Corey let out a breath that was almost a word. Leo put both hands over his face. Dave Pelman sat back on his stool and gripped the counter with both hands and looked at the ceiling with the expression of a man counting his blessings by name in order starting with the most important. Harold came out of the kitchen with the skillet.
He stood at the counter and looked at it and then hung it on the hook beside the pass-through. "I'm making eggs." he announced to no one specifically. "Everybody's getting eggs. I don't care if you don't want eggs.
You're getting eggs." Nobody argued. Brenda picked up the Louisville Slugger and put it back under the counter. Bobby looked at Declan who had finally moved away from the wall and was walking back to the booth. "You didn't have to say anything to him." Bobby said.
"No." Declan agreed. "I didn't." "That was effective." "Presence is a language." Declan said. He sat back down. "Some people are fluent." Bobby considered this.
"That sounds like something that belongs on a bumper sticker." "Most true things do." Declan said. Garrett was laughing again, that full room laugh, and this time nobody compressed it, and it filled the diner the way light fills a window completely with nowhere left to hide. And for a moment in the laugh and the smell of Harold's eggs hitting the griddle and the desert air coming through the empty door frame and the steady hum of the overhead light, the Pioneer Wells diner felt less like the site of something that had almost gone terribly wrong and more like the site of something that had against considerable odds gone exactly right. Leo lowered his hands from his face.
His eyes were wet and he wasn't embarrassed about it. He looked at Mike Callahan, who was sitting in booth nine, exactly as he had been sitting since before any of this began with his coffee and his patty melt and his gray eyes and his coat simple, old, and unbroken. "I don't know how to thank you," Leo said. Mike picked up his coffee.
"Go to Stockton," he said. "Hold your daughter. That's all the thanks I need." Harold's eggs were good. Nobody said so out loud because the room still had too much residual electricity for a compliment about eggs to feel proportionate, but every plate came back clean and that was its own kind of review.