Cameron counted the singles in his wallet on the drive back to Magnolia Ridge. Seventeen dollars, a gas receipt, and a business card for a bail bondsman he'd never use. The heat had not broken in three weeks. His truck's AC unit wheezed like it was giving up on life somewhere around the Arkansas state line.
The shop sat at the end of Main Street, wedged between the feed store and a place that used to be a barbershop. He'd inherited it from his grandfather along with the welding equipment, the overdue property taxes, and a stubbornness that had served three generations of Steel men. The sign out front, "Steel Fabrication Repair," needed a new coat of paint. The building needed a new roof. Cameron needed a miracle.
He parked in the alley and sat for a minute, listening to the engine tick itself cool.
The shop door stuck. He had to put his shoulder into it the way he had since he was twelve years old, following his grandfather around with a welding helmet two sizes too big for his head. The smell hit him first: machine oil, old metal, and the particular staleness of a building that had been closed for six days while he drove to Little Rock and back, looking for work that did not exist.
He turned on the overhead lights. Two of them buzzed. One flickered like it was trying to send a message in Morse code.
The answering machine on the workbench had six messages. He played them in order, pencil stub ready.
"Cameron, this is Hoyt over at the lumber yard. Look, about that estimate we talked about, the board decided to go with someone else. Sorry, son. Give me a call when you can."
"Hey, Cameron, it's Preacher Jim. Wanted to remind you about the church fundraiser breakfast this Saturday. Biscuit duty. You in? Call me back."
"Cameron Steel, this is Della. I know you're probably screening my calls, but I need to talk to you about the insurance check. The check cleared, but the mortgage company is saying there's a, there's some kind of discrepancy. Call me. Please. We need to figure this out before it goes to collections. I'm at my sister's if you need to reach me."
He stopped the tape. He did not need to hear the other three.
Cameron sat on the tall stool beside the welding bench and looked at the space his grandfather had built. The press brake needed a new hydraulic line. The plasma cutter had been making noises that did not bode well. The floor was concrete with a crack that ran from the loading dock to the back door, and in that crack grew a determined weed that he had not had the heart to pull.
His grandfather's calendar still hung on the wall, turned to August of the previous year. The man's handwriting in the squares: "Order copper. Call Henderson about the gate." And in the square for August 14th, circled twice, "Cameron home."
He had been gone eight months. He had not felt particularly home.
The phone rang. Cameron let it ring twice, then picked up the receiver on the third ring because that was what his grandfather had always done.
"Cameron Steel, Steel Fabrication."
"Cameron, honey, it's Josie. Josie Callahan. Over at the diner."
He smiled for the first time that day. "Josie. How's Birdie?"
Josie made a sound somewhere between a laugh and a groan. "She is currently teaching my curtains how to spell. I wish I were making that up. Listen, I am calling because I am in desperate need of a favor, and I am prepared to beg."
Cameron leaned back on the stool. The wood creaked under his weight. "What kind of favor?"
"The heavy kind. The kind that involves lifting things that my arms and my lower back have opinions about."
"Define heavy."
"Forty-pound bags of flour. Cases of oil. A walk-in cooler motor that has been making a sound I do not want to describe on a recorded line."
Cameron looked at the ceiling. A water stain had spread since the last rain. "What's wrong with your usual help?"
"Danny Ray moved to Tupelo last month to be near his daughter's baby. And the high school boys who usually want summer cash have all decided this is the summer they want to go to band camp. I have been moving forty-pound bags of flour by myself for nine days, Cameron. Nine days. My spine is filing a complaint."
"I can come by tomorrow after I make some calls."
"No, I need help tonight. The delivery truck is coming at five-thirty, and if I do not have someone here to help me unload, those bags are going to sit on the loading dock until I can convince either my mother or God himself to come lift them, and frankly neither one of them is answering my calls."
He glanced at the shop. At the empty bench. At the calendar turned to August.
"I can be there in twenty minutes."
"Twenty minutes. You are a saint and a gentleman and I am going to repay you with a piece of coconut cream pie that will make you weep."
"Josie."
"Twelve minutes, actually. The truck is early."
He was already reaching for his keys. "I'll be there in twelve."
