The Strawberry Hearts Diner

The Strawberry Hearts Diner

Carolyn Brown



CHAPTER ONE


Luck, whether good or bad, always came in threes.

Vicky Rawlins was seventeen years old the year that her godmother, Nettie, divorced her worthless, cheating husband in May. Vicky’s mother, Thelma, died in June, and Vicky found out she was pregnant in August. Twenty-three years later, she still hated the idea of summer rolling around, dreading the first official day of the season weeks before it actually arrived.

Whoever made the calendar had no idea about seasons in Texas. They thought that spring lasted right up to the twenty-first day of June. If they ever came to visit, they’d learn right quick that there were only two seasons in Pick, Texas—summer and winter.

“Goin’ to be a hot one. Starin’ at that calendar ain’t goin’ to make the next week pass by no quicker.” Nettie set a cup of steaming-hot coffee in front of her.

“It’s still over a month until the first real day of summer, and the bad luck has already started,” Vicky muttered.

“I wish you’d get over that crap.” Nettie cut and laid out biscuits on a cookie sheet. “Instead of worryin’ about luck, think about Emily coming home in a week. We’ll have some help then.”

Vicky turned away from the feed store calendar hanging on the wall beside the door out into the diner’s seating area. “We really need two waitresses.”

“Maybe one will drop out of the sky today.” Nettie laughed at her own joke.

“That will happen when pigs fly north for the hot summer months.” Vicky smiled.

For more than two decades, Nettie had been her surrogate mother, best friend, business partner, and roommate all rolled into one. A tall, rawboned woman with a round face and short gray hair, Nettie had a backbone of steel and a heart of gold. At seventy she swore that when it was her time to step from earth into heaven, it would be at the end of a fourteen-hour shift right there in the Strawberry Hearts Diner.

Thinking about her daughter, Emily, coming home in a few days lightened Vicky’s heart. Maybe this summer would be three months of nothing but working with Emily and enjoying evenings on the porch swing. No bad luck. No good luck. Just a peaceful summer with her daughter and lots of good times.

“Quit your frettin’. It’s goin’ to be a good-luck year. I can feel it in my bones.” Nettie cut out two dozen biscuits and placed them evenly on a cookie sheet.

“Do your bones ever lie to you?” Vicky asked.

“Haven’t yet,” Nettie said. “Go open up for business. I’ll be glad when Emily gets here on Friday.”

“Me, too.” Vicky flipped a switch, turning on the lights that flashed BREAKFAST, LUNCH, DINNER at the top of three of the windows. The shiny black-and-white-tiled floor evoked the 1950s, right along with the red booths lining one wall. An old silver metal tube of sorts, the diner looked out of place in the modern world, but that was the charm. Folks came from all over the county to eat Nettie’s cooking and to taste one of the famous strawberry tarts, which were the diner’s real claim to fame.

Heat had melted the adhesive tape holding up the HELP WANTED sign, sending it to the floor. Vicky picked it up and carried it back to the cash register, found a roll of duct tape in the gadget basket under the counter, and put it back at eye level on the glass door. It looked like crap, but at least it was visible.

“Is there a line of experienced waitresses waiting at the door for us to interview them? See any pigs flying around up there in the sky?” Nettie yelled from the kitchen.

“No pigs, but you should see this line of folks wanting a job,” Vicky hollered. “It goes from here all the way down the street to the convenience store.”

Nettie’s hearty laughter filled the diner right along with the aromas of bacon, sausage, and biscuits coming out of the oven. Pretty soon the place would be full and Vicky would be hopping from booths to the counter to the cash register. They needed help so bad that Vicky looked out the window toward the sky, just in case there was someone floating down toward them.

“No such luck,” she muttered.

Nettie brought two biscuits stuffed with bacon and scrambled eggs from the kitchen to the dining area and set them on the counter. “Better eat up. Got about ten minutes until Woody gets here. I could set my clock by that man.”

Vicky bit into a biscuit. “How did you and Mama do all the work by yourselves for all those years?”

“Wasn’t easy, but we was determined to never have a year that we weren’t making a profit. At the end of the first year, we figured everything up and hired a part-time waitress, Linda,” Nettie said. “Whoever said that time takes away the pain of losing someone has cow chips for brains. I miss Thelma every day, especially when I make the crusts for the tarts. She was the one who always did that job.”

Vicky twirled around on the bar stool and braced her back against the counter. “Twenty-three years, Nettie. Can you believe it? Some days it seems like yesterday that I came into the house and told you I was pregnant. Then again, it all feels like at least two lifetimes ago.”

Nettie finished off her biscuit and took a sip of coffee. “Wonder how many strawberry tarts we’ve sold in that time.”

“Sixty-four million.” Vicky tucked a strand of jet-black hair up under her short ponytail.

“Give or take a few million.” Nettie’s deep chuckle implied she was a longtime smoker, but truth was she’d never lit up a cigarette in her life.