim, and leaned against the prep table drinking club soda out of a paper cone.
Theo came out of the dish pit drying his hands on a bar towel. He looked at the spotless grill, the stacked soup bowls, and the eighteen cooled pie shells lined up on the speed rack.
“The guy who quit this morning,” Theo said, “was renting the three-room flat upstairs over the kitchen. Left his key on the microwave and took his duffel bag to Akron. I need somebody who can open five days a week through March so I can get my knee scoped in January. Twenty-two hundred a month plus the apartment upstairs, utilities included, and you can do whatever you want with the Thursday night specials as long as you don’t take liver and onions off on Tuesdays.”
Danny looked through the greased pass-through window, across the wet blacktop of Front Street, to the green-and-cream sign above the hardware store door.
“Give me till five o’clock, Theo,” Danny said. “I gotta close a store.”
* * *
At four forty-five, the sun was already dropping behind the river hills, turning the brick rowhouses the color of copper pennies.
Jo had taken the last of the cash drawer to the bank, and Ruth was packing the family photographs off the office wall into a shoebox. Inside the main room, the shelves were bare wood. The brass scale sat empty on the counter.
The cowbell clanked one last time.
A girl of about fifteen pushed the door open, her shoulders hunched inside a thin denim jacket with a fleece collar. She looked around at the empty tables and stopped, biting her lip.
“Sorry,” she said. “Sign says you’re closing.”
“Five o’clock,” Walt said from his stool. “Still four minutes on the clock. What do you need, honey?”
She held out a shiny new house key on a plastic ring. “My mom and me just moved into the upstairs duplex over on Maple. There’s only one front door key and she works third shift at the hospital, so I need one to get in after school. The place out on the highway said their machine was broken.”
Walt looked at the rack behind the key machine. All the display hooks were empty, the bulk boxes already packed in Jo’s trunk, except for the four loose brass blanks sitting in the little tin ashtray next to the motor.
Walt didn’t reach for his cane. He looked down the counter at Danny.
“Go on,” Walt said. “Cut the girl a key.”
Danny walked behind the counter, took the key from the girl’s hand, and matched the groove profile against the blanks in the tin dish. Walt got off the stool and came down to stand behind Danny’s right shoulder, leaning both hands on the back edge of the worktable.
Danny set the master in the left vise. On the right vise, he slipped his thumb under the worn brass collar, lifted it a fraction of an inch so the stripped thread caught cleanly, and tightened the wing nut.
He flipped the switch. The wheel sang against the brass, throwing a last tiny shower of gold dust onto the dark wood of the bench. He brushed the burrs off the teeth with the wire wheel, blew the dust away, and handed both keys across the counter to the girl.
“How much?” she asked, digging two crumpled dollar bills out of her jeans pocket.
“On the house,” Walt said. “Tell your mother if the winter latch sticks when it freezes, rub a little bar soap on the tongue. Don’t put oil in the lock or it’ll gum up.”
“Thank you,” she said, and hurried out into the blue street dusk. The cowbell gave its double clank and went still.
Danny walked up to the front door, reached up to the EVERYTHING MUST GO banner, and peeled the masking tape off the glass. He folded the paper neatly in quarters instead of crumpling it.
“Before you throw the bolt,” Walt said behind him. “Get the four-foot stepladder and a big flathead out of your sister’s bucket.”
“Thought you weren’t allowed on ladders,” Danny said.
“I’m not getting on it. You are. Prop the door open.”
Danny grabbed the battered wooden stepladder and a long-shanked screwdriver from the plastic bucket of house tools Jo had kept by the register, carried them out onto the cold sidewalk, and set the ladder under the overhang. Walt came out slowly, leaning on his cane, his breath puffing white in the chill air.
“Keystone people want the big sign left up,” Walt said, looking up at the painted plank his father had hung sixty-five years ago. “Said it gives the front entry character. Take the bottom board off. They don’t get that part.”
Danny climbed two rungs up. The two steel straps holding the narrower & SON plank under the main sign were fastened with heavy slotted wood screws coated in four layers of dark green house paint. He chipped the paint out of the slots with the corner of the screwdriver blade, braced his palm against the cold wood under his left arm, and leaned into the first screw.