The drive to Callahan's Café took four minutes if he ran both stop signs on Magnolia Street, which he did, because at this hour in this town, the only witnesses were the pigeons on the courthouse lawn.
Josie had bought the old Stuckey's building eight years ago with a loan from her aunt, a paintbrush, and a stubbornness that matched her own. She had transformed it into a diner that smelled like coffee and bacon and whatever pie happened to be cooling on the counter. The lunch counter had red vinyl stools. The booths were upholstered in a pattern that might have been floral at one point in its life but had since surrendered to a general motif of cheerful wear.
The neon sign in the window said "EAT" in pink cursive. Half the letters worked.
Cameron parked in the alley and came through the back door. The kitchen was hot. A box fan in the window stirred air that had given up. Josie stood at the center island rolling out pie crust with the focus of a surgeon. Her auburn hair was piled on top of her head with a pencil stuck through it. There was flour on her cheek, her apron, and somehow, inexplicably, on the inside of her elbow.
"Cameron Steel, you are a sight for sore eyes and a weak lower back," she said without looking up. "Truck's in the alley. Driver's name is Gerald. Gerald is chatty. Do not engage Gerald or we will be here until the ice cream melts."
"I never engage."
"You have the gift of quiet, that is true. Grab that dolly by the door. Let's get this done before my daughter wakes up from her nap and decides she needs to help. Last time she helped, she alphabetized my spice rack and then asked me why I had two kinds of pepper."
He followed her out back. The delivery truck idled in the alley, its hazard lights blinking in the late afternoon heat. Gerald, a man of about sixty with a Delta hat and a belt buckle the size of a serving platter, waved from the cab.
"Afternoon. You the muscle?"
"I am whatever Josie needs me to be," Cameron said, which was the kind of line that got a snort out of Josie and a grin out of Gerald.
They made quick work of it. Cameron stacked. Josie checked the invoice. Gerald told them about his grandkids, his knee surgery, and the catfish he caught last weekend that was, by his estimation, the largest catfish ever recorded in the history of Leflore County.
"I am telling you, I had to wrestle that thing for forty-five minutes. Forty-five. My arms are still sore."
Cameron stacked the last case of oil and signed the invoice. Gerald waved and pulled out of the alley.
Josie stood in the doorway, fanning herself with the invoice. "Okay. Pie. Sit."
"I can't stay, Josie. I've got calls to make."
"You can make calls and eat pie. Those are not mutually exclusive activities. Sit down."
He sat at the counter. She cut him a slice of coconut cream and set it in front of him with a fork and a napkin. Then she poured him coffee without asking, because Josie Callahan's coffee was as much a part of the establishment as the stools or the neon sign, and accepting a cup was less a choice than a civic duty.
He ate. It was, as promised, exceptional.
"Now," Josie said, wiping her hands on her apron. "About your situation."
"My situation."
"Cameron, I have lived in this town for eight years and I have watched you walk into your grandfather's shop every morning at seven and lock the door every night at nine. I have also watched the sign out front start to peel and the parking lot stay empty. Della's been calling my phone asking if I've heard from you, which means you are not answering hers. And last Tuesday I saw you at the gas station on Fourth filling up a water bottle from the soft drink machine, which is the saddest thing I have ever witnessed, and I once watched a man try to pay for a haircut with a live chicken."
Cameron set down his fork. "Josie."
"I am not finished. The apartment above this café has been empty since Mrs. Wheaton moved into her daughter's place in Jackson. It has two bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen the size of a postage stamp, and a window that faces the magnolia tree in the side yard. It needs paint. It needs a man who knows how to fix things. And I need someone here in the mornings to help me with the heavy lifting before Birdie wakes up and before my regular staff shows up at six."
"What are you asking me?"
"I am asking you to take the apartment, help me lift things, fix whatever needs fixing in the building, and let me pay you what I can pay you, which is not what you deserve, but it is also not seventeen dollars and a bail bondsman card."
He looked at her. She looked at him. The fan turned. Somewhere in the back of the café, the radio was playing a station out of Greenwood that specialized in classic country and commercials for funeral homes.
"Why?" he asked.
"Because my daughter is seven and she has started asking me why the man from the welding shop never smiles anymore. And I do not have an answer for her that I am willing to give."
