woke up early every morning and left the house and some of the emptiness of her absence behind. Although it followed him everywhere, it helped to be with people.
He read The Wave at the counter each morning, even though it was published only once a week. His mind would still wander from time to time to memories of the past and he missed many of the details of what he read. He took his time, reading and chatting with those who approached him. The bank didn’t open until 9:00 a.m. anyway. And he opened it.
Johnny Watson sauntered in, just home from Rehab. People always hoped the best for him, but had lost track of the number of times he’d gone away for help. The word around town was that his first two marriages had drowned in the sauce and his third was on life support.
Between benders one time, Joe had hired him to repaint the sign on the little cafe. When he finished, Johnny informed Joe that there had been a misspelling in the sign and he had corrected it. There had been an e missing, he said. It now read Joe’s Fine Dine-ing. The hyphen should have been there all along, Johnny had said.
Joe didn’t have the heart to tell him differently and paid him anyway. The past two years, he couldn’t count the times tourists had come in and told him the name was spelled wrong on the sign.
“Well, now you will remember us,” Joe always said. “Make sure you tell your friends when they come to town, to look for the cafe that doesn’t know how to spell, but they sure do have good food and wonderful hospitality!”
It had worked. People had started taking pictures of it and sending it on to others on their cell phones. Joe’s Fine Dine-ing had become a bit of an icon.
Now, because business had increased by thirty percent since the sign painting, Johnny Watson and his brother Hobe, who had held the ladder for the now infamous painting affair, got free coffee when they came in each morning. Joe had set no time limit on it, so Johnny and Hobe assumed it was a “for life” kind of thing.
Here and now, just after 6:30 in the morning, the diner was mercifully devoid of tourists and the townspeople had their meeting place back for a little while. For a few precious moments, people could just be who they are together.
Susanna Kappos always arrived at 6:43 a.m. A dark-haired Greek beauty in her thirties, she was recently widowed. When Nicholas was alive, he’d make the coffee and she always served him breakfast right at 6:43 a.m. It had started one morning when Nick noticed that they had sat down to breakfast at that same time now for three mornings in a row. From then on, it was ritual. 6:43 a.m. No sooner—no later. If she arrived a little early at Joe’s, she sat in her car until it was time. Now that he was gone, killed in a car accident, it helped her feel close to him, and at the same time, she got herself out of the house, same as Wendell.
Meanwhile, she had thrown herself into her work. With the help of an improving economy, the Argostoli Art Gallery, named after Susanna’s home town on an island off Greece, had begun to thrive. Lately, she’d had to hire on some help.
Still, life felt more vacant than not for her. Nothing could fill up the hole in her heart that Nick had left. You could work hard and be around people, nice people, and still in the end you ended up going home alone. A great sadness sometimes manifested itself on her face.
She’d brought Joe some Greek coffee one time and offered to supply him with enough for a year if he would serve it in the morning, along with cheese and yogurt. She’d have that and some olives and boiled eggs for breakfast along with orange juice, just what Nick and she had eaten together every morning of their short married life.
Joe named the new Greek breakfast plate, Susanna’s Special. It had proven to be a success, especially with the out-of-towners. Some of the morning locals had even departed from their usual order, at least once, just to please the beautiful young woman who seemed so unbearably sad.
Father Frank Callaghan, of Our Lady of the Harbor, was, by now, intensely engaged in conversation with Jeremy Woods, the new owner of De-light-full Bookshop, which boasted a coffee bar with free Wi-Fi. Soon, Lou Schofield, the mayor, and his wife Hope, a local teacher and artist, joined them in their booth.
Then, the Rev Meriwether Starhawk, of the Mystical Waters Spiritual Community, appeared. She had a way of doing that. She came in so quietly that hardly anyone ever saw her actually come in the place. Lately, she’d been joining Susanna at her table.
Katye Puckett, the local free-spirited professor at Coast Range Community College, and one of the few people of color in the town, came in to get an Americano-to-go. She was soon hand-signaled over by Meriwether.
“I haven’t long.” she said. “I’ve got errands to run and papers to grade.”
Rev. Luther Hodges of the Always Sunny Free Will Holiness Church and the Reverend Wesley Harrington, Protestant Chaplain at Harbor View Hospital, showed up about ten after seven. Father Callaghan pulled a couple more chairs up to their table to accommodate them. It was crowded, but ecumenical.
There were more to come, including Johnny and Hobe, of course. Finally, the whole band of breakfast crew was there, minus one, by 7:30 a.m. Doc Bailey had been called to Harbor View Community Hospital for an emergency. People felt badly about their sentiments, but they hoped it was a tourist and none of their own.
Nobody ever saw Joe much. Some had never seen him. He was too busy in the back, cooking, organizing, and making sure everyone got their orders just as they wanted them. Even at other times when he’d come out to the dining room, he was a man of a few words. People paid attention when he spoke.
An enigmatic figure, people weren’t quite sure of his origins. He never clarified that mystery and they were content to leave it alone. They figured there must be something personal Joe was keeping to himself. They so respected him, that, if anybody started to gossip about it, they were immediately hushed.
A line of tourists would form at the front of Joe’s until about 9:00 a.m. when most of the locals would have gone home, or to work, or somewhere else. Joe could have made more money had he rushed them out for more volume; but Joe’s Fine Dine-ing was about more than being a business, especially from six-thirty to nine in the morning. For a while, a little community assembled there.
For now, the quiet hum of the refrigerators and other appliances in the cafe had been overrun by the chatter of the early morning voices as people sat in twos and threes and sometimes fours. The clatter of coffee cups and the tinkling of spoons and the aroma of cooking food and human kindness went on and on in one of the few places left on the face of the earth, it seemed, where, as Joe said, “When you come inside, you are who you are, and if you have any, you leave your pretensions along with your self-importance outside.”
With its white clapboard exterior, red trimmed bay windows, and simple wooden front stoop, Joe’s Fine Dine-ing could well have been from another time. And perhaps it was. But it didn’t know it, so it just kept on being who it was. And when the people went inside, they weren’t so much from another time, as they were timeless.
Chapter 2
Nate Beard’s fishing boat, the Far from Home, held twenty-five passengers. Today, he had to leave seven behind. A few years ago, a competitor had gone out of business when his boat capsized with three passengers too many on board. The Coast Guard saved all but three. The offender had a couple of lawsuits hanging over his head and had lost his license. If Nate had ever been tempted to board extra passengers, there was always that unfortunate event to remember.
A couple of years ago his wife, Carrie Lynn, had divorced him and taken their two children to Vermont. Actually, it was the other
