Black slacks, white dress shirt, collar button undone, a clipboard tucked under one arm. He scanned the floor the way a person scans a spreadsheet, not looking at people, looking at figures. His eyes landed briefly on Rey, registered old guy at the counter, flannel shirt, and moved on. He stopped at a table where a buser was resetting, pointed at something, said something quiet but firm. The buser, a young man maybe 20, who looked like he'd rather be anywhere else, nodded quickly and adjusted whatever needed adjusting.
Then the manager, Ry had already figured out that's what he was, walked to the far side of the room and made a note on his clipboard. Ry watched all of this over the rim of his coffee mug. He finished the pie. He didn't finish in protest. He finished it because wasting food wasn't something Earl Garrett's son did, no matter what the food tasted like. He set his fork down, ordered a second cup of coffee, and settled in.
20 minutes later, Rey had been in the restaurant for 43 minutes total. Cassie came back. She looked uncomfortable. Sir, the manager wanted me to let you know. We have a table policy during busy hours.
Ry looked at her, then looked around the dining room. Nine tables now out of 22. I'll take my check, he said. No irritation in his voice. None at all.
She brought it over. He looked at it, pulled two 20s from his wallet, cash, always cash, and laid them on the counter. The check was $14 and change. He left them both. You keep that, he said.
Cassie looked at the bills, looked at him. Thank you, she said. Quiet, genuine. Hard morning, Ry said. She didn't answer right away.
They're all kind of hard lately, she said. Ry nodded once. He stood up, buttoned one button on his flannel, and picked up his cap. He was three steps from the door when the voice came from behind him. Excuse me.
Ry turned. The manager was standing in the middle of the floor. Clipboard at his side now. Posture of a man who decided something. Sir, I don't know if you noticed, but you've been here almost an hour.
And I have to be honest with you. The way you're dressed isn't really in line with the image we're trying to maintain here. I'm going to have to ask that if you come back, you come a little more put together. Silence. Not an angry silence, a thinking silence.
Rey looked at the man. Really? Looked at him. Young face. Smart in the way schools teach you to be smart.
The eyes of someone who had learned what success was supposed to look like and was executing accordingly. What's your name? Ry asked. Brandon Keller. I'm the general manager.
Of this location. Of this location? Yes. Ray nodded slowly. "All right, Brandon."
He put his cap back on, straightened the brim, looked once more at the room, the pale pie, the airport music, the nine half-filled tables, the buser with the nervous hands, Cassie with her red- rimmed eyes. Then he pushed through the door and walked out. He stood on the sidewalk for a moment. The October air was cool and clean. He looked up at the sign, Garretts, EST, 1987.
37 years. He'd signed the lease on this building on a Thursday in February of 1987. He'd painted the back room himself that weekend, two coats of white, because the landlord's crew had left water stains on the drywall, and Rey didn't want Karen to have to look at them every day. Karen had stood in the middle of the empty room, 8 months pregnant, and said, "This is going to work, Rey. I know it."
He'd been less sure than she was, but she'd been right. He walked to his truck, got in, sat for a moment. On the rear view mirror, hanging from a short leather cord, was a small metal keychain worn. The shape was a skull with wings. If you knew what you were looking at, you knew what it meant.
If you didn't, it just looked like an old keychain that a man had been carrying too long to throw away. Ray held it for a moment, set it down, picked up his flip phone from the cup holder, opened it, found a number that wasn't saved under a name, just a seven-digit sequence he'd had memorized for 30 years, dialed two rings. Well, I'll be. The voice was low, unhurried. The voice of a man who'd stopped being surprised by things a long time ago.
Ray Garrett. What? You lost your mind finally calling this number? Maybe, Ry said. Duke, I need to ask you something.
Shoot. You still know people who know things. Pause. Depends on the thing, Duke said. Ry looked out the windshield at Garrett's.
Somebody's taking apart my restaurant, he said. Piece by piece from the inside. And I need to know who's behind it. A longer pause this time. You sure it's not just a bad manager?
