December 1

The bell over the door at The Lantern sounds like a spoon against a glass. That night it rang twice, because the wind yanked the door out of my hand.

“You again?” Iris said without looking up from the counter. “Don’t you have a home?”

“I have a home. What I don’t have is pie.”

“Well, you’re not getting much tonight either. I burned the edge.”

“Then I’m here to supervise.”

Three winters I’ve been sitting at the same table, and I still don’t know whether Iris has a dog, whether she sleeps in socks, or why she stopped driving.

She pointed me to the table with her dish towel, in case I’d forgotten the way. The fourth one by the window. It wobbles if you lean on your left elbow. The first week I thought about telling her to shim it. Then I found out I liked knowing it wobbled.

I took off my coat and set my phone facedown next to the napkin holder. On the screen sat an email from Chicago I hadn’t answered in three weeks. The kind of offer you either answer fast or don’t answer at all, with a salary nobody in Wren Hollow earns, the whole bank included, and a last line I knew by heart: We need your answer before Christmas. I watched it out of the corner of my eye. Like a sleeping dog that isn’t mine.

I know other things. That she closes at eight-thirty without any hurry and has never thrown a customer out in her life. That if you get up to carry your plate to the counter, she takes it from you halfway there and gives you a look. That she has a small scar on her left thumb, from a bread knife, and she rubs it when somebody comes up short on the check; that night, she forgets to charge that somebody. That she laughs like someone gave her permission.

With a profile like that, I wouldn’t manage a cousin’s portfolio. My grandmother would say I know exactly what matters.

It smelled like cinnamon and reheated coffee. The Pruitt brothers were arguing football, the way they have since 1987. Mrs. Delgado was fighting with her crossword and her cinnamon tea. At the counter, a trucker was eating chili with three hundred miles still ahead of him.

On the menu chalkboard, Iris had erased the soup and written in red chalk, in her round handwriting: 24 days to go.

“Is that a threat?” I asked when she came over with the coffeepot.

“It’s a countdown.”

“To what?”

“To Christmas, Roger. It’s December. It happens every year. Like you in here.”

She filled my cup without asking. Black, no sugar. The first day she served it to me with milk and I drank it to be polite. The second day, same thing. The third day she said, “You look like a man who takes it black and doesn’t know how to complain.” She hasn’t asked since.

She came back with the plate. Pecan pie. The edge, dark.

“No apple tonight. I let the apples go too long.”

“Burned,” I said.

“Toasted.”

“You didn’t try very hard today. What happened? Nervous?”

“I’m swamped, which is different.” She pushed her hair off her face with the back of her wrist, because her fingers had something on them. “If you don’t like it, I’m charging you anyway.”

“I’ll eat it out of pity.”

“Then I’m charging you double for the pity.”

She walked off the way she does, like she’s late for something even when she isn’t going anywhere.

The pie was good. It’s good every night. But there’s an agreement between us, signed at some point that first winter: I complain about dessert and she insults me. Neither of us has moved to terminate it.

I haven’t told her I grew up among pecan trees. Those pecans had been in the oven a minute too long, and it suited them. I’m never admitting that to her.

I ate the edge first. I’ve done that since I was a kid: there were five grandkids in my grandmother’s kitchen, and the good stuff ran out before it got to you. Iris came by my table with two bowls of chili and stopped.

“Why do you eat the burned part first?”

“My grandmother said you eat the bad part first, so the good part finds you hungry.”

“And what would your grandmother say about my pie?”

“That the crust was short on patience and long on oven.” Another bite. “She’d say it in Spanish. It sounds worse.”

“Your grandmother’s never tasted my pie.”

“She wouldn’t need to. She’d just have to look at your hands.”

She looked down at her hands, flour on the knuckles, and then at me. She went on to the Pruitts without answering. On her way back she left a napkin on my plate, written with the order pen: Tell your grandmother I’ll add some patience tomorrow.

My grandmother hasn’t been able to tell anybody they’re right for six years now. I didn’t say so. I folded the napkin and put it in the notebook.

