YOU JUST NEVER KNOW
The clink of cutlery against stoneware cut through the quiet hush of early morning. The Pie Plate was about a third full, pretty standard for a Tuesday morning in the summer, but Brenda knew it was a precursor to what would likely be a busy day. She'd seen the forecast, and when the temperature spiked, people took shelter in the diner, it seemed.
Even people fleeing their home countries and taking up residence in hers, hiding from their governments, usually with a bundle of state secrets tucked under one arm. You just never knew when that door opened who would walk through. Brenda loved that about this place, in addition to the air conditioning and the hot turkey sandwich.
The door opened and Brenda watched as the couple she thought of as her two favorite regulars came in. Scarecrow and Mrs King, she always called them in her head, though Amanda wasn't Mrs King anymore and Lee didn't get out in the field as much as he had. Certainly not in the last few months, anyway. He still had an angry red welt over one brow and she knew he was on medical leave — because he'd told her himself, and then Francine Desmond had.
It had delighted her from the first to realize that one of the country's top spies liked to come in and eat a slice of pecan pie by himself in the corner booth every Tuesday night. When she'd discovered it, by accident, she'd started to move her shifts around a little. She wanted to understand what brought him there, and whether he was working or just taking five. Taking five, it turned out, and once she realized that she moved her shifts back and left him alone.
And then after a year or so his patterns changed. He brought this woman with him — a woman who had dark hair and bright eyes and whose face glowed when she smiled at him. Brenda knew they weren't dating. She wasn't sure how she knew it but she could tell — there was something about the way they kept space between them but clearly wanted to be close together. She served them coffee and pie and watched them snatch their hands apart when she approached the table.
Brenda knew how to work the grapevine, and she knew Scarecrow had a reputation as a player. So this woman who came to the diner with him was a surprise, until Brenda dug around a little and discovered he had a partner, a divorced mom of two who was turning the Agency on its ear.
And him too, it seemed.
After he brought Amanda in a few times things changed between them. They came in later, with the post-movie crowd, and their hands migrated across the table, toward each other, like two magnets. Brenda knew shop talk when she saw it and the conversations they were having were not shop talk. This wasn't like when Lee came in with Billy Melrose, either. Then, he still had a little of the Scarecrow about him. When he and Amanda came in he was just a regular guy, out with a woman he liked.
Brenda didn't always work the late Saturday shift. In fact, she'd been there long enough she didn't have to do it ever if she didn't want to. But it was a funny thing — she liked it. She liked watching all the couples come in on their dates, the families stopping in for dinner. The alternative was sitting at home alone or typing up a report in the subterranean office downtown, and neither of those held much appeal. And to be honest, some of her contacts came in on those nights, too. Saturday nights and Sunday mornings were brisk for Brenda.
Now, she watched from the coffee station as Lee steered Amanda towards a booth, his hand resting on the small of her back. Steering was the wrong word, she thought. He wasn't directing her. She knew where to go. They always sat in one of three tables if they were open, unless they came in with Dotty and the boys.
When Amanda came in by herself she sat at a two-top near the back that was quiet but had a good view of the dining room. She usually came in alone early in the morning, after dropping one of her sons off somewhere, and Brenda suspected she and Lee had just done that now. Camp, she remembered suddenly. Dotty had mentioned it when she'd delivered her latest cookie order. "Phillip's working as a counselor," Dotty had told her, "he'll be gone the entire summer."
Amanda came in on her own for work, too, which was a new thing. She had a new role at the Agency, an interagency liaison of sorts, and sometimes she came to connect with Brenda about past cases. When she came in for those meetings she timed them to coincide with the end of Brenda's shift, and they took their coffees outside and sat on a bench across the street. Ralph thought it was weird but Brenda just told him she liked to get out for some fresh air once in a while before her drive home, and he was apathetic enough to accept her excuse at face value.
Ralph never questioned anything, which was both handy and baffling. "He doesn't have a curious bone in his entire body," she'd told Amanda once. "He asked me the other week why I think we get so many Russian customers and I told him there was a group for newcomers that met at the community center. And he just nodded and that was it. There is no community center. They tore it down to build that professional building last year but Ralph has no idea."
Amanda's forehead wrinkled at that. "Are you sure? Doesn't he suspect at least a little?"
"Amanda, he is dull as anything. I swear to God. It's the top reason I set up shop here."
