by Holly Jacobs
“Are you scheduling me for half shifts because you don’t think I can manage a whole one?” The words came out a lot harsher than he’d intended.
Lily didn’t pull back, as he noticed she so often did when he was testy. She stood her ground and forced a smile. He knew it was forced because those wrinkles around her blue eyes didn’t fall into their normal places.
“I’m scheduling,” she said slowly, as if she wanted to be sure he understood her, “your hours around the hours people can spare. Most of our employees live paycheck to paycheck and simply can’t take a full shift off because you want the hours. Red has a new girlfriend, who complains he works too many evening hours and misses things. Her parents have an anniversary party, and he wanted to surprise her and go. It wasn’t a reflection on you or your capabilities.”
He’d felt like a heel for complaining. He should have understood that there were only so many hours available at the diner. Obviously not enough to keep him busy.
The next night, he quickly discovered that the rhythm of short-order cooking didn’t come back as quickly as busing a table or washing a plate. There was an element of timing involved. Making sure all the dishes on an order were done at the same time.
And he’d lost that ability over the years.
His first two orders were not well-timed, but after the first couple hours, he felt his old skills coming back to him. He tossed three burgers on the grill and listened to the hiss as the grease splattered.
“How’s it going?” Lily asked as she came through the kitchen, walking toward the office.
“Well, it might take me a while, but I’m getting back into the swing of things.” He pressed the burgers with his spatula.
“Good.”
“What are you doing tonight?” He tossed the hamburger rolls onto the grill next to the burgers.
“More of the files. I think it’ll take me at least another week to go through all of them.”
He plated the rolls and flipped the burgers again. More grease spattered. “I’d much rather cook a burger than do paperwork.”
“That’s how Hank feels, if those files are any indication.” She paused. “What did you do to your hand?”
He glanced down and saw the massive blister on the back of his left hand.
“Must have burned it. Probably some grease from the burgers.” He hadn’t felt a thing.
She was all nurse as she examined it and said, “We should treat it.”
His reaction to her wasn’t medical at all. For one second, he wanted to take that hand and caress her cheek. Simply run his finger down along it and see if he could erase her worried look. Normally, he bristled when someone displayed any sympathy, and he wasn’t sure why he wasn’t bristling with Lily this time.
“I’ll put a bandage on it when I pull these,” he promised. He quickly put the window dressing on the buns.
“Didn’t it hurt?” Lily asked.
“Nerve damage. There are sections of my hand and arm where I can’t feel much,” he explained. “The doctor said that some, if not all, will come back. But in the meantime, I guess that’s a bonus.”
“Bonus?”
“Grease burns hurt, and I don’t feel a thing,” he teased.
“Why, Sebastian Bennington, was that you looking at a silver lining?” she teased, and her laugh lines fell back to their normal position.
He chuckled. “I suppose it was. You don’t think you’re rubbing off on me?”
“Oh, there’s a possibility. Soon you’ll be sitting on a rainbow, surveying life with a smile.”
He snorted and plated the burgers.
By eight o’clock, he felt as if he’d never left. He’d put a bandage over the blister and was more cautious with his left hand. The small window between the kitchen and the dining area gave him a unique view of Hank.
He watched his grandfather on the other side of it, passing out greetings and coffee in turn. But not once did Hank call anyone by name. Not one person. Not even Jack Rooney, one of Hank’s oldest friends. Between orders, Sebastian blatantly listened to the conversations and noticed Hank’s contributions were mainly reactive. His grandfather didn’t instigate topics of discussion; he only responded. And those responses were generic to the point of being interchangeable.
What do you think about the weather? Better than last month, not as good as next, he’d offered.
Hear you went fishing a couple weeks ago. Catch anything? Didn’t catch a cold or the flu.
Hear Seb helped out Mrs. Dedionisio. That boy’s a peach.
Of all Hank’s responses, this one concerned Sebastian most of all. Back when he was growing up, Hank heard about...well, everything through the town grapevine, which seemed to begin and end at the diner.
Hank had known when Sebastian stepped over the line, out of line and when he occasionally toed the line. Hank had heard it all, and he’d mined every detail before he discussed every incident, good and bad, with Sebastian.
But he hadn’t had one question about what Sebastian had done for Mrs. Dedionisio. It was a small thing, but Hank knew how fiercely independent Mrs. Dedionisio was, which meant he knew she wasn’t prone to accepting help.
Hank had asked nothing—he’d said nothing.
At nine o’clock, Hank came into the kitchen and said, “I’m walking Megan home, if you’ll close up.”
“Sure, Hank.”
His grandfather turned to leave, and Sebastian called him back. “Hank, I need your keys to the diner.”
“Where are yours? Did you lose them again?”
“Hank, I haven’t had keys since I left for college years ago.”
Hank’s expression was momentarily blank, as if he didn’t understand what Sebastian was talking about. Then it cleared, and he quickly fished in his pocket and handed Sebastian his keys. “There you go. I’m taking Megan home. A gentleman should never let a woman walk home alone at night,” he lectured.
“Okay, Hank.”