The notebook is brown leather, worn at the corners, with an elastic band that doesn’t close anymore. My grandmother, who crossed over from Coahuila as a little girl, had one just like it: recipes, sayings, and in the margins, lines of eight syllables. She said anything that doesn’t fit in eight syllables isn’t worth saying. I used to laugh at her. Now I’m thirty-nine and I count syllables on my fingers under a table in a café, in Spanish, like she did. Verses go in the front. Client numbers in the back. They don’t mix.

Iris came back with the coffeepot and looked my shirt up and down, eyes narrowed.

“You coming from the bank again?”

“I’m not from the bank.”

“Then the funeral home. In that shirt, you either just signed a mortgage or buried somebody. I haven’t decided.”

“They’re pretty similar.”

A minute later she was back with a book of raffle tickets.

“Since you’re in mourning anyway, liven things up. The Chamber of Commerce basket: a ham, a bottle of bourbon, a wool blanket and a fifty-dollar gift certificate at the Pruitts’ hardware store. A dollar a ticket. It’s for a good cause.”

“Which is?”

“Me not getting stuck with the unsold ones.”

I bought five. On each stub she wrote Roger, table 4. No sign of my last name. She doesn’t know it; she’s never needed it. At the office I’m Mr. Hale and I bill by the hour. Here I’m table 4 and I’m the one paying. I come out ahead.

“Don’t waste your money, mijo,” Mrs. Delgado said without lifting her pen. “I’m winning that basket. I won the last two.”

“How many tickets do you buy?”

“One. The Lord knows what He’s doing.”

Iris tucked my five dollars into her apron. You don’t argue with Mrs. Delgado.

At ten to eight Bob came in, shaking off the cold like a big dog.

It took me longer than I’d like to admit to figure out he was her brother. At first I thought he was her husband; for a short, embarrassing stretch, a customer who owed her money. Then one day Mrs. Delgado asked from behind her crossword, “And your brother, honey, is he still having trouble with his back?” and Bob answered from the counter, “Still am, Mrs. Delgado, thanks.” The world sorted itself out.

They don’t look much alike. He’s tall and broad, blond in the way that goes darker with age, with the friendly face of a high school coach. She’s dark, small and sharp. But they laugh at the same point in a sentence.

Bob sat on the third stool, the one with the cracked leather. Iris put a coffee with milk and a slice of pie in front of him without him ordering anything.

“It’s toasted,” she warned him.

“I see that. What happened?”

“Nothing. I can’t keep up. My nut supplier fell through and I had to go to Fredericksburg for them.”

“How’d you get there?”

“Bus.”

Bob set his fork down on the plate. A small thing. I saw it.

“Iris.”

“Don’t start.”

“I’ll lend you mine. Sara barely drives hers.”

“I said don’t start.”

And he didn’t. They know where each other’s line is.

At some point Bob said something about a reindeer costume and a picture from when they were little, and Iris burst out laughing.

I can’t explain that laugh without sounding like an idiot. It’s too loud and too sudden, and it comes out all at once, head thrown back, mouth open. When she laughs like that, the café warms up a couple of degrees. Mrs. Delgado smiled without looking up. The trucker raised his head from his chili.

Then they all went back to what they were doing. Nobody looked at her for more than a second. It happens a lot at The Lantern: I watch people miss that laugh, and I don’t know whether to be mad at them or thank them.

Then Kayla walked by.

Kayla’s worked for Iris since spring. Twenty-five, ponytail up high, a pen behind her ear she never uses. She passed behind Bob with a tray of dirty mugs, and Bob, still talking to his sister, without turning his head all the way, flashed her half a crooked grin. The kind a married man shouldn’t even keep in a drawer.

It didn’t last long. Not the kind of thing you could prove in court. Kayla went red from her neck to her ears, dropped her eyes and smiled at the tray in a way that had nothing to do with mugs.

Iris had her back turned, pouring coffee. She didn’t see it. I did.

I didn’t like it. Not because it’s any of my business. For Iris. For the way she’d set the coffee with milk in front of her brother without asking, the way she sets mine down black. Some people know your habits and some people know your life. I knew which group Bob was in. I also knew which one I was in.

Bob’s phone buzzed on the counter. He looked at the screen, flipped it over and kept talking.

“Was that Sara?” Iris asked without turning around.

“I’ll call her later.”

