Page 9 of Devoted

"Better," Lauren said. "Awful, but better."

Marge came out of the kitchen.

Olivia saw it happen over Lauren’s shoulder, and the room saw it too, the way the room always did. Marge left her stove for a shortlist, and the whole town knew who was on it. She came around the end of the counter with flour dusted up both arms and a plate in one hand, and she crossed to the booth and set the plate down in front of Olivia. Eggs, done soft, the way Olivia had ordered them maybe twice a year for thirty years, and not this morning.

"I didn’t order," Olivia said.

"I know what you didn’t do." Marge wiped her hands on her apron and stood there, broad and floury and not going anywhere yet. "Your daddy sold me eggs. Nineteen years. Every Tuesday, and he wouldn’t take a nickel over what he asked the first Tuesday, and I asked him about it once and he said the price was the price." She wiped her hands again. "Peach today."

"Marge—"

"I’m not done." Marge looked at her, and there was something in the look Olivia had no map for, because Marge dealt in plates and looks and left the words to her sister, and here she was standing in her own dining room mid-rush with words. "I feed this town its breakfast. In eight years I have not heard one complaint about you come across that counter, not one, and I hear every complaint this town manufactures, I hear complaints about the weather, the government, and me. There is not a kinder woman in this county and I have never said so to your face." She picked up the sugar caddy, straightened it, and set it back down in the same spot. "Now I’ve said it. Eat those while they’re hot."

She went back to the kitchen. The doors swung twice behind her and stopped.

Olivia looked at the eggs. Her throat had gone tight, which was ridiculous, because they were eggs, and it was not ridiculous at all, and she picked up the fork so she’d have something to do that wasn’t crying at nine in the morning in a window booth.

"I’ve been here since November," Lauren said quietly, "and she’s never once come out for me."

"She came out for you the week your grandfather’s stone was set."

"She put down a pie for a girl burying a stranger, and left." Lauren nodded at the plate. "What you just got was a speech. You should know the difference."

Then Pearl sat down.

She came around the counter with the pot, topped off both cups, looked back once at her own register, and slid into the booth next to Lauren, across from Olivia, and Olivia’s stomach dropped, because in thirty years of watching that counter she could count on one hand the times she’d seen Pearl Whittaker sit down in her own diner, and not one of them had been for anything good. Pearl sat down for deaths. Pearl sat down for diagnoses. Pearl standing up with a pot was the place running right. Pearl sitting down was the place stopping to deal with something.

"Ten minutes," Pearl said, to nobody, meaning the register. "Now. Your mama."

"She’s fine, Pearl."

"She's selling the roof her mama left her and moving two hours off, and you're telling me fine." Pearl said it without cruelty, laying it out the way she laid out everything, at volume, factual, for the room's benefit as much as the table's. "Edna Bateman is the only woman in this county who's never owed me news and I've never owed her any, and I'll miss her like a sister, and I've already told her so, this morning, on the telephone, before you were up, I'd guess." She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table and didn't drink out of it. "It's the right call. That's the hell of it. You can't winter a woman with that hip out on that road. I've been saying it since November."

"Everybody's been saying it since November," Olivia said. "Everybody was right. It's a county full of people being right."

"And you're the one paying the bill on all that rightness." Pearl looked straight at her and didn't soften it. "I know it, honey. Why do you think I sat down."

The bell went, and Elena came in on the cold in her clinic coat, found their booth, and came straight to it without sitting.

"I can't stay. I've got Herrera's boy coming in with an arm at half past." She put one hand flat on the table. "Olivia. I called your mother yesterday."

"You called my mother."

"I want her seen at my clinic, in town, every two weeks until the move, so the small things get caught here instead of turning into another two hours on the road. She told me she'd think about it."

"That's a no."

"I know it's a no. It's why I'm standing at your table." Elena straightened up. "So you'll tell her it wasn't an offer."

"You want me to tell Edna Bateman something wasn't an offer."

"I want you to try it, and then I'll try it, and between the two of us she'll run out of ways to say it." Something came up underneath the clinic voice then, quick and real. "None of this touches Midland. The hip man's still the hip man. I'm the fence between him and everything small enough to handle here." She was already moving for the door. "And I'm sorry about the place. I know what it's not. It's not fine."

"Elena—"

"Tell Edna I'm cheaper than the diesel and I don't make anybody wear the gown."

She was gone before anybody could thank her.