She felt mean about how she thought of Ralph sometimes. He wasn't a bad boss, not really. He let her do whatever she wanted as long as she showed up for her shifts and the till balanced at the end of the night. He trusted her, and she tried to honor that trust by not getting the place shot up and steering her more unsavory contacts to the truck stop off the highway. For the most part she'd been successful, though there had been what her section chief referred to as The Vavilov Incident, which he'd had to have local police explain away as a botched robbery. Brenda had cracked open the till drawer herself, as the officer in charge watched askance from the vestibule, which was littered with shattered glass. Scarecrow had been in the thick of that one, and deeply annoyed that his favorite diner wasn't as squeaky clean as he'd always thought.
He got over it, though. She had a feeling Amanda had coached him a little. And the pie really was good. At any rate he'd made a roundabout suggestion that they feed each other information now and then, in addition to pie.
Pie Plate pie was delicious, but Brenda never ate it. She was glad to see Dotty's cookies added to the pastry case because she had a minimal sweet tooth and Dotty made a cookie that was the perfect size. They usually had some salty element, like peanuts or even pretzels baked right in. She'd made one with chocolate and chili that Brenda had really liked but it hadn't sold as well as the others, so Dotty had struck it off the rotation. When she made it for catering jobs she set aside a few for Brenda, though, and sometimes Amanda brought them tucked into her purse in a little white paper bag.
"They're an acquired taste," Brenda would say. "Like me."
Now, Brenda picked up her coffee pot and headed over to their table, stopping to fill cups as she did. Lee and Amanda had settled into their seats and were laughing over something, their hands joined across the table the way they always were now. Amanda's diamond ring caught the light, a little sunbeam in the dining room.
"You're in early," she said, filling their cups.
"We just dropped the boys at the bus for camp," Amanda said, sighing a little.
"For the whole summer?"
"Practically," Amanda said. "Seven weeks." She looked across the table at her husband, and Brenda saw the dimple in his cheek, just for a moment.
"Does that mean we'll see more of you or less of you?" Brenda asked, smirking.
"More, probably," Amanda said, just as Lee said, "Less, definitely." They laughed.
"Knowing us we'll spend it neck-deep in work," Amanda continued.
"We'd better not," Lee countered, letting go of her hand to slouch in his seat. "I plan on taking it easy this summer."
Brenda snorted out a laugh before she could stop herself. "Good luck," she said, wryly. And then Lee's eyes gleamed, and he braced herself.
"Speaking of kids," he said, "how are your four doing?"
He said it just loud enough that the couple in the table beside them could hear.
Brenda had invented the kids as an act of desperation, a few weeks into her job at The Pie Plate. She'd needed to get away in a hurry and the one of the other waitresses would never switch, and so she'd blurted out that her son Carson had the stomach flu and she couldn't possibly leave him. There was just no one else to look after him and the other three were too young to be trusted with a sick sibling.
"You've never mentioned kids before," the other waitress said over the phone.
"Well they're old enough to be left alone but not old enough to look after someone." And so Karen, Todd, and Theresa were born. That night she'd gone down to her poky little desk and added the kids to the notes she kept about her cover. She did that every time she added a detail, which wasn't very often. She liked to keep their profiles lean.
"They're fine, thanks," she said to Lee now. "Heading to band camp next week."
"You got them in!" Amanda said, her eyes twinkling with glee. She bit her lip to keep from laughing. She and Brenda had concocted the band camp story over coffee a few weeks before; Amanda had given her just enough detail for it to be authentic.
"It took six months of tips, but they're all going."
"You're gonna miss them." Amanda said.
Brenda shook her head. "Not as much as you might think. Theresa's really struggling with the French horn."
"It's a difficult instrument," Lee said, his eyes twinkling. "Or so I hear."
Brenda drew out her order pad. "You have no idea." She paused. "The usuals?"
They both nodded, and she jotted down the order and tucked her pad back into her apron. She didn't need to ask. She would have loved to slide into the booth with them and talk about the crazy week she'd had — the ex-Romanian official who had made a series of bizarre demands in exchange for information, and then stiffed her with his bill, the State Department colleague who'd thought he could score a free burger under the guise of a 'performance review' — but her section was filling up now and she could see the woman at the next table beginning to fidget.
"Enjoy your peace and quiet," she said, sliding her waitress mask back into place. "Just wave if you want a refill and I'll be back with breakfast in a few."
Amanda gave her a warm smile. Lee dipped his head in acknowledgement. And then she stepped away and they were absorbed in each other again, even as they were stirring cream and sugar into their coffees. Even as the world kept moving around them.
The little bell over the door rang again as someone else came in, and Brenda paused for a second to see if it was another regular or someone new. After all, anyone could stop in on a summer Tuesday morning.
You just never knew.
