CHAPTER 1
Piper Williams stood at the end of the grocery store aisle, her hand poised over the display of baked beans - a nice, cheap dinner option - and stared at the young couple in the dairy section at the back of the store.
They were obviously in love and around her age, twenty-five years old. The man was a good bit taller than the woman, and he had his arm around her waist as they looked at milk options. She stared up at him with an adoring look on her face and then went up on her tip toes as he planted a kiss on her lips.
Ugh. Why had she never experienced that? She was at a stage in life when love should’ve been reserved for her too, but instead she was living in a tiny South Georgia town working at a place called The Greasy Spoon - which wasn’t a misnomer - and raising her seven year old son, Lucas, alone.
She loved her son, and he had changed her life in so many ways - helped her grow up, become independent. But it would be so nice to have someone to lean on. Someone to hug her at the end of a hard day. Someone to tend to her when she was sick. Someone to take on the stresses of life so she didn’t have to shoulder the burdens alone.
She still had her mother, who had raised her alone too, but she was barely getting by herself. Piper hated that she had repeated the patterns of her mother - getting pregnant by a guy who obviously didn’t care one bit about her.
Piper’s father had been her mother’s high school sweetheart and captain of the football team. Seemed like an all-American guy until he just abandoned her mother, Nancy, and Piper. She hadn’t seen her father since she was three years old, but social media had proved that he was a well-to-to businessman with four kids now. Apparently, she hadn’t mattered to him.
That nagging feeling of being unwanted had followed her since childhood as she looked for love in all the wrong places. First, there had been Bruce Bailer who guided her through her “first time” in the back of his red pickup truck. Then, there had been Lucas’s father, Johnny.
Johnny had started off as a fairly good boyfriend, bringing her flowers and candy and taking her on movie dates. He was a year older than Piper and had quit school before graduating. He had a darker side, and when she learned she was pregnant with his child at seventeen years old, she knew he wouldn’t make a good father. Still, she had to tell him that she was pregnant. His answer was to scream at her and burn rubber as he took off in his truck.
It had been seven years, and he had never looked back. Never checked on her or Lucas. And the pattern was being repeated.
Piper sighed as she thought about all of it. The woman in the young couple turned around and stared at her.
“Can we help you?” she said with a look of disgust on her face.
“Um, no. Sorry. I was just…” Piper stammered as she tried to figure out a logical explanation that didn’t make her sound like a deranged stalker.
“Get your own man!” the woman yelled as she pulled her boyfriend’s hand.
Piper’s heart was racing. The woman had assumed she was trying to flirt with her boyfriend, and that definitely wasn’t the case. The guy wasn’t even her type - too tall and gangly.
“Mommy, can I get this?” Lucas said from behind her, bouncing a ball he’d found misplaced on the shelf.
“No, honey, not today.” She resumed looking at the cans of baked beans, trying to find the cheapest one possible. Sometimes she had a coupon, but today she had run out of her small apartment without her coupon binder.
“Why not? Brian has one of these, and they are so cool!” he said, continuing to bounce the ball so high that it was in danger of going over to the next aisle. Piper caught it in mid air and knelt down to face her son. His white blond hair reminded her of Johnny, and that was not a welcome thought.
“Because Mommy just can’t buy this today, okay?”
“Are we poor?” he asked. It was an innocent question really, but it made her heart clench up in her chest. He had never asked that question before.
“Where did you learn that word?” she asked softly, hoping no one around them heard the conversation.
“Billy at school said my shoes had holes in them, so we must be poor. Everybody laughed,” he said quietly, looking down at his favorite pair of sneakers. It was true that his shoes had holes in them, and that made her feel like a terrible mother. How could she send him to school to get bullied about all the things he didn’t have?
“No, we’re not poor. You know why?” she said, brushing a stray piece of his moppy hair away from his eyes. “Because we have each other. And I promise, I’m working so hard to make things better for us, okay?”
He nodded his head, and she hoped that it was settled in his seven year old mind but she knew it wasn’t. He understood that Billy was right. They were poor. But if she had to fight tooth and nail, her son would have new shoes before the day was over.
Piper sat in her favorite chair in her mother’s tiny mobile home. It was made of orange crushed velvet, like it fell out of a time warp from the 1970s. But she loved the old thing. It didn’t have much cushion left to it, but her mother would just unzip it and stuff in old clothes from time to time.
“I just felt so bad,” Piper said to her mother, Nancy, as they sat having a cup of coffee while Lucas played with blocks in the back bedroom. “I have to get another job or something.”
“Piper, how are you going to do that? You barely get any sleep just working at the diner. How many hours are you picking up there now?”
“I did sixty last week.”