Bad manager doesn't register a supply company in Delaware 14 months before he gets hired, Ry said. Silence on the line. Then Duke said, "Give me 24 hours." "Thank you, Duke. Don't thank me.
Buy me a burger sometime at that diner of yours whenever you fix it." Ry almost smiled. "Yeah," he said. "When I fix it." He closed the phone.
This is not a story about romanticizing what that life was. There's no romance in it, Rey won't give you any. He's been asked over the years by people who thought it sounded exciting, reporters, mostly in the early days. A couple of true crime podcasters who found out somehow and reached out through his restaurant's website. He never talked to any of them because the truth isn't exciting.
The truth is he was a young man who was angry about things he couldn't name. Who found a place where anger was useful and who spent 6 years making decisions he would spend the next 36 paying for. Not legally. He was never charged with anything. But in the way that matters more, in the accounting that a man keeps with himself at 3:00 in the morning when the house is quiet.
He left the club in 1987. Not with drama, not with a movie scene, with a conversation with Duke, actually, who was already the chapter president by then, in a garage on a Tuesday night. Ry told him he was going to marry Karen, that Karen was having a baby, that he'd signed a lease on a building on Main Street in Witchah, that he was going to open a restaurant. Duke looked at him for a long time, then he said, "You sure this is what you want?" Ry said, "It's what she needs, and she's the best thing that ever happened to me."
Duke nodded. That was it. 37 years ago, he hadn't looked back. He drove to a house 2 mi from the restaurant. The house had a porch with a green rocking chair and a flower bed that had just been put to sleep for the winter wrapped in burlap the way Karen always did it in October.
He came inside through the kitchen door. Karen was at the table reading. She was 60 years old and wore her gray hair short and neat the way she'd worn it for the last 10 years. She'd been beautiful when she was young. She was still beautiful now, just differently in the way that a face that has laughed a lot and worried a lot and held a lot of other people's weight starts to hold its own quiet kind of grace.
She looked up when he came in. She read his face. That took her about 1 second. Bad, she said. He said it's different in there, Karen.
She took off her reading glasses, set her book down. How different. He pulled out a chair and sat across from her. The pie was pale, he said. Karen went still of all the things to say, of all the details.
The pie, because she knew, and he knew she knew that if the pie was wrong, it wasn't about the pie. The pie was the canary. The pie was the thing you checked when you wanted to know if someone was still honoring what you built. Tell me everything, she said. So, he did.
Karen Garrett had not been in the restaurant's day-to-day operations for 15 years. That's a long story for another time, and it belongs to her more than it belongs to this telling. But what you should know is this. She built Garretts alongside Rey, brick by brick, table by table. She designed the original menu.
She trained the first three servers. She wrote the kitchen standards that still supposedly governed how food was prepared in every Garrett's location. She had stepped back. Not away. There is a difference.
And when Rey told her what the restaurant felt like now, the music, the prices, the pale crust, the way the staff moved like people waiting for something bad to happen, she listened without interrupting. When he finished, she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "What are you going to do?" Ry said, "I'm going to find out who's doing this and why, and then I'm going to fix it legally," Aaron said. It was not a question, Rey said.
She looked at him. "Promise me." He looked at her. You have my word. The phone rang that afternoon.
He didn't recognize the number. He almost didn't pick up. He almost never picked up numbers he didn't know. He picked up. Mr. Garrett, a woman's voice, clear, deliberate.
The voice of someone who had spent decades in rooms where being heard mattered. Speaking. You don't know me, she said. My name is Ruth Callaway. You fixed my shopping cart this morning in the hardware store parking lot.
Ry said nothing for a moment. Yes, he said. I remember. I live on Maple Street, she said. Four blocks from your restaurant on Maine.
He sat up slightly. I used to eat there every Tuesday, Ruth said. With a group of friends. We'd been doing it since 1994. We stopped about 6 months ago.
Why'd you stop? Because it stopped feeling like the place I remembered, she said plainly. Without cruelty, just honestly. Rey was quiet. I'm sorry to hear that, he said.