The Last Year of Wanting

Nana Webb turned 41 on a Tuesday, and she remembered it because it was the day she stopped making excuses for herself. Twenty-one years waiting tables at the Seagrape, the same coffee, the same tourists, and the same three booths. She stood in front of the mirror that morning in her rented room down the road, still in her underwear, her brown skin still smooth but gray coming in at her edges, and she heard herself say out loud, "You are forty-one years old, girl, and you are waiting on what, exactly?"

She didn't have an answer. Her mama used to say if you can't answer a question, that usually is the answer. So Nana made herself a promise before she put on her work uniform, the one with the little seagrape embroidered on the pocket. She promised that this year, the last one before the big 4-2, she would not let another twelve months go by waiting for something to happen to her. If she wanted a thing, she was going to reach out and take it, or at least try, once, like a person with a spine.

She'd held to it about half the year, which was better than her diet record. Then the renovation crew showed up in the spring and Philippe Fleming walked through the door of the half-open diner with a nail bag on his hip, and every promise she'd made got a whole new meaning.

* * *

The crew came in at six forty-five most mornings, boots loud on the tile she'd mopped twenty minutes earlier. There were eight of them regular, plus the apprentice, Bradly, who was twenty-eight and tried too hard and always ordered the big breakfast and never finished the grits. Nana liked them okay. They tipped decent and they didn't whistle at her, which by her age she counted as a kind of respect, though some mornings she wasn't sure she wanted respect as much as she wanted the whistling.

Philippe came in last, always. He'd lock up the gang box out front and walk through the doors and the whole room changed temperature, or that was how it felt to her anyway. Forty-four years old, a big pale Cajun out of Lafayette with forearms like rope, gray coming in at his temples in a way that looked earned instead of sad. He'd sit at the counter, not the booths, and he'd say, "Morning, Nana," in that low voice, and she'd say, "Coffee's fresh," which was a lie every single day because the pot was forty minutes old, and he'd drink it anyway and never once call her on it.

She watched his hands more than anything. A carpenter's hands tell you everything. Philippe's hands didn't fuss. He'd hold a coffee cup steady and flat, turn it a quarter turn when he set it down, always the same. On the job she could see him through the pass-through window when she refilled the creamer, the way he'd run a thumb along a board he'd just planed, reading it like braille, deciding without any drama whether it was good enough. Bradly would be over there asking five questions and Philippe would answer with his hands, point here, hold that, and the kid would nod like he'd been given scripture.

One morning he was fitting a doorframe in what used to be the motel bar, right across the lobby from the diner. The bar was going to be reopened eventually, Bertha said, once the owner found the money. Right now it was bare studs and plywood and dust hanging in the light. Nana stood at the pass-through with the creamer in her hand longer than any creamer needed, watching him. He saw her watching. He always saw her. That was the other thing about him. Most men her age, you caught them looking and they flinched like a kid with his hand in the till. Philippe didn't flinch. He'd look right back, one second, two, and then go back to his board like nothing happened, and Nana would walk off with her heart going like she'd climbed the stairs two at a time.

"How's that frame coming, Mr. Fleming?" she asked through the window one day, just to have a reason to talk.

"Coming," he said. He stepped back and looked at it, tilted his head. "You know what's wrong with most people, Nana? They don't check their work twice. They set it and walk away and hope."

"That's how I do grits," she said.

That got a laugh out of him, a real one, low in the chest. "I doubt that very much."

"Well, don't. I've been fooling this whole town for twenty-one years."

He looked at her then, longer than two seconds, and she had to go check on booth three, which was empty, and she knew it was empty, and she went and checked it anyway.

* * *

Bertha Compton had run the diner side of the Seagrape since before Nana started, and she was fifty-five and built like a chicken coop and she missed nothing. She caught Nana at the dish pit that same afternoon, elbow deep in the rinse water, and she planted herself there with her arms crossed.

"I saw that," Bertha said.

"Saw what?"

"You standing at that window like a cat at a fish tank. That man is trouble, Nana Webb."

"He's a carpenter, Bertha. He's putting up a doorframe."

