When he left, the bell jangling as the diner door closed behind him, she saw the tip resting next to his $8.85 check. It was a hundred–dollar bill, fresh, as if it had never beforebeen used, and the only people ever to touch it were him, setting it down, and Kacey, lifting it carefully, thoughtfully from the table. He always ordered the same thing, no matter what time of day, and always left the same tip.
“He is older,” Rosanna acknowledged as they closed up, counting the register’s contents. “But notthatmuch older. Thirty?”
“That’s twelve years older.”
“Good! Boys your age are nuts. They don’t know what they want.”
“Idon’t know what I want.”
Rosanna huffed. “Yes, you do.” She wrapped up three- quarters of a quiche too old to serve and placed it in Kacey’s hands.
When Kacey came home, Sam was watching the Disney Channel. The TV was the only good thing about living at an extended-stay motel. Their cable had been off for many months before the bank foreclosed on the house, so Sam ignored the stained carpet of the motel and the way the hot plates smelled of old meat whenever Kacey cooked. He was excited to have TV again.
“Good news!” he called, not breaking gaze with the screen. “Mommy got pasta we can twirl with a fork!”
“Where is she?”
“In our room. She’s lying down. She’s tired.”
Kacey’s mother wasn’t tired. She was sad. The sadness had become a tiredness, then a sickness.
Later, after her mother pushed aside her half-finished plate and Sam ate the rest quickly, not even complaining the way he used to about the bits he didn’t like, which in the case of the quiche was probably the zucchini, Kacey’s mother lay down on the couch, her face a wavering blue in the television’s light. She looked underwater. Kacey and Sam went to the bedroom and got under the covers.
“I like this place,” he said doggedly, as though he hadn’t begged for weeks to go home, wailing that he hated it here.
“What do you like about it?”
“I get to sleep with you.”
“I like that, too.”
As though he were her mother, Sam tucked Kacey’s loose blond hair over her shoulder. “You look like Cinderella.”
“If I’m Cinderella, who are you?”
“A mouse.”
Kacey held him close. “Good night, Mouse.”
“Good night.”
Kacey began to recognize the signs of the man’s impending arrival. Each time he came, there seemed to be fewer people in the diner, as though he possessed invisible servants who traveled in advance of their master and whispered to the customers to leave. The diner would get quiet, like wind dying down before a storm. His car would pull up, an apple-red Cadillac convertible from the 1950s, with creamy whitewall tires and chrome as shiny as a new dime.
“Do you live around here?” Kacey said as she poured coffee. She couldn’t contain her curiosity. Surely someone with his means lived in Manhattan. Did he drive up here on business? He came so regularly these days, sometimes three times a week.
He smiled. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“It’s beautiful here.”
As much as Kacey longed to leave, she couldn’t deny the beauty of the Hudson Valley. The silver Ashokan Reservoir, the delicate flowers of dogwoods in spring, the noisy chandelier of the falls at Lake Minnewaska, old rock walls, autumn setting the mountains ablaze, the slow bulk of a bear.
“I own a farm,” he clarified.
A farmer who was rich? Was that possible? She glanced over his shoulder out the window, at his convertible. Though he did not follow her gaze, he seemed to guess where it had gone, and why. He said, “The farm has been in my family for generations, along with some other properties around the world.”
“Like where?”