The pie turned to chalk in his mouth.
"I will fix your steps," Cameron said. "I will patch your roof. I will lift whatever you need me to lift. But I cannot move into your apartment."
"Why not?"
"Because I have a shop to run."
"Cameron, honey, your shop is not running. Your shop is sitting. I am not trying to be unkind. I am trying to keep a man who is worth saving from becoming another ghost in a building on Main Street."
The fan clicked. The neon sign buzzed. Outside, the sun started its slow slide toward the line of trees at the edge of town.
"One month," he said. "I will stay one month. I will keep the shop open in the afternoons. I will come up here at five and stay until Birdie leaves for school. Whatever you need."
Josie extended her hand across the counter. Her grip was firm, her palm dusted with flour.
"Deal."
They shook on it.
"Now finish your pie. I am going to go upstairs and find you some clean sheets, because the ones on the bed in there have been in the closet since the Clinton administration, and you deserve better than that."
The stairs to the apartment above Callahan's Café were steeper than Cameron remembered. Or maybe he had simply forgotten. It had been two years since Della had walked down them with a suitcase in each hand and the cat under her arm, and the wood had warped since then, the treads cupping in the middle, each step a small declaration of neglect.
The door at the top stuck. He bumped it with his hip, the way he had learned to do at his grandfather's house, and it swung open onto a kitchen that smelled like coffee and old curtains.
Josie was already in the hallway, pulling sheets out of a linen closet that looked like it had been organized by a woman who believed in labels the way some people believed in prayer.
"Bedroom is the first door on the left," she said. "Bathroom is the one with the rug that says Welcome in front of it. Towels are in the cabinet above the toilet. If the hot water takes a minute to come on, just let it run. The pipes are temperamental."
Cameron set his duffel bag down on the kitchen table. The linoleum was yellow and cracked in places, but it was clean. The whole apartment was clean, in the way that only a person who worked in food service could make a space clean, the counters wiped, the stove gleaming, the sink empty of dishes.
"You didn't have to do this," he said.
"Yes. I did." Josie tucked a fitted sheet under her arm. "You would have slept in that shop for another six months if I had let you. I have seen how you operate, Cameron Steel. You are the kind of man who will fix everyone else's problems until there is nothing left of you to fix yourself."
He opened his mouth to argue. He closed it.
She handed him the sheets. "Make yourself useful. The bed in there has a mind of its own. You have to talk it into holding a fitted sheet."
The bedroom was small. A double bed with a metal frame, a dresser with a mirror that had a crack running through one corner, a window that looked out over the back parking lot of the café. The curtains were the same ones Della had picked out at the hardware store in Greenwood, the ones with the tiny yellow flowers that she had insisted would cheer the place up.
He stood in the doorway for a moment, holding the sheets.
Then he went to work.
The bed took twelve minutes. The window took twenty. By the time Josie knocked at quarter past five to tell him Birdie was already asking when he was coming down for pancakes, he had the room looking like a place a person might actually want to sleep.
"How does it look?" he asked, stepping back into the hallway.
Josie leaned past him, peering through the door. She was quiet for a beat too long.
"It looks like a guest room," she said. "That's a compliment. Trust me."
Birdie was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, her backpack already on, her shoes untied. She had her mother's habit of tilting her head when she was thinking, and her father's habit of holding still when she was nervous.
"You fixed the bed," she said.
"I tried to."
"Did you talk to it?"
Cameron blinked. "What?"
"Mom says you have to talk to fitted sheets or they won't cooperate. Did you?"
"I might have said a few words."
Birdie considered this. "What kind of words?"
"The kind I am not going to repeat in front of a seven-year-old."
She smiled. It was the first smile he had seen from her that wasn't performed, and it landed somewhere in his chest like a coin dropping into a slot.
"Pancakes are ready," Josie called from the kitchen. "Birdie, shoes. Cameron, table."
The café didn't open until six, but the kitchen ran on its own clock. Josie had a griddle the size of a car hood and a batter bowl she had been using since the place opened. Birdie sat on a stool at the counter with her homework spread out in front of her, a worksheet about long vowels that she kept abandoning in favor of watching her mother flip pancakes with a wrist flick that defied physics.
