The Strawberry Hearts Diner(20)

“Nettie!” Jancy gasped.

“It’s the truth.” She knocked on Emily’s door. “Rise and shine, mornin’ glory. If you are goin’ to walk to work with the rest of us, you’d best get up and around.”

Jancy waited on the porch swing for the other three. Trees had begun to take on individual forms instead of blending together into big black shapeless blobs. In an hour the sun would pop up as an orange sliver at first, and then it would rise with heat and power to knock out the darkness. As Jancy sat on the porch that morning, the pungent scents of wet grass and dirt all around her, she admitted that getting stranded in Pick was a good thing.

Her life had been a black blob for a long time, but in the past five days she’d begun to feel like the trees were taking shape. The sun wasn’t up yet, but it was rising, and it might reveal that she wasn’t supposed to spend the rest of her life at the diner. Yet she wasn’t sure what she’d do if that’s what was laid on her heart.

“Hey.” Emily sat down on the other end of the swing. “I guess I owe you an explanation. You know I did not spend the night on the swing.”

“Emily, this is your home. You don’t owe me anything,” Jancy said.

“Well, then I’ve got a confession. I wasn’t sure about you living here. I remembered you from when you lived here before, and you were kind of standoffish. Anyway, after working with you and listening to Shane talk about you, I’ll admit I was wrong.”

“Shane talked about me?” Jancy asked.

“Honey, Shane had a big, big crush on you when we were sophomores and he and Ryder were seniors.”

“Really?” Jancy gasped. “Are you serious?”

“Oh, yeah.” Emily smiled.

“Why didn’t he say something?”

“Because he stutters and it would have broken his heart if you’d laughed at him or rejected him. I’ve talked to him every night since you took the job. He says that you are a hard worker and that Mama and Nettie are lucky to have you.”

“You must like him a lot,” Jancy said.

“I really do,” Emily told her.

“Y’all ready?” Nettie and Vicky came out at the same time.

“Ready.” Jancy quickly stood up.

Vicky and Emily walked on ahead with Nettie and Jancy a few feet behind. They were about halfway to the diner when Nettie raised an eyebrow. Jancy shrugged and shook her head. Jancy wasn’t ready to get in the middle of family problems. She’d been in that place before, and all it got her was a lot of misery.

She sucked in one more lungful of fresh morning air as Nettie unlocked the back door to the diner. “Want me to get out the pans of meat loaf and put them in the oven?”

Nettie looped a clean apron over her neck. “Not until we get the biscuits done for breakfast. You can make the dough up while I start a pot of gravy.”

Emily removed a stick of sausage from the refrigerator, pulled out a stockpot, and crumbled the meat into it. “I’ll make the gravy. I got hungry for sausage gravy and biscuits last spring and decided I’d make some.”

“And you made a pot this size, right?” Jancy carefully mixed the ingredients for the biscuits.

“Oh, yeah. Didn’t even think to size the recipe down. The whole dorm had biscuits and gravy that morning.” Emily laughed. “You must’ve made the same mistake, right?”

Jancy nodded. “Only it was with salsa. We served it at the Mexican restaurant where I worked and they shared the recipe. I was the only one who liked it at home, and there I was with a whole gallon.”

She remembered how her father had fussed for weeks about having to move it to the side every time he wanted a beer from the tiny refrigerator in the smallest trailer they’d ever lived in. With his ideas about a woman’s place being in the home and the man making a living, it was a miracle that he even allowed Jancy to get a job when she was sixteen. But they needed that paycheck. Old enough to work; old enough to make her own way—that became his philosophy.

As soon as the dough was ready, Jancy slid it over toward her area of the worktable, rolled it out, and cut it into perfect little circles.

“The other places I worked used frozen biscuits,” Jancy said.

“I mentioned that years ago and got shot down in a hurry.” Emily didn’t even look up from stirring the sausage. “In this diner everything is made from scratch.”

“Cash register is counted and loaded. I’ll get the tart shells put into the convection oven.” Vicky looped the strings of a bibbed apron over her head. “Y’all did a good job yesterday of taking care of the customers, so I’ll leave the front to y’all and help Nettie get things done back here.”

Jancy smiled at the compliment. Not that she was vain enough to ever think she’d be anything but an employee—well, maybe a friend—for the next couple of weeks, but it was nice to be appreciated.

Couple of weeks? In one more week, you’ll have the money to go. Don’t let moss grow on you, girl, or you’ll never leave. You were lookin’ for a job when you found this one, and there’s plenty more to be had. Her father’s voice came through loud and clear in her head.

But a few weeks won’t matter, she argued.

“Are we taking tarts to the picnic?” she blurted to get her father out of her head.