Then, hoping for the best, she strode back toward the old ladies’ booth, yelling out, “Use your fingers!” to George.
The bell over the front door tinkled. More customers. Yippy skippy. The diner went eerily silent, as though somebody’d pressed the mute button. Violet glanced up, skidding smack into a pair of smoky-blue eyes in a male face that didn’t have a single soft anything, anywhere. At least, what she could see underneath the beard haze.
He was big, bodyguard big, his head stubbled with little more hair than his face, big enough to nearly blot out the younger man behind him, to dwarf the pretty, long-haired girl in front, her slender shoulders swallowed by a pair of huge, hard hands.
“Three?” Darla, the other waitress, finally got out, gawking at the taller man as though she wouldn’t mind clutching him to her flat little bosom like one of the front-door-size laminated menus in her arms.
“Yeah, three,” he said, and Violet more felt than heard his voice, deep, not from around here, felt it seep into her skin, through her pores…
No more romance novels for you, she thought, shrugging off two years’ worth of unused hormones, about the same time she realized Darla had seated the trio in Violet’s station because hers was all filled.
Great. Just great, she thought as Darla passed around the menus, her long face sagging with disappointment.
But a gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do. So, jerking her pencil out of her hair, Violet marched over to take their orders.
“Smile,” Darla hissed at her as she passed, and Violet reminded herself that her sore feet and bitching back were not these peoples’ fault. And that the grumpy approach was probably not the best way to get a tip.
Both men were slouched heavily against the padded booth backs, the girl’s face folded into the standard issue adolescent glower. Without even knowing the particulars, Violet felt a tremor of sympathy for her. Orders taken, she called them out to Maude—burgers and fries, the special, spaghetti for the girl—then asked, “So what brings you to Mulligan Falls?”
Those sharp blue eyes swung to hers, and assorted body parts quivered, remembering. Then he said, “I just bought the old Hicks Inn, up on the hill.”
And presto-chango, Mitch fell to second place on Violet’s Men Who Screwed Me Over list.
“Your food’ll be here in a sec,” the redheaded waitress said, her voice like needles as she snatched up the menus, and Rudy thought, Huh? But the needles had pricked him awake, at least enough to notice her as something other than the means by which food would eventually reach his stomach. Enough to catch the sparks of anger, of hurt, in her big, silvery-green eyes, before she wheeled around and tromped off, the diner’s overhead lights tangling in a thousand tiny ringlets the same color orange as in the wallpaper in his “new” kitchen.
Then the haze of exhaustion cleared enough for him to notice the body underneath the curls, short and curvy and compact in the pale green uniform, like one of those VW Bugs, he thought, stronger and far more crash-resistant than one might think.
“What was that all about?” Kevin asked, and Rudy shook his head, half-annoyed, half-relieved that he hadn’t imagined it.
“No idea,” he said. But after a flurry of murmurings and gasps, Rudy noticed several heads had turned in their direction.
“Dad?” Stacey whispered. “Why’s everybody looking at us?”
“Beats me, honey.”
Kevin leaned forward. “Why do I feel like we just landed in the middle of a Stephen King novel?”
Stacey sidled closer as Rudy kicked Kevin under the table.
Until three minutes ago, Rudy hadn’t had too much trouble keeping his good mood aloft. Much to their surprise—and Rudy’s profound relief—three of the upstairs bedrooms were in fairly good shape, as were the bathrooms. Yeah, the downstairs needed a lot of work, but no huge surprises. So he’d decided—especially after four hours of nonstop cleaning and inspection and plugging up unplanned critter doors—that nobody, including him, was up to canned Dinty Moore stew warmed up over a camp stove. And besides, promising Stacey any dessert she wanted might earn him enough points to see them through at least the next twenty-four hours.
So, with the U-Haul trailer unhitched, they’d piled into his edging-toward-classic-status Bronco and headed to town, “town” being Main Street, basically, five blocks long and anchored by an old-fashioned square, across from which sat Maude’s. Applebee’s, it wasn’t, but—as he explained to his sneering daughter—the sooner they started mixing with the locals, the sooner they’d stop feeling like outsiders.
“Never happen,” she’d muttered as they’d walked in. Although he already knew she had her eye on a piece of chocolate cream pie in the old-fashioned display tower on the counter.
He hadn’t counted, however, on being regarded like their ship had just cut swathes in the crop fields. Unnerving, to say the least. And frankly annoying. For God’s sake, the minute he or Kev opened their mouths it was pretty clear the Vaccaros hailed from the same good, solid working-class stock as the majority of Mulligan Falls’s residents. So what the hell?
Their waitress returned with their drinks, which she clunked in front of them, her mouth pressed tight, and Rudy saw the pinch of frustration and exhaustion in those squeezed lips. Although what that had to do with him, he had no idea. His cop senses sprang to attention, that this was someone about to blow, and he thought, I could fix, you, too.
What the freaking hell?
“Oh, and, miss?” he said, gently, “my daughter would love a piece of that chocolate pie, if you could add it to our order?”
“Sure thing,” she said, not meeting his eyes but smiling just enough at Stacey for Rudy to see through at least some of those suffocating layers of resentment.
Then one of the old biddies at the booth across the way called her over, in that imperious way people have when they think you exist solely for their comfort, complaining about her food being cold or something, and at the back of the restaurant a little boy yelled, “Mom! What’s twelve take away seven?” as the woman behind the serving counter dinged an obnoxiously loud bell and hollered, “Violet! Order up!”
He saw her—Violet—stop for a second, her back expanding with the force of her breath, before yelling, “Use your fingers!” to the boy (there were two of them, Rudy now saw, practically buried by books and things in the booth), grabbing the old lady’s plate and carrying it back to the kitchen, where she exchanged it for the three plates waiting for her.
The plates precariously balanced, she spun around again at the precise moment the youngest boy darted out of the booth and into her path. On a yelp, the waitress—Violet—stumbled, the plates leaping, flying, crashing magnificently onto the tile floor as, catching her son in her arms, she went down, too.
Rudy and Kevin were instantly out of their seats, Kevin snatching the child out of the pile of shattered plates and splattered spaghetti and scattered fries and roast beef and gravy as Rudy grabbed for the crumpled waitress.
“Leave me alone!” she cried, close to meltdown, slapping at his hands as she struggled to her knees and grabbed her chick. “Zeke! You okay? Does anything hurt?” Heedless of the spaghetti sauce and gravy clinging to her breasts, dribbled down her skirt, she frantically checked for blood and bruises. A noodle dangled from her hair; she yanked it out and tossed it on the floor, then clamped one tiny shoulder with a short-nailed hand, holding the other one three inches from the kid’s nose. “How many fingers?”
“Th-three,” the kid said, small-voiced, trembling. “I’m sorry, Mama, I had to pee! I didn’t see you!”
“It’s