Snowstorm of Our Past novel · Chapter 28 of 32
Chapter 28: Summer
"Gran, I'm a forecaster," I said. "I just got my job back."
"I know that."
"I can't run a diner and a forecast office."
"Who said run it?" She pointed out the window, at the OPEN sign. "That boy's been flipping pancakes for four days, and nobody's died. Let him cook. Let the schoolteacher do the books. She's been dying to get her hands on my books for twenty years."
"And me?"
"You own it." She patted my hand. "You come down in the morning and pour coffee before work. You sit in the back booth on your days off and argue with the regulars. You keep the soup going on Christmas Eve."
She looked at me over her reading glasses.
"That's all I ever did, honey. The rest was just standing up."
I started crying again.
She handed me a tissue from her sleeve without looking.
"Also, I'm not dead yet," she said. "So don't go changing the menu."
Summer came all at once.
The snow went off Harrison Avenue in a week, and then the meadows below Mount Massive turned yellow and purple and red with wildflowers.
The kid started cooking breakfast four days a week. He fixed the gravy by the second week of June.
Gran said it was still wrong, and had seconds.
I forecasted until the snow was gone, and then I spent the summer in the field, digging into old slide paths and mapping where they'd run.
Most days I brought Tilly to the diner in the afternoon.
She liked to sit on a folded towel on the counter and slap it with both hands while the regulars made faces at her.
Clint came every other Saturday, exactly at ten, exactly on time.
The first few visits were hard.
He sat at the counter and held Tilly. She cried when he took her from me.
His son, who'd started crawling, went everywhere at once and pulled every sugar packet out of every holder in the diner.
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