Chapter 32: Stool One

I stood in the dune grass with the blanket until they turned around.

Then I walked down to them.

Lily gave me a look over her glasses that was all my mother.

Rafael didn't propose that day.

He didn't propose that week, or that month.

He carried Lily back up the beach on his shoulders and gave Raymond the shell, and never said a word.

Neither did Lily.

I asked her once, at bedtime.

"What was the condition?"

"It's a secret," she said. "Grandma said you have to keep a secret all the way to the end, or it doesn't work."

"Grandma never said that."

"She would have."

All winter Rafael went to the counter after I closed.

He said he was helping Raymond with the books.

Raymond couldn't do the books.

Every night the kitchen smelled faintly burned when I came down in the morning.

Every morning the smoke alarm was sitting on top of the walk-in with its battery out.

On the last Saturday in March, I opened the gate at six-thirty.

One year to the morning.

The oxblood wall glowed under the old lights.

The pie case hummed. Twelve stools stood in a line.

Mom's lemon pound cake sat in the case under the glass, one slice already gone.

Raymond was at the register.

He'd come down at five, which he never did.

Lily had asked to write the specials on the menu board herself the night before.

She'd made me promise not to look.

I hadn't looked.

The bell rang, and rang, and rang.

By seven every stool was full but one.

Stool one sat empty at the end, by the register.

Most days it did. Stool Nine only sat on it when somebody needed keeping off it.

People stood along the wall with their coffee.

The church. The regulars. The crew in clean shirts. The detective, on her day off.

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