Sebastian watched via the pass-through as Hank and Megan left. He finished cleaning the grill and prepped the kitchen for the next day. The office light was on, though he didn’t need it to know Lily was still back there. He’d checked in on her a few times, and she’d been focused on whatever paperwork she was doing.
He went in and found her studying a sheet of paper from where she sat on the floor surrounded by stacks of files.
“What do you have there?” he asked.
She looked up as if surprised to discover him. “What time is it?” She didn’t wait for him to answer, but looked at the clock, her surprise registering on her face. “Wow, I can’t believe it’s so late. Did you know your grandfather kept everything? I mean, everything. I found a cache of old newspaper articles. This one is about when your grandfather bought the diner.” She passed him the brittle article. There was a picture of a young Hank Bennington and his wife, Betty.
“I never knew my grandmother,” Sebastian said as he stared at the two young people in the accompanying photograph. “She died before I was born. Once, when Hank was fighting with my mom, he said he was glad she didn’t live to see what my mom had become.”
“Sebastian, I’m sorry.”
He wasn’t sure why he’d told Lily that. “No. It’s all right. My mother was a drug addict. She blamed everyone for it. She blamed her mom for not being there. Hank for not being enough. Me for being too much. The one person she never blamed was herself. I suspect Hank was right, and she would have broken my grandmother’s heart, because it’s clear she broke Hank’s.”
“He was lucky he had you.” Lily looked at him as if she really believed that. Despite the way he’d treated her, she believed he was someone of worth.
Sebastian wasn’t so sure he agreed with that. He didn’t know how to respond, so he read.
Hank and Betty Bennington bought the old Valley Ridge Diner from John Nauss, who is relocating to Florida. “We hope to carry on Mr. Nauss’s fine tradition of providing not only good food at a fair price at the diner
, but making it a meeting place for the community,” Mr. Bennington said.
“He did what he set out to do,” Lily commented. “The diner is the heart of the community. We have our regulars, but pretty much everyone comes in on occasion. I’ve met most of Valley Ridge here. As a stranger to the town, helping out here was a great way to begin to fit in.”
Sebastian had eaten most of his dinners here when he was younger. He’d sit at a booth with Hank and they’d talk and visit. Then Hank would go back to work, and Sebastian would do his homework. If he ran into a problem, there was always someone around to help. Hank was great with English. Hank’s friend Mr. Rooney was a science nerd. “It was a terrific place to grow up.”
“I imagine it was.” Lily’s eyes crinkled, but there was a hint of wistfulness in her smile. “You were very lucky.”
Sebastian suspected that Lily wasn’t nearly as lucky, and he found it hurt to think about her as a little girl in a bad situation. “Did you know Hank had a degree in English literature?”
She stood up slowly, as if her muscles had cramped from sitting so long. “No, I didn’t know that. To be honest, he was much more free with his Sebastian stories than the Hank stories. How did he go from that to this?”
“I asked him that once, and he said literature was, at its heart, the study of people and how they relate to their society as a whole and to each other on an individual basis. Then he grinned and said that’s what the diner was. He was able to study people and how they related on a daily basis...and make a steady income to support his family.” He shrugged. “And once he told me he liked working with his Betty every day.”
“Aw, that’s sweet.” Now she had her smile lines with a slightly gooey, girly, romantic zest to them. “It must have been awesome to be so in love with someone that you thought working with them daily was a bonus. I don’t know if I could stand being with one person all day, every day.”
Sebastian couldn’t imagine it, either, but he didn’t like that Lily couldn’t. She was the kind of woman who should have that kind of love. He felt angry that she hadn’t had a good childhood and, even worse, that someone hadn’t recognized how wonderful she was and snapped her up. And the fact that he should care bothered him. He handed her the article. “I think, if you don’t mind, I’m going to get a few of these framed, and then we can put the rest of them in some archival sleeves so they don’t deteriorate further.”
She set the article down on the desk. “I’ve been saving all the documents with historical worth. That’s what I was thinking. But let’s leave it for tomorrow.” She yawned and stretched.
Sebastian knew it wasn’t meant to be a sexy pose, but it definitely was. Oh, it was time to get out of here.
He should have turned and left, but he found himself saying, “Hank reminded me earlier tonight that a gentleman never allows a woman to walk home on her own.”
She stepped over the piles of folders and looked up at him. “Was that an invitation, Mr. Bennington?”
“I believe it was, Ms. Paul.”
“That would be nice. Give me a sec to move these piles out of the way or else Hank will knock them over when he comes in tomorrow.”
Normally, Seb would offer to help, but his hand was throbbing tonight. He massaged it as he watched Lily nudge the piles against the wall.
“Ready,” she said.
He switched off the lights as they left through the back door. He turned around and double-checked that the door was locked.
“Did you check the front?” Lily asked.
When he’d first met her, he might have thought her question was some sort of indication that she didn’t trust him, but now he knew she was asking because she didn’t trust that Hank did it. “Yes.” He paused and added, “He’s getting worse.”
They started walking side by side toward Hank’s house. “The appointment’s a week from tomorrow,” she said.