Kayla came by again two minutes later, with the broom. Bob swiveled a little on his stool.

“Kayla, that apron looks better on you than on your boss.”

He said it as a joke, in the friendly voice he uses on everybody. It almost worked. Kayla laughed under her breath and kept sweeping. Iris turned around with the coffeepot in her hand.

“Robert Allen Hayes.”

“Uh-oh. The full name,” said Bob, who’s only Robert when his sister gets mad.

“Leave my waitress alone.” She aimed the coffeepot at him like a pistol. “She doesn’t have to put up with that from a happily married man.”

“Happily married.” He put a hand on his chest. “Sounds like a diagnosis.”

“I’m just saying it so you don’t forget.”

They both laughed. Kayla kept sweeping, pink in the face. I kept watching Bob, who was laughing with his mouth and not his eyes.

He left at a quarter past eight. Iris walked him to the door, hanging on his arm. There Bob leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. Not the cheek. The forehead, brushing her hair back with his hand, the way you kiss a kid with a fever. He says goodbye like that every time. It’s the only thing I’ve ever seen him do that strikes me as completely sincere.

“Give Sara a kiss.”

“From you.”

“No, from you. You don’t give her enough.”

He laughed and went out. The bell. The cold came in just enough to stir the napkins.

Iris stood looking at the closed door. Three or four seconds, her face still, and her face is never still. It wasn’t sadness. It was the face of someone counting the people in a room and coming up one short.

Then she turned around and caught me looking at her.

I didn’t look away. I’ve got seniority at that table.

“What are you looking at?”

“The chalkboard. Twenty-four days to go, I’m told.”

“You were looking at me.” She crossed her arms. She had flour on her elbow and didn’t know it. “Don’t you have a life? You come in here to listen to me talk to my family?”

“I come for the pie.”

“The pie was burned.”

“That’s why. Somebody has to put it on the record. Besides, your family’s better than anything on TV. You should charge admission.”

She came to clear my plate. With her other hand, without thinking, she took the empty mug out of my fingers. She had to tug. I have big hands, and I hold mugs harder than they need.

“One of these days you’re going to break one.”

“I’d pay for it.”

“It’s not about the money. They were my mother’s.”

She said it very fast and went back to the counter before I could answer. Three years I’d been drinking out of her mother’s mugs. I hadn’t known.

Before the kitchen closed I ordered a grilled cheese. I wasn’t hungry. I order it on Tuesdays at that hour, a whole one, because Iris doesn’t eat dinner: she eats standing up, in bits, whatever comes back from the tables or breaks coming out of the pan. The official excuse is that by that hour I only have room for half. The check says “half sandwich,” in her handwriting, with a price that isn’t on the menu.

That night, when she picked up the plate, she looked at the half that was left.

“You’re not full.”

“Stuffed.”

“Tuesdays at this hour you’re always full. It’s a medical thing, right? You should get that looked at.”

“It’s the pie. The disappointment shut my stomach.”

She took the plate to the counter, leaned back against it facing me and ate her half in small bites. She didn’t thank me. I didn’t expect her to.

At eight-thirty Mrs. Delgado left. Kayla hung up her apron, said “Night, boss” in a voice brighter than usual, checked her phone and was out the door almost at a run. That left the two of us, like most nights I come in. She was counting out the register with her bun half fallen down. I was waiting, no mug and no excuse.

Between bills she put the chairs up on the tables, legs to the ceiling. All of them but two: mine and the one across from it. Nobody ever sits across from me. I don’t leave my coat on it and she doesn’t rest her tray there, but it’s the only chair in The Lantern that spends the night on the floor. I’ve never asked.

At eight-forty the wall phone rang, the one with the curly cord that only suppliers and people over sixty use. Iris pinned it with her shoulder without letting go of the bills.

“The Lantern.” Pause. “Good evening, Mr. Hendricks.”

She rolled her eyes. Hendricks runs the bank branch on the square and wants forty boxes of cookies without paying for them.

“Forty boxes at twelve dollars, Mr. Hendricks.” Pause. “No, last year’s price was last year’s. Pecans went up.” Long pause. “Yes, I know it’s Christmas. That’s why there are cookies.”