It shrieked once in the dry pine, then turned.
He backed out all four screws, slipped them into his shirt pocket, and lifted the four-foot pine board down in both hands. The paint was alligator-cracked around the cream-colored ampersand, the wood heavier than it looked, seasoned by sixty-five winters of river fog and coal smoke.
Danny stepped down off the ladder and held the board out to his father.
Walt looked at it, reached out with his gloved hand to brush a dead spiderweb off the N, and then pushed the board back against Danny’s chest.
“Put it in your car,” Walt said.
Danny looked down at the painted letters between his hands. “Marco’s car,” he said quietly. “And I’m sending Marco’s brother up on Saturday to drive it back to Baltimore. Theo’s got a flat upstairs over the diner. Needs a morning cook through the winter.”
Walt nodded once, as if Danny had just told him it might snow by Tuesday. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out the dark blue savings passbook from the safe, and shoved it into the top of Danny’s canvas work apron right beside the four rusted screws.
“Don’t leave it sitting in the bank forever,” Walt said, turning back toward the open door of the dark store. “Start something of your own when spring comes. Ask somebody first.”
* * *
Thanksgiving afternoon smelled like sage, roasted squash, and wet wool coats drying on the radiator in Walt and Ruth’s front hall.
Danny had been in his mother’s tiny kitchen since nine in the morning, working with two decent knives he had rescued from his duffel bag and a heavy roasting pan that had belonged to his grandmother. He had roasted the big turkey for the table alongside a deep ceramic dish of wild mushroom and chestnut stuffing, glazed root vegetables, cranberry-orange relish, and a huge skillet of herb gravy thickened with roasted garlic and pan drippings.
At three o’clock, Jo’s nineteen-year-old son Owen carried the heavy leaves out of the hall closet to stretch the dining room table into the living room doorway.
Against the flowered wallpaper behind the buffet, right where you could see it from the kitchen door, leaned the green-and-cream & SON board, resting on two felt furniture pads Ruth had stuck under the bottom edge so it wouldn’t scratch the baseboard.
“All right, behind you, hot pan coming through,” Danny called, backing through the swinging door with a folded dishtowel in each hand and setting the platter down at the head of the table in front of Walt.
Walt stood up at his place, picked up the bone-handled carving knife and two-pronged fork he had used every fourth Thursday of November for fifty years, and set the fork into the breastbone. His bad hip kept him from leaning over the platter the way he needed to, and on the second stroke his wrist wobbled, sending the knife skittering off the wing joint against the china rim.
Nobody said anything. Jo looked down at her napkin. Owen stopped reaching for the rolls.
Walt looked at the crooked slice, then looked down the table at Danny, who was setting down the bowl of chestnut stuffing.
Walt turned the carving knife around and held it out handle-first. “Here,” he said. “You got the hands for it. My wrist is stiff.”
Danny wiped his palms on his apron, took the knife and fork from his father, and stepped beside Walt’s chair. In six clean, whisper-quiet strokes he took the wing off at the joint, laid the breast meat down in even, shingled slices along the warm platter, and set the carving fork neatly across the edge before sitting down in his own chair between Owen and Jo.
“Show-off,” Jo said, passing him the basket of rolls before taking one herself.
“Professional courtesy,” Danny said, taking a roll and handing the basket to Owen. “How’s the engineering math going down at State, kid? Still speaking in numbers?”
“Barely passing calculus,” Owen said cheerfully, loading his plate with stuffing. “Mom says if I flunk out I have to come live above the diner with you and peel potatoes.”
“Not a chance,” Danny said. “Theo only lets people in the kitchen who know how to use a broom.”
At the head of the table, Walt looked over his plate of sliced turkey, mashed potatoes, and stuffing. He didn’t look at the sign against the wall, and he didn’t make a speech. He reached out, tapped the table twice near Danny’s water glass with a blunt forefinger, and nodded toward the porcelain boat sitting by the trivet.
“Danny,” Walt said. “Pass the gravy down here before it gets cold.”
Danny picked up the warm gravy boat by the handle, handed it across to his father, and reached for the squash while Ruth started talking about the snow forecast for Friday and nobody got up to leave.