'So it seems,' Barbie agreed. That she knew he had been leaving - and why - didn't surprise him. He'd spent enough time in The Mill to know Julia Shumway knew everything worth knowsng.
Rose saw him as she was serving beans and franks (plus a smoking relic that might once have been a pork chop) to a party of six crammed around a table for four. She froze with a plate in each hand and two more on her arm, eyes wide. Then she smiled. It was one full of undisguised happiness and relief, and it lifted his heart.
This is what home feels like, he thought. Goddamned if it isn't.
'Good gravy, I never expected to see you again, Dale Barbara!'
'You still got my apron?' Barbie asked. A little shyly. Rose had taken him in, after all - just a drifter with a few scribbled references in his backpack - and given him work. She'd told him she completely understood why he felt he had to blow town, Junior Rennie's dad wasn't a fellow you wanted for an enemy, but Barbie still felt as if he'd left her in the lurch.
Rose put down her load of plates anywhere there was room for them and hurried to Barbie. She was a plump little woman, and she had to stand on tiptoe to hug him, but she managed.
'I'm so goddam glad to see you!' she whispered. Barbie hugged her back and kissed the top of her head.
'Big Jim and Junior won't be,' he said. But at least neither Rennie was here; there was that to be grateful for. Barbie was aware:hat, for the time being, at least, he had become even more interesting to the assembled Millites than their very own town on national TV
'BigJim Rennie can blow me!' she said.Barbie laughed, delighted by her fierceness but glad for her discretion - she was still whispering. 'I thought you were gone!'
'I almost was, but I got a late start.'
'Did you see... it?'
'Yes. Tell you later.' He released her, held her at arm's length, and thought: If you were ten years younger, Rose.. . or even five...
'So I can have my apron back?'
She wiped the corners of her eyes and nodded. 'Please take it back. Get Anson out of there before he kills us all.'
Barbie gave her a salute, then hooked around the counter into the kitchen and sent Anson Wheeler to the counter, telling him to take bare of orders and cleanup there before helping Rose in the main room. Anson stepped back from the grill with a sigh of relief. Before going to the counter, he shook Barbie's right hand in both of his. 'Thank God, man - I never seen such a rush. I was lost.'
'Don't worry. We're gonna feed the five thousand.'
Anson, no Biblical scholar, looked blank. 'Huh?'
'Never mind.'
The bell sitting in the corner of the pass-through binged.'Order up!' Rose called.
Barbie grabbed a spatula before taking the slip - the grill was a mess, it always was when Anson was engaged in those cataclysmic heat-induced changes he called cooking - then slipped his apron over his head, tied it in back, and checked the cabinet over the sink. It was full of baseball caps, which served Sweetbriar Rose grill-monkeys as chef's toques. He selected a Sea Dogs cap in honor of Paul Gendron (now in the bosom of his nearest and dearest, Barbie hoped), yanked it on backward, and cracked his knuckles.
Then he grabbed the first slip and went to work.
By nine fifteen, more than an hour after their usual Saturday night closing time, Rose ushered the final patrons out. Barbie locked the door and turned the sign from OPEN to CLOSED. He watched those last four or five cross the street to the town common, where there were as many as fifty people gathered and talking among themselves. They were facing south, where a great white light formed a bubble over 119. Not TV lights, Barbie judged; that was the U.S. Army, creating and securing a perimeter. And how did you secure a perimeter at night? Why, by posting sentries and lighting the dead zone, of course. Dead zone. He didn't like the sound of that.
Main Street, on the other hand, was unnaturally dark. There were electric lights shining in some of the buildings - where there were gennies at work - and battery-powered emergency lights shining in Burpee's Department Store, the Gas & Grocery, Mill New Sc Used Books, Food City at the foot of Main Street Hill, and half a dozen others, but the streetlights were dark and there were candles shining in the windows of most of Main Street's second-floor windows, where there were apartments.
Rose sat at a table in the middle of the room, smoking a cigarette (illegal in public buildings, but Barbie would never tell). She pulled the net off her head and gave Barbie a wan smile as he sat down across from her. Behind them Anson was swabbing the counter, his own shoulder-length hair now liberated from its Red Sox cap.
'I thought Fourth of July was bad, but this was worse,' Rose said. 'If you hadn't turned up, I'd be curled in the corner, screaming for my mommy,'