Page 22 of Takedown

Vinyl booths gone the color of old mustard. A pie carousel turning in the window with three slices in it, all of them lying about their age. A waitress named Doris — actually named Doris, her tag said so, like the place was committing to the bit — who looked at two boiled-down college wrestlers walking in at ten p.m. and said, "Athletes," the way you'd say raccoons, and pointed us at a corner booth with her chin.

"Told you," Grayson said, sliding in across from me. "Actual terrible."

"It's perfect."

And here's the thing — it was. Because I'd spent seven weeks at Ashworth being either priced or performed at, gold light and candlelight and portraits of dead rowers, and the Wagon Wheel didn't give one single shit about either of us. Doris didn't know his name. The menu was laminated and sticky in the specific way that means loved. For the first time since the covered bridge, I was in a room where we were both foreigners.

I watched him look at the menu. Actually watched him — I'd earned it, I figured, eight pounds and a war — and caught the exact moment Grayson Whitfield, of the library Whitfields, encountered the concept of a Hungry Man Special.

"It comes with three kinds of meat," he said, quietly, like he was reading scripture in a foreign church.

"Welcome to America."

"There's a photograph of it. Danny, there's a photograph."

"So the illiterate can also feast. It's a democracy." That was the first time I'd said his first name out loud, by the way. Danny, he'd said, and my mouth had just — answered in kind, easy as a stance correction. Neither of us flagged it. Both of us heard it. The table got about four degrees warmer and Doris arrived with coffee nobody ordered, because coffee wasn't a choice there, it was a condition of entry.

He drank some. His whole face did something complicated.

"Strip an engine block," I said.

"I owe the engine block an apology." He set the cup down with respect for a fallen enemy. "We're eating everything. You know that, right? Post-weigh-in, post-win — this is the one meal all season with no math in it. Doris?" — and this is the thing about him I keep having to explain to people who weren't there, the way he could turn a beam of full attention on absolutely anyone — "we'd like the Hungry Man Special. Two of them. And whichever slice of pie you'd defend with your reputation."

Doris looked at him for a second. "The cherry's from this week."

"Then the cherry. Both of them. Thank you."

"Huh," said Doris, warmer by a degree, and I thought: that's the town's word. He just got a huh out of the town. Took me eleven hours on a bus. Took him one sentence. Money teaches you the trick of people, I thought, and then watched him stack the creamers into a little tower to entertain himself while we waited, twenty years old, benched, happy, and thought: no. Money didn't teach him that. Money doesn't say thank you to Doris.

I was doing a lot of revising that fall. The file marked WHITFIELD was getting messy.

* * *

"Okay," I said, when the food had landed and we'd gone at it for five straight minutes in the reverent silence of the starved. "The cooks. You promised."

"I promised roast potatoes. The feud costs extra."

"I just watched you eat bacon off my plate. We're past pride."

"That was strategic bacon." He wiped his mouth, sat back, and lit up in a way I hadn't seen before — not the mat intensity, not the club correctness. This was the storyteller. I'd learn it was the realest room in the house of him, this one, and the least visited. "Right. So. My grandmother employs two cooks. Mrs. Hale, who has been with the family since roughly the Coolidge administration, and Denise, who arrived eight years ago with — and I need you to sit with this — culinary training."

"Oh no."

"Oh yes. Mrs. Hale cooks from memory and grievance. Denise cooks from Le Cordon Bleu. They divide the kitchen with a border only they can see, they communicate exclusively through my grandmother's housekeeper like hostile nations through Switzerland, and every Christmas — every Christmas — there are two gravies."

"Two gravies."

"Two gravies, Danny. Labeled. And the entire extended family, cowards to a man, takes a spoon of each so as not to start a war, so every plate has two puddles of gravy touching in the middle like the Battle of the Somme, and my grandmother presides over it all saying nothing, because — and I genuinely believe this — the feud is the only thing keeping her alive. She once told my mother that Denise's roast potatoes were 'very continental,' and Mrs. Hale got word, and we ate boiled potatoes for two years. Boiled. As a message."

I was laughing by then — actually laughing, mouth full, in a vinyl booth, at potatoes deployed as psychological warfare — and he watched me laugh with an expression I filed away to think about later, when I was braver.

"Your family fights with food."

"My family fights with everything except words. Food, seating arrangements, the guest list, thermostat settings. My great-aunt once expressed forty years of disapproval through the medium of Christmas card envelope quality." He said it light, funny, and then — this was new, this was the diner working on him, or the win, or the coffee, or me — he kept going past where the joke ended. "You'd think it's harmless. It's not, quite. When nothing can be said, everything becomes code, and then you spend your whole life decoding, and some days—" he turned the coffee cup ninety degrees on its saucer, precise, "—some days I genuinely don't know if anyone in that house has ever said one true sentence to another person in it."

The diner hummed. Doris refilled someone's cup across the room.

"You say true sentences," I said. "I've heard a couple."