Cameron set three places at the table. He was folding a napkin when the back door opened and Tilly Marsh walked in carrying a bucket of sunflowers and wearing a denim apron that had more paint on it than fabric.
"I heard a rumor," she announced, setting the sunflowers on the counter, "that Callahan's Café has acquired a new resident, and that resident has hands."
"Tilly," Josie said.
"I brought flowers. Don't 'Tilly' me. I also brought sympathy, and a casserole, and a strong opinion about a man who has been sleeping above his own welding shop for two years."
Cameron turned from the table. Tilly Marsh was five foot two and one hundred and ten pounds, and she had the energy of a woman who had once argued a city councilman into reversing a vote on a parking meter. She was also, he had to admit, one of the few people in town who could make him laugh without trying.
"Morning, Tilly."
"Morning yourself. How is Della?"
"Gone."
"Good riddance to bad luggage."
Josie shot her a look. Tilly ignored it.
"I am not here to gossip," Tilly said, untying her apron. "I am here to deliver flora, fauna, and carbohydrates. Josie, where is your vase? The one that does not leak?"
"Under the sink."
"And Cameron. How is the shop?"
He hesitated. "Running."
"Open hours?"
"Some afternoons."
Tilly looked at Josie. Josie looked at the griddle.
"Cameron," Tilly said, softer now. "I am going to say something, and you are going to let me say it, and then we are going to eat pancakes."
He set down the napkin.
"This town has lost three businesses in the last eighteen months. The feed store closed. The barber shop is hanging on by a thread. The bookstore is surviving on the stubbornness of a sixty-two-year-old woman named Emma Lou Pemberton who refuses to let Amazon win. If Steel Fabrication goes dark, that is four. And then Main Street is just a road that goes somewhere else."
The kitchen went quiet. The griddle hissed. Birdie looked up from her worksheet.
"I am not going dark," Cameron said.
"Then open your doors. Hire a kid. Paint the front. Whatever it is you need to do to make it look like a man who wants to be in business. Right now it looks like a man who wants to be left alone."
She said it without malice. That was the thing about Tilly. She could cut you in half and hand you back the better pieces and somehow you ended up thanking her for it.
"Tilly," Josie said.
"I am done."
"Good. Now come help me fold napkins."
Tilly tied her apron back on. She took a stack of white cloth napkins from the drawer and began folding them into triangles with the precision of a woman who had once considered a career in origami.
Cameron watched her for a moment. Then he went back to setting the table.
Birdie appeared at his elbow. She was holding a crayon.
"I made you something," she said.
She held out a piece of paper. On it was a drawing of a man with a square head and big hands, standing next to a building with a sign that said STEAL in dripping red letters.
"You spelled it wrong," he said.
"I know. Mom said I should let you fix it."
He took the crayon from her. He crossed out the A. He wrote an E.
"There," he said. "Better."
She beamed. She took the paper back and ran to show her mother.
Cameron watched her go. He stood in Josie's kitchen, in the early light, with a folded napkin in one hand and a crayon-smudged finger on the other, and he thought about Tilly's words, and his grandfather's words, and the words his own father had never said.
Then Birdie called from the other room, "Pancakes are getting cold, Mr. Cameron," and he went to sit down.
They ate pancakes at Josie's small kitchen table. The morning light came in through the window over the sink and fell across the syrup bottle and the stack of napkins Tilly had folded, and Birdie ate with both elbows on the table until Josie reminded her about manners twice.
"You got syrup in your hair, sweetheart," Josie said.
"Good. Now I match Mr. Cameron."
Cameron looked at her. He had a smear of something on his cheek from the first batch of croissants, the ones that had died so the second batch could live. He touched his face.
"Flour," he said.
"And egg," Birdie said. "And something else. I'm not sure what."
"Char," Josie said.
"That'll come out," Tilly said, which was a lie and everyone knew it.
Cameron reached for the orange juice. He poured a glass for Birdie without being asked. She took it with both hands and drank like someone who had just crossed a desert.
"You want to come to the shop with me after this?" Cameron asked her. "I've got some scrap metal in the back I've been saving. I could teach you to bend a wire."
Birdie's eyes went wide. She looked at her mother.
