The Rotary breakfast cancels at 5:52 in the morning, which is roughly eight minutes after I crack the fortieth egg.

Dot takes the call at the register, because my hands are full of shell. She holds the phone a little away from her ear, the way she does when somebody is being polite at her for too long, and I know how it ends before she hangs up.

“They’re doing it at the church hall this month,” she says.

“The church hall doesn’t have a griddle.”

“I said that.”

“They have one of those electric skillets from a wedding in 1988.”

“I said that too.” Dot ties her apron and doesn’t look at me. “Ed says they’ll be back in June.”

There are eighteen Rotary men. They come the first Saturday of every month at seven, they sit at the long table in the back, they order the same things in the same order, and they tip like men who have known my father since before I was born. Forty eggs is not a guess. Forty eggs is arithmetic.

I look at the bowl. The bowl looks back.

“Egg salad,” I say. “Egg salad for a week. Egg salad until this whole town begs me to stop.”

“You’re taking it well,” Dot says.

“It’s a nice morning. Nobody’s dead.”

That is a thing my mother says, and I hear it come out of my mouth in her voice, which is what happens when you run the place your parents built and you are standing in the spot where they stood. Some days I catch myself wiping the pass the same way my father did, twice across, once back, and I have to put the rag down.

It is the first of May. Outside the window the light is doing the thing it does here in spring, coming off the lake all thin and silver, like the whole town got washed and hung out to dry. The maples on Main Street are barely green. Mr. Petrakis is sweeping the sidewalk in front of the hardware store, which he does at six in the morning for reasons no one has ever asked him about.

Raman’s on Main opens at five thirty. It has opened at five thirty since 1998, first because of the mill shift, then because people got used to it, then because it was simply true, like the lake being cold in June.

I flip the sign. I start the coffee. Curtis comes in at six and ties his apron and puts the bacon down in two long rows without being told, and the smell fills the room the way it always does, and I think, all right. We’ll have a Saturday anyway.

By eight, we’ve done nine covers.

Nine. On a Saturday, in May, with the weather like this.

I count them twice, which is stupid, because I can see the entire dining room from the pass. Forty-two seats. Nine people have touched six of them.

Eli comes in at eight twenty in his department T-shirt and takes the stool at the counter, and I have his coffee down before he sits, and he says, “How’s the world, Priya,” and I say, “Fully operational,” and he laughs like I have said something funny, which is one of the kindest things about Eli.

The Dunning sisters come at eight thirty and share one order of toast and argue about their mother’s birthday. Tommy’s mom calls to cancel a to-go order and doesn’t say why, and she says it fast, the way you hang up on a person you like.

At nine the door opens and it is Bev Lindahl, in her spring coat, carrying her purse with both hands in front of her like a shield.

Bev sits at the window table. She has sat at the window table since she taught tenth grade English and made half this town read a book in the summer, and my father used to keep that table empty until nine fifteen even in August, even when there were people standing.

She doesn’t order. That is the first thing that is wrong.

The second thing is the magazine.

She sets it on the table and squares it with two fingers, and she looks up at me with an expression I have only seen on her once, at Rosemary Albrecht’s funeral last spring, when she got to the part of her reading where she had to stop.

“Priya,” she says. “Have you seen this.”

“That depends on what it is.”

“It’s the Best of the Lakeshore issue.” Her fingers don’t move. “The readers voted. You won pie. You won pie by a lot.”

“Well, that’s good news you’re delivering like a telegram, Bev.”

“The critic didn’t agree,” she says.

And she opens it.

The magazine is Straits Monthly, out of Detroit, and it is the kind of magazine people up here keep on the coffee table for a year. Page forty-one is a map of the shore with little numbered stars on it, and one of the stars is us. Best Pie, Lakeshore. Raman’s on Main, Hollis Point. There is a photo of my counter with the sun coming through it, and if you know where to look you can see my mother’s handwriting on the corner of the chalkboard, because I have never painted over it.

