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“I like her,” Hayley said.
Nick started in on his cake. “Now that she’s picking on me, you mean?”
“That helps,” she said playfully. “Plus this cake is amazing.”
“Just wait until you taste the milkshake.”
“So you two go way back, huh?” she asked. “To college?”
He nodded. “This was my home.”
“Like the bar is now?”
Nick gave an odd smile at that, almost regretful. “No, the bar is something else,” he said. “This place … well, I went to OSU, and this whole area is part of Ohio State’s campus.”
“Seems like the campus takes up the whole city.”
“That was the problem. It turns out the diner was closer to a lot of my classes than my dorm room was. I ended up pretty much living here.”
“I’m surprised you don’t have your own booth.”
“I do.” He pointed behind her. “I usually sit over there.”
She laughed. “The whole world just falls in love with you, don’t they? How do you do it?”
Nick went back to concentrating on his cake, and she realized she’d embarrassed him.
“It had nothing to do with me,” he said. “Pauline can’t resist helping people. She saw this crippled kid coming in every day, and before you know it she’s insisting I take her parking space inthe back, just to make sure I had one. She never charged me for it. Never told me how much farther she had to walk to work each day either, but I’m sure it was a hike. And if I tell her I’m going to come visit, she still moves her car.”
Hayley had welcomed the opportunity to walk off late-night pizzas as an undergrad at Purdue. But it was jarring to reframe the memory of her campus through the lens of someone who couldn’t walk very far. And when she considered the size of the campus she was in the middle of now—God, how would you evendothat, driving everywhere? Nick would’ve had to pack up his stuff after each class, walk to his car, get in the car, drive to a completely different building, hope for a parking space … She was getting overwhelmed just thinking about it, and hoped it didn’t show on her face.
“Did the campus give you reserved parking too?” she asked.
“Oh, there were all sorts of perks,” he said. “Even so, it was a pain in the ass before Pauline and her husband, Len, stepped in. They let me keep my scooter here overnight.”
“You had a scooter?”
“Sure, like a souped-up version of what you see in Walmart. I’d park the car here in the morning, pick up the scooter, come back for lunch, and then plug in the scooter here at night before I drove the car back to the dorm.”
“Did you have a helmet?” She reconsidered. “Nah, I bet you just had sunglasses and a leather jacket, like inTop Gun.” He smiled a little reluctantly, and she gasped. “You did!”
“I looked really cool,” he said sheepishly.
She wasn’t sure he believed it, but she did. “Is Len the guy at the grill?”
He laughed; this was clearly a more comfortable topic. “No, that’s Dom, as in Dom and Tony. Dom and Tony are brothers, and Pauline is Tony’s daughter. She runs the place with Len, and the old men work the grill when they feel like it.”
She smiled. “And they tell you dirty jokes.”
“And they tell me dirty jokes.”
Hayley thought about what Nick Freeman must have been like ten years ago, lugging textbooks into the diner, entertaining his friends in the back booth. Had he always been able to gain family everywhere he went?
“Hey,” she said, “how’d they make so manyRockymovies? Does he just keep punching people?”
He considered this. “First of all, he doesn’t punch people. He fights them.”
“Fights them by punching them.”