"I know what he is. He's a carpenter with a divorce behind him and a job that ends in October, and you are a grown woman who hasn't been on a date since the Bush administration, and I know how this story goes." Bertha picked up a towel and started folding it, which she always did when she was about to lecture. "These renovation men come through every few years. They're friendly, they're pretty, they leave when the drywall's done. Meanwhile I've got a diner to run and a girl to keep out of the ditch."

"It's nothing, Bertha. We talk about grits."

"You don't talk about grits with your face doing what your face was doing."

Nana pulled her hands out of the water and dried them on the towel Bertha was holding, which made Bertha hold still, which was the point. "Look," Nana said. "I hear you. I do. But I'm forty-one years old and I'm not made of glass. If I want to stand at a window and look at a doorframe, I can stand at a window and look at a doorframe."

"That's not what you're looking at."

"It's what I said I was looking at."

Bertha looked at her a long moment, then hung the towel over the rack and shook her head. "Twenty years I've watched you be sensible. Don't go getting unsensible on me now, right when I need you for the season."

"I've never been sensible a day in my life and you know it. I've just been quiet about it."

Bertha took the folded towels and went toward the register, then stopped and turned around. "He any good at talking, at least?"

"Bertha."

"I'm asking for science."

"He fixed the wobble in booth two with a matchbook," Nana said. "You figure out what that tells you."

Bertha laughed and went off to the register, and Nana stood at the dish pit feeling like a woman who'd just confessed to something, because she had.

* * *

The diner emptied out early that Thursday, because there was nothing to empty. Season was over, the beach traffic was gone, and the only customers left were the crew and the occasional snowbird who hadn't gotten the memo. By seven the parking lot had two trucks and Bertha's Buick. Bertha left at seven thirty. "Lock the side door behind the crew when they're done," she said, "and don't stay past nine, it's not in your hours and you know it."

The crew worked late that night. Something about the inspection Friday morning, the inspector was coming at eight and Philippe wanted the bar's rough framing buttoned up and squared away first. So they ran cords and radios and saws into the evening, and Nana cleaned around them, and around nine Bradly came in for the last of the sweet tea and said, "Philippe says go on home, he'll lock the side door, he's got his own key."

"You sure?"

"That's what he said. He's particular about the lock anyway."

Nana looked at the clock. Twenty past nine. Bertha's voice in her head said don't stay past nine, it's not in your hours, and the promise she'd made on her birthday said something else entirely. She wiped the counter one more time, which took no time at all, then hung up her apron and walked out through the lobby, past the bare bar, and there was Philippe with a level in his hand and a flashlight on the floor throwing his shadow up the studs, and he straightened up when he saw her.

"Bradly didn't tell you?" he said. "I told him to tell you to go home."

"He told me. I'm going." She didn't move. "Inspection's at eight?"

"At eight." He looked at the frame he'd built, then at her. "You been here since six this morning?"

"Since five forty-five. Somebody's got to make the grits."

"That's a long day."

"It's the same day it's been for twenty years." She heard herself say it and winced a little, because it came out more honest than she'd loaded it. Philippe picked up his flashlight and didn't say anything for a second, and the sawdust drifted through the light between them, and Nana stood there in her uniform with her car keys in her hand, thirty years old in her head and forty-one in the mirror, deciding.

"Go on home, Nana," he said, but he said it quiet, as if he hoped she'd argue.

"I'm going."

She still didn't move. The flashlight buzzed a little on the plywood. Somewhere out in the lot a truck door slammed and Bradly's taillights swung past the plastic sheeting over the window.

"Good luck at eight," she said finally.

"Thanks. Go home."

"I'm going. Stop saying it!"

She went, and she sat in her car in the lot for a full minute with her keys in the ignition, not turning them, watching his shadow move on the plastic like it was some kind of show she'd paid for. Then she went home and didn't sleep worth a damn.

* * *

It was the next day, Friday afternoon, after the inspection passed and the lunch rush had come through and gone, that he came into the diner alone. The crew had knocked off and gone to the Zapata gas station for beer and scratch-offs, the way they did, but Philippe came in by himself and sat at the counter, at the second stool, the one right in front of where she worked.

"Coffee," he said. "Unless the grits ran out."

"The grits never run out. The grits are eternal." She poured him a cup. "Inspection go all right?"

"Passed. Man barely looked at the bar. Drove me crazy