“Good Lord! You’re going to get sick working so much,” Nancy said as she stood to pour herself another cup of coffee. It was a rare day that the two women got to sit together and have some free time. Piper was enjoying her Sunday off, but the constant state of anxiety over finances was always looming overhead.
“I can’t help it, Momma. What am I supposed to do? You know what it’s like…”
“Yeah, I sure do,” Nancy said as she sat back down. She looked older than her years. At only forty-two years old, she looked tired. Her face had deep wrinkles from years of hard living. Her mousy platinum blond hair did nothing for her appearance and set off her overly bronzed skin. Nancy loved laying out in the son - and smoking her cigarettes - but it had wreaked havoc on her looks, for sure.
“How did you get by when I was a kid?”
“I did anything I had to do. I didn’t have a choice,” she said, looking past Piper into the yard through the window behind her. She seemed to be searching her past for all the things she’d done, and by the look on her face she wasn’t proud of some of them. Piper decided not to dig further.
“Well, that’s what I’m going to do. Lucas is going to break this cycle, Momma. He’s going to be something big one day if I have to break my back making it happen,” she said as she stood and put her mug in the sink. “Right now, I’m going over to the thrift store to get my boy a pair of shoes. I’ve got a few bucks in my wallet,” she said with a sad smile.
Nancy stood up and pulled some change out of her purse and handed it to Piper.
“Here. It’s not much, but maybe it’ll help,” she said, her raspy smoker’s voice taking away the once beautiful lilting quality that her voice used to have.
“Thanks,” Piper said as she hugged her mother. The two women had a strange relationship at times, but her mother had always been there which was a heck of a lot more than she could say for her father.
Lucas danced around in his “new” shoes from the thrift store, showing them to everyone in the diner. He hadn’t taken them off in two days, almost since the moment she paid for them. They weren’t anything special, but to Lucas they were the whole world right now. Plus, she’d had enough left over to buy him a ball at the thrift store too.
“Sorry, Clara,” Piper whispered to her boss, a heavyset woman with fire engine red hair that was styled into a beehive from the 1970s. “My mom should be by to pick him up any second. Her boss kept her a little late.”
Clara raised her painted-on eyebrows. “Piper,” she said in her thick Southern drawl, “this can’t keep happening. I ain’t got nowhere for that boy to stay in this diner. And he can’t keep dancing around the place like this.”
“Lucas!” Piper called in a loud whisper. “Put the sugar packets back!”
Clara was definitely not amused. But Piper didn’t have the money for a real babysitter or daycare, and it was fall break from his elementary school so her only option was either not taking her shifts or getting her mother to help out. Unfortunately, her mother was barely making ends meet herself and had picked up extra shifts too.
“Piper, maybe it’s better if you take him home…” Clara started to say, but thankfully her mother walked in the door just in the nick of time.
“She’s here,” Piper said to Clara. “He goes back to school in a couple of days…”
“But what are you going to do at Thanksgiving and Christmas? This is a problem.”
“I’ll figure something out. I promise,” she said before she trotted off and took Lucas’s hand. He happily ran out into the parking lot with Nancy and climbed into her beat up little car which sputtered and spewed smoke all the way down the street.
Piper went back to work, walking from table to table checking on her customers. It wasn’t her favorite job in the world, but it paid most of her bills and allowed her to meet some amazing people.
Her favorite among them was Lola. She came in everyday, even on Sundays, and always at the same time - 11:15 AM. Never earlier, never later. When she’d asked Lola why she came in at that time, she said it was the perfect time to come because the breakfast crowd was gone and the lunch crowd wasn’t there yet, so she could get her favorite table in the corner and get out before the lunch rush.
Lola was an elderly woman who seemingly had no family left, or at least no one local. She was petite with snow white hair, but her personality was larger than life. Lola had regaled her with tales from her younger years many times, including when she was a showgirl for a brief stint in Las Vegas and when she had a small part in an Elvis Presley movie.
“Good morning, Miss Lola,” Piper said with a smile as she walked over to the table. There was no need to take her order as Lola had a standing order with the cook that was already being prepared. Everyday, Ernie the cook would start her meal at 11:10 because he knew Lola would be walking through the door any minute.
“Well, good morning, Piper,” she said with a smile. She had to be in her late eighties now, but Piper wouldn’t have dared to ask her age. “I saw little Lucas running out to the car. He’s getting so big!”
“Yes, ma’am, he is,” Piper said. She sat down across the table from her, which Clara allowed only because Lola expected it and would pitch a fit if Piper didn’t sit down.
“And he had some new shoes on?”
“You noticed? Yes. Those are Power Ranger sneakers. Very popular with seven year olds.”
“Well, they’re very snazzy.” The old woman took a sip of her coffee and smiled. “Times are tough?”