Page forty-two is a column called The Last Word, with a small square photograph of a man in his thirties who is not smiling.

I read it standing at the pass with the ticket rail empty over my head.

It runs six paragraphs, and five of them are about other places on the shore, and they are not unkind. Then the last one.

“Raman’s on Main has been making the same cherry pie since 1998, and the whole county calls it famous. Famous is a promise. This is a memory with sugar on it, kept warm by people too generous to say otherwise. The crust is a good crust from a tired oven. The filling tastes like a decision somebody made a long time ago and nobody has been brave enough to revisit.”

I read it again.

The byline says Marcus Vale.

Behind me, Curtis has stopped moving. The fan over the flat-top is going, and out on Main a truck downshifts at the light, and Dot is standing in the middle of the floor holding the coffee pot at an angle she isn’t aware of.

“He can’t write,” I say.

“Priya,” Bev says.

“No, listen to the sentence. A memory with sugar on it. What does that mean? Put it on a plate. Show me what that means on a plate.”

“It’s been shared around,” Bev says gently. “My nephew sent it to me last night from Ann Arbor. It’s on one of those food accounts, the one with the pictures of the lake.”

“How many people follow that account?”

Bev looks like she would rather tell me about a death in the family. “Two hundred thousand, I think.”

I put the magazine down on the pass, cover up, and I look out at my dining room.

Six of forty-two seats. On the first of May, in weather like this.

“Do you want your eggs, Bev?”

“I want you to sit down for one minute.”

“I’ve got a rush coming,” I say, and both of us look at the empty room, and neither of us says anything, and that is how I find out that I am going to cry about this later and not now.

Bev orders her eggs. She eats maybe four bites of them and leaves six dollars for a three-dollar breakfast, and at the door she stops and says, “It’s a good pie, Priya. It has always been a good pie,” which is the exact sentence you say to somebody at a wake.

When she’s gone, Dot comes and stands next to me at the pass with her arms folded.

“He ate here,” she says.

“What?”

“Whoever that is. He ate here, he sat in my section, and I don’t remember him, and that’s what I can’t get over.” She unties and reties her apron, which is what she does instead of yelling. “Twenty-seven years I’ve been on this floor. I know the back of everybody’s head in this county. And a man sat down at one of my tables and ordered that pie and wrote that about us, and I gave him a refill and said have a nice day.”

“You don’t know he sat in your section.”

“I know he sat in somebody’s.”

Curtis has come out of the kitchen with his phone in his hand and his ears red. He is twenty-four. He grew up two streets over.

“It’s got four thousand likes,” he says.

“Curtis.”

“I’m just telling you what it’s got.”

“Put it down,” I say, “and turn the fryer off, because we are not going to need the fryer.”

Here is the thing that nobody tells you about a bad Saturday.

It isn’t loud. Nothing breaks. The ice machine keeps making ice. The dishwasher runs its cycle and pops open and lets out its little breath of steam. The radio on the shelf plays the same twelve songs it has played since my father wired it in under the shelf, and I still know every one, and they all still end.

At eleven, a family from out of town comes in because their kid has to use the bathroom, and they stay for pancakes, and I make those pancakes like they are the last pancakes in Michigan.

At twelve thirty, Grant Whitford comes in and takes a booth and orders a patty melt, and reads the paper, and leaves a twenty on a nine-dollar check. He doesn’t mention the magazine. He came here every week all last summer while he was trying to buy the drive-in out from under my best friend, which in a smaller town would make him a villain. In this town it makes him a man who likes our patty melt and got told no.

At one thirty I cut the pie.

We keep four in the case and I cut one at one thirty for the afternoon, because the afternoon is when the shore people come off the beach road in their sandy cars and want something sweet and cold to drink. My mother cut hers at one thirty. Her card says so. The recipe box in the office is full of index cards in her handwriting and some in my father’s, and the pie card has a corner gone soft from being handled.