At the corner, they left the main street and entered a quiet, residential section of town. Sebastian had always liked being out at night. He liked seeing the houses all lit up and knowing that inside people were going about their everyday lives. Some happy, some not so much. He stared at one particular house that had lights on in every visible room. “And if it’s not something they can fix?”
“You’re asking what happens if it’s Alzheimer’s?”
He nodded, still looking at the house, not at Lily.
She stopped and gave his arm a gentle tug until he turned to face her. “If it is Alzheimer’s, then Hank’s still in an early stage. Noticeably impaired, but not debilitated. The doctor can give him medications that will help.”
He’d done some reading on the disease and the medications associated with it, and afterward, he wished he hadn’t. “The drugs can help keep him from getting worse, at least for a while, right? They slow down the course of the disease. They don’t have drugs to cure it?”
“No. The current medications won’t cure the disease, and they won’t even help him recover the ground he’s lost. What they will do is help slow the disease’s progression. The medications can buy him time.”
“But if that’s the diagnosis, some sort of dementia, how long will he have to still be Hank?”
“I can’t answer that. No one can. The medicines might stabilize him for weeks, months or...”
“Years?”
He knew what her answer was when she switched to saying, “Medicine is always changing, evolving. There are new drugs. There are even trials. He might be eligible for something like that. But the truth is, I don’t know, Sebastian. Honestly, I don’t know.” She took his hand in hers.
She’d taken his bad hand, and his first instinct was to pull away, but he didn’t. To be honest, it felt nice to know there was still something the hand could manage. It could hold someone. “When I was in the hospital, they wanted me to call Hank, to have him come be there with me at least through the surgeries, but I didn’t. I didn’t want him to be in California. I needed to think of him here—in Valley Ridge. I needed to know he was still at the diner. I needed to know he was still feeding the town and gossiping with folks. I needed him to be here and to have things normal. Does that make sense?”
He could barely see her nodding.
“Having him here, it helped me. Knowing that he was doing what he’d always done, that Valley Ridge was what it always was, helped. I need to know that even if everything in my life has changed, my grandfather and the town are the same.”
She gave his hand a small squeeze. “There’s the world the way you want it—maybe even need it to be. And there’s the world the way it is. It’s hard to reconcile the two. Sometimes it feels almost impossible. But in the world the way it is right now, you’ve got to figure out a way to cope with that. Hank needs you. No matter what the diagnosis, he needs you.”
“And I want to help him, but I don’t know how.”
“You’ll go to the doctor’s with us next week and you’ll be here for him. That’s important, Sebastian.”
He realized they’d walked the whole way home. She started toward the house, but he stopped, and because she was still holding his hand, she stopped, as well. “Do you need to get right in?”
She shook her head, and he noticed her dangly earrings tinkled slightly. He hadn’t noticed before, probably because the diner was always so noisy. Even when the customers left, the refrigerator and freezers hummed, the ice machine clinked...
She said, “No. I’m going out with Sophie tomorrow and we’re not leaving until tenish, so I’ve got plenty of time.”
He wasn’t ready to let her go. “Would you sit with me for a few minutes?”
She nodded again, producing more tinkling noises. “Yes.”
He took her to the glider and they sat side by side, which tipped the glider at a precarious angle.
“It might work better if you sat on the other side,” Lily suggested with a laugh.
He could do that. It might make sense, but he didn’t want to. He found comfort in walking
next to and sitting next to Lily. “Maybe, but if I’m on this side, we’re tipped back enough that we can see the stars easier.”
“You’re a stargazer?” she asked.
Well, that just bit him in the butt. Odds were she knew all the constellations. “No. I couldn’t pick out a star by name if my life depended on it, but I like looking at them. There’s something soothing about them. I remember in school, the science teacher was telling us that the light from the stars takes so long to get here that some of them are long since dead before we ever see them. I like thinking about that.”
“About them being dead?”
He shook his head. “About them still being visible even if they’re not there. I think when I was in the hospital I wanted to keep Hank here in Valley Ridge because if he was here, I knew he was thinking about me, and somehow, even though I wasn’t here, I was. Again, if that makes any sense at all.”
“I’ve found that things that feel right to you don’t always have to make sense to anyone else.”
“Which is your way of saying it doesn’t?”
She laughed. “No, I can understand that the idea of things being the same can be comforting. Sometimes the opposite is true, too.”
There was such utter sadness in her voice that it was palpable. “What do you mean?” he asked softly, hoping she’d share.
But the moment passed, and Lily leaned back as if to get a better look at the stars. “I don’t know any of the constellations, either, but I’m officially dubbing that cluster there—” she pointed “—the Valley Ridge Constellation.” He finger traced what could be considered a big V in the sky. “It represents the valleys and—”
“Let me guess, the ridges?”
She laughed again, and if he hadn’t witnessed it for himself, he wouldn’t have believed that a minute ago she’d been sad.
“Yes, that’s it,” she told him.
But that was all she told him.
Lily knew everything about him. Stories from Hank. Things he’d shared.
But he knew very little about her.