She asked it as a question instead of a statement. Piper nodded. “Always. But we make it through.” She tried to put a positive spin on it, but sometimes it was hard.
Lola coughed, and Piper could hear congestion in her chest. She’d been doing that a lot more lately. “You okay, Miss Lola?” Piper asked, reaching across the table and touching her arm.
“Oh, of course. Just getting a little long in the tooth,” she said, as she always did. It was a phrase Piper had heard her whole life.
“But you don’t look a day over twenty-one,” Piper said with a chuckle.
“Well, I feel a day over one hundred and one,” Lola quipped. She was a funny woman with a keen wit, and Piper hoped to be as sharp at her age one day… if she lived that long.
Ernie walked Lola’s food to the table - one egg over easy, plain grits and a piece of toast with grape jelly. She loved having breakfast for lunch, and she never changed her order. In fact, Ernie said she’d been ordering that for the nine years he’d been there, and probably long before that.
Piper had only been working at The Greasy Spoon for four of those years, but the place had been open almost thirty years, passing down from generation to generation in Clara’s family.
It was a small town, and everyone knew everyone else. Piper had grown up there, gone to school there and never visited anywhere else except one trip to the Gulf Coast in Alabama when she was a kid. Her school took a field trip to study marine animal life, and she was lucky enough to get to go.
And although she loved many of the people in her town, she was sick and tired of seeing the same things everyday. She wanted to get out, see the world, meet new people - experience something other than the red clay roads of her tiny town.
Lola bit into her toast and groaned. “I swear Ernie does some kind of magic over this toast. Ernie, you’re a genius!” she called, as she always did. He smiled and waved, bowing slightly, as he always did.
Everyday was the same for Piper. The same people, the same job, the same struggle.
“Well, Miss Lola, I’d better go wipe down my tables before the lunch rush,” she said, as she said everyday, of course. But Lola threw a kink in the monotony by responding.
“Piper, have I ever told you why I’m all alone out here in this one traffic light town?” Piper shook her head and giggled at the description.
“No, ma’am, you sure haven’t.”
“It was an accident, really. My husband and I lived our whole marriage in the north Georgia mountains. Little town called Whiskey Ridge. Heard of it?”
“No, I can’t say that I have.”
“Well, it’s a beautiful place. You should visit it sometime. Anyway, when Al died almost fifteen years ago now - fell off a roof, God rest his soul - I eventually came down here to Minnsville to live with my sister.”
“But didn’t you have kids?”
“I had one daughter. But she was busy herself, traveling all over the world with her husband…” Her voice trailed off as if she story was painful, and then it dawned on Piper that her daughter was probably deceased since she never talked about her. “She and her husband were killed in a plane crash about eighteen years ago.”
Piper could see tears in Lola’s eyes, but she quickly wiped them away. “I’m so sorry, Miss Lola. That must have been so hard. I can’t imagine the pain of losing a child.” She never wanted to imagine that.
“They say time heals all wounds, but you know I don’t think that’s true. I still miss Diane everyday. She was the apple of my eye. That’s what I always called her. To lose my husband and my only child within a few years of each other… well, it almost killed me.”
“How did you get through that?” Piper genuinely wanted to know the secret to pulling herself up by the bootstraps and overcoming the obstacles that seemed to be blocking her path every day of her life.
“I had to. My daughter had a son, and he came to live with me. Cam was just twelve when his parents died. They lived in Nashville at the time, and that boy was so smart and sweet. I really thought he might be a preacher one day, but he was gifted in writing.”
“And that’s what he does now?”
“Well, kind of. He owns a publishing company in New York City of all places.” She crinkled her nose up like she smelled something bad and sighed.
“You don’t like New York City? It looks like a fabulous place to me.” Anywhere but Minnsville looked fabulous about right now.
“I don’t like all that hustle and bustle and shenanigans,” she said shaking her head. “And Cam doesn’t belong up there either. He’s a country boy at heart, whether he wants to admit it or not.”
“Does he have a family?”
“No. Worries me that he’ll spend his life alone. He’s so focused on business that he’s letting his life slip away, I’m afraid. In fact, he hasn’t been here to see me in two years now. I talk to him quite regularly on the phone, but he’s always so anxious sounding…” She’d never seen Lola look so concerned.
“Miss Lola, I’m sure you helped raise a fine man. He’ll figure it out if he’s that smart. Don’t you worry.”
“Thank you, sweetie. And don’t you worry either. One day, your luck is going to turn around when you least expect it. I’ve found that some of my greatest blessings came out of my biggest tragedies.”
It was a weird thing to say, but Piper just smiled and gave Lola a quick hug before welcoming a new set of patrons into the diner. She looked back one more time to see Lola watching her, and then she went back to taking orders.
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