I watched her give. Iris will haggle over anything until the other person says “it’s Christmas.” Then her guard drops. I make a living knowing where people’s guard drops. I grabbed a napkin, wrote Half up front. Otherwise you don’t turn on the oven and left it next to the register.

She read it. Raised an eyebrow. Then she squared up in front of the phone and spoke in a voice I’d never heard from her, the voice of someone who gets paid:

“I’ll make it easy for you, Mr. Hendricks. Half up front tomorrow and the rest on delivery. Otherwise I don’t turn on the oven.” Silence. “Nine o’clock. Perfect. Good night.”

She hung up very carefully.

“I didn’t ask for your help.”

“I know.”

“I was going to get there on my own.”

“Sure. But you were going to give him a discount.”

She opened her mouth to deny it and shut it again. She folded the napkin in four and put it in her apron, with my five dollars.

She shut the drawer, took her coat off the hook and turned off half the lights. That left the Open sign in the window, buzzing.

“Want a ride?” I asked.

“I’m walking tonight.” She’s said yes exactly once: the night it snowed, that first winter. “I’ve had enough bus for one day, and your car smells like an office.”

“It smells like leather.”

“Office leather.”

We went out together. She locked up and turned off the neon from outside with a switch hidden behind a flowerpot. On the square, the courthouse tree was blinking, the bulb on top burned out.

She turned up her coat collar and started walking backward, facing me, the way she does when she’s got one more line.

“Hey, Roger. You’ve seen me with my brother a million times. You know what he’s like, you know how he gets on my nerves.” She tilted her head. A strand of hair fell across her face and this time she left it. “Someday you’re going to tell me how you get along with yours. Because you have brothers and sisters, right? You’ve got a big-brother face.”

Several answers occurred to me. That I have four. That the oldest, Lupe, is forty-six, with a pecan farm two hours north and three kids: Danny and Mateo, who are already a head taller than she is, and Rosie, who’s nine and working on it. That the five of us were raised by a grandmother who counted syllables, because my mother worked whatever job came along. That my father fishes in a town on the coast and calls me the day after my birthday. That on Christmas Eve there are twenty-three of us around a table for twelve, and I’ve spent three Christmases finding excuses not to go.

And one other thing, which wasn’t about family.

“Iris.”

She stopped. Waited, hands in her pockets. The light hit her from the side, from the streetlamp. Her nose was red and the flour was still on her elbow.

I counted. Three seconds. Four. It fit in eight syllables. I didn’t say it.

“Four,” I said. “And each one’s story costs you a pie. Thursday you bring me the peach one, not burned, and I’ll tell you the first.”

She opened her mouth to fire one back, and for once nothing came out. Then she burst out laughing right there in the middle of Main Street, and the laugh bounced off the dark shop windows.

“You’re a blackmailer, Roger.”

“Financial advisor. Similar, but with a tie.”

She went off down the sidewalk, stepping on the loose paving stones on purpose so they’d clunk.

She was halfway down the block when the sheriff’s cruiser came down Main Street at the speed of a church procession. It stopped next to me and the window came down. On the dashboard sat a to-go cup from The Lantern and a plastic snowman that nodded at every bump.

“Everything all right, Roger?”

“Everything’s fine.”

“Uh-huh.” He looked at Iris, still headed down the street, and then at me, leaning on my car with the keys in my hand. “I’ve been watching you do this same thing for a long time now. One of these days I’m going to have to write you a ticket.”

“For what?”

“Parking without a purpose.” His eyes drifted to the corner by the pharmacy and came back with a grin too big for his uniform. “Get some rest, son.”

The snowman kept nodding yes at me until the cruiser turned the corner.

In my pocket, the phone buzzed once. Chicago, back on top again. I stayed by the car until Iris turned at the pharmacy. Then I got in, engine off, the cold climbing up my ankles, took out the notebook and wrote on the first blank page, the letters crooked against my knee:

Nadie mira cuando ríe. (No one watches when she laughs.)

Eight syllables. I counted them twice.

I put the phone facedown on the passenger seat, started the car and turned the heat all the way up. Chicago had been waiting three weeks. One more night wouldn’t make a difference. The other thing had been waiting a lot longer.