I cut the pie into eight, and the filling holds the way it is supposed to, glossy and dark, and the smell comes up warm and sharp at the same time.

Nobody comes.

At two I send Curtis home. I tell him it is slow because of the bridge work on the county road, and he says, “Okay, chef,” which is a joke between us that started because he is twenty-four and thinks the word is funny in a diner, and it is the first thing all day that makes my chest hurt.

At three I box two slices and walk them down to the station for Eli’s crew, and the guy at the desk says, “Hey, we read about you,” in a tone I can’t do anything with.

At three forty my phone rings, and it is Hattie, and I let it go twice before I pick up, because Hattie can hear things in my voice that I have not decided to say yet.

“Don’t,” I say.

“Don’t what?”

“You are not coming down here.”

“I’m in the parking lot,” Hattie says.

“Hattie.”

“I’m not coming in. Theo’s got me looking at a compressor, we’re on our way to Petrakis. I’m just sitting here.” A pause. “Priya, my nephew in Ann Arbor doesn’t know where Hollis Point is, and he sent it to me.”

“Everybody’s nephew is very well informed today.”

“How bad is the room?”

I look at my room. The chairs are still down, which is the part I can’t explain to her, because chairs down means service, and service means people. I have a floor set for forty-two.

“It’s May,” I say. “May’s always slow.”

“May is not always slow.”

“Go look at your compressor.”

“I’m going to bring you dinner,” she says, and I say absolutely not, and then we sit there on the phone for a second, not saying anything, the way you can only do with somebody who slept on your bedroom floor when you were nine.

Last year I stood in her grandmother’s drive-in and helped her count folding chairs while she tried not to lose the place, and she used to look at me like I was the steady one. I have been the steady one in this town for nine years. It is not a job I know how to put down for an afternoon.

“Hattie,” I say. “Opening night’s in six weeks. Is the marquee done?”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Is the marquee done?”

“The J is fine,” she says, and I can hear her smiling, and I hang up before she can hear anything else.

At six the light comes flat through the front window and lies across the floor and shows me every scuff mark on tile my father laid in 1998. The chalkboard over the pass says the same thing it has said for as long as I have known how to read.

OUR FAMOUS CHERRY PIE. SINCE 1998.

Underneath, in my mother’s small square letters, in chalk somebody would have to be a monster to erase: Ask about today’s special.

I close out at eight fifteen on my father’s adding machine, the beige one that prints on a paper roll and clacks like a typewriter with something to say.

Day total: two hundred and eighty-one dollars.

I run it a second time because the number is so far outside my life that my hands do it before my brain agrees. The tape comes out the same. I tear it off and hold the little strip of paper and stand there in my empty dining room with the chairs up on the tables.

Two hundred and eighty-one dollars. First Saturday in May. Last year, that Saturday was nineteen hundred.

Somewhere over my head, the building settles and ticks. Upstairs there are two empty bedrooms and a bathroom with green tile that my parents rented out until 2016, and now it holds the Christmas decorations and a sewing table and about forty years of things we are all too tired to throw away.

I do the arithmetic I’ve been doing for four months and I get the same answer I always get, which is that I need a normal summer. Not a miracle. Just a normal one.

I turn off the lights in the front and leave the one above the pass burning, because my mother always left it on, because a diner with one light on looks like a place that is coming back in the morning.

Then I pick up Bev’s magazine from where I put it face down on the counter eleven hours ago.

I don’t read it again. I already have it. It is going to live in my head in his voice, which is funny, because I have never heard his voice.

The office drawer sticks unless you lift it. I lift it and slide the magazine in, on top of the electric bill and the linen bill and the bank’s spring statement, and I push it shut with my hip.

That’s where I put things I’m going to deal with later.

Then I lock the front door of my parents’ diner and go home and sleep like a person who has not yet been told the rest of it.