Chapter 5

Sunday afternoon Bay found her grandmother sitting at the counter with the register open, doing nothing at all.

"You're not going to sell," Bay said.

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to." Bay dropped her backpack on a stool. "Mamaw, you fed this town for thirty years. Otis Priddy's kids ate here on credit through a whole winter. The Bakers' whole wedding reception was in this room."

"And none of that is a temperature reading."

"You have the picture."

"The picture is on his wall, and he can take it down, and then it's my word against his." Inez closed the drawer. "I'm sixty-eight years old, Bay. I don't have a lawyer. I don't have a log. I don't have standing. What I have is a citation from last year and a bank notice and a man from Marlow's with a check."

Bay's jaw set the way her grandfather's used to. "So we lose."

"We don't lose yet."

"What does that even mean?"

Inez didn't answer. She reached into the register and lifted out the tray, the way she'd done ten thousand times, and set it on the counter to count the drawer for Monday.

The lid of the register was metal, and taped inside the lid, where nobody had looked in years, was an index card. Yellowed. Soft at one corner. Her own handwriting, in blue ballpoint, from a decade she had to think about to place.

Voss - no charge.

She sat down slowly on the stool behind the register.

"Mamaw?"

Inez put her finger on the card. "Emmett Voss," she said.

"Who?"

She didn't answer right away. She was looking at the card and at the lobby form in her purse with the typed name in section five, and the two of them were the same name, and the whole thirty years between them had folded up flat.

"Dr. Emmett Voss," she said. "State environmental health director."

Bay came around the counter and looked over her shoulder at the card. "Why's his name in your register?"

Inez laughed - one short breath through her nose, not a happy sound.

"Because he ate here," she said. "And he never paid."

She taped the card back where it had been, closed the lid, and locked the register with the key on Bay's shoelace.

Then she went to the closet and took out her Sunday dress and hung it on the door where she would see it in the morning.