"Only if you ask nice," Josie said.
"Mr. Cameron," Birdie said, "may I please come to your shop and bend a wire."
"You may," he said.
She kicked her feet under the table. She kicked them so hard the table jumped and Josie's coffee rippled in her mug.
"Birdie Grace," Josie said.
"Sorry, Mama."
"Eat your pancake."
Birdie ate her pancake. She ate it the way she did everything, with her whole self, and when she was done she had more of it on her face than in her stomach, and Tilly reached over and wiped her chin with a napkin and said, "Child, you are a miracle and a mess."
"I know," Birdie said.
Josie laughed. It was a real laugh, the kind she hadn't laughed in a while, the kind that came from somewhere deep and surprised her on the way out. She covered her mouth with her hand.
Tilly saw. She didn't say anything. She just folded another napkin.
The bell on the front door of the café rang at seven forty-five.
Josie was behind the counter. She was pouring coffee for Hank Boudreaux, who had been a morning regular since before she bought the place and who tipped in quarters and told the same three stories in rotation. Tilly was serving eggs to a table of four women who met every Tuesday for what they called their "prayer and gossip breakfast," though the proportions varied. Birdie was at the kid table in the corner, drawing something with the crayons Josie kept in a tin for that purpose. Cameron was at the counter on a stool, eating a piece of toast he hadn't asked for, because Josie had put it in front of him without comment and he had understood that it was not optional.
The door opened.
A woman walked in.
She was tall and thin and dressed like she had somewhere better to be. Her hair was dark and pulled back. Her coat was expensive and cut clean. She stood in the doorway for a moment, looking around the café like she was reading a map of a place she had once known and was trying to remember how to navigate.
Cameron saw her.
His whole body changed.
It wasn't a big change. He didn't gasp or stand or make any sound. But the line of his shoulders shifted, the way a wire shifts when you put weight on it. His hand, the one holding the toast, went still.
Josie saw it too.
The woman saw Cameron.
"Hello, Cam," Della Steel said.
The café got quieter. Not silent. The prayer-and-gossip table kept going. Hank Boudreaux kept drinking his coffee. But the air changed, the way air changes before a storm, and Josie felt it in her teeth.
"Della," Cameron said.
His voice was flat. Not cold. Flat. The voice of a man who had practiced being calm.
Della walked to the counter. She didn't sit on a stool. She stood, with one hand on her purse strap, the way you stand when you mean to leave quickly.
"I came to talk to you," she said.
"I figured."
"Not here."
"Where, then?"
"The shop. Later. When you're not... busy."
She looked at Josie when she said the last word. She looked at Tilly. She looked at Birdie, who had stopped drawing and was watching the whole thing with the unblinking focus of a child who understood more than the adults in the room wanted her to.
"Is that your daughter?" Della asked.
"Yes," Josie said.
"She's pretty."
"Thank you."
Della looked back at Cameron. He had set the toast down. He was looking at her with the expression he used to look at welding blueprints when something didn't add up.
"What time?" he asked.
"Ten. After your first break."
"You remember my schedule."
"I remember everything about you, Cam. That's the problem."
She turned and walked out. The bell on the door rang again. The café breathed.
Josie wiped the counter. She wiped it three times in the same spot.
"You don't have to go," Tilly said.
"Yes, he does," Josie said.
Cameron looked at her.
"She's right," he said. "I do."
He slid off the stool. He put money on the counter for the toast he hadn't ordered. He looked at Birdie.
"I might be late," he said. "For the wire."
"That's okay," Birdie said. "I'll wait."
He nodded. He walked out.
The bell rang for the third time that morning, and this time it sounded, to Josie, like the start of something she couldn't yet name.
She picked up the money he had left. She held it in her hand for a moment. Then she put it in the register and closed the drawer.
"Hank," she said, "you want a refill?"
"Always," Hank said.
She poured his coffee. She went back to work.
But her hands were not quite steady, and Tilly saw, and the prayer-and-gossip table saw, and Birdie, at the kid table, picked up her crayon again and drew a picture of a man with a square head and big hands, walking away down a road with no one else on it, and she drew a sun above him, because that was the kind of thing Birdie thought about, and because, in her small and serious way, she had already begun to pray for him.