The time is late July, 2003. Carry O’Brien, introduced as a sixteen-year-old girl in A Drowning, is now the 52-year-old proprietress of the cafe in the no longer drab, dreary town of Winewood.
~~~~~ ~~~~~ ~~~~~ “If I was feeling grumpy,” Carry O’Brien replied to Janet Caldwell across the heavily potato- and carrot- and onion-strewn plastic-topped chopping block in the kitchen of her cafe, “you’d darn’ well hear about it.”
“Might have to get some ear plugs, too?” Janet teased her.
“Might,” Carry concurred with a sly and mock-sly smirk at herself. “No. ’S’nuthin’: just a meeting over—”
“Feeling all right?”
“Aw, yeah. Just a meeting over at the bank this afternoon at 2:00. Wouldn’t tell me what it’s all about, of course, so if I get real lucky, maybe it’ll be the rent’s going up. That’d just about make my whole darn’ day.” Carry doubted her rent was about to be increased: the bank had not been directly involved in property management in years, and in any event, she had signed a five-year lease less than two years earlier. She mentioned the rent just to say something after remarking she had no idea what the meeting was about, a fact she wished she had kept to herself.
“Think maybe?” Janet offered sympathetically.
Carry shrugged indifferently, then asked, “Any chance you can stay late an hour, hour and a half?”
“Sure. Air conditioning’s better here, anyway. They can’t keep up?” she asked with a nod toward the front, where Jane and Nancy refilled coffee cups and ran the cash register and wiped down counters as the morning rush began to subside.
“Probably, but you know what they say about adult supervision,” Carry replied, making a weary, heavily ironic face, then waved aside her remark as she rotated in place to turn the approximately sausage-seasoned ground beef and turkey meat balls on the big grill. Janet was the first waitress she had hired in years who was truly useful in the kitchen and a grown woman into the bargain: worth giving extra hours now and then as an incentive to stay and continue to work hard instead of cutting corners.
Nancy popped in with an order for bacon and eggs sunny up, cracked wheat toast, fried potatoes well done.
Janet offered with a gesture to take care of it, but Carry waved her hand again and stepped to the small grill herself: her wrists, never minding it was late July and the temperature looked likely to rise into the high 90s, were still too tender from winter-harried arthritis to chop vegetables by the hour.
“So what’s up with the bank, eh?”
“Guess I’ll find out. If they’re trying to talk me back into the dumb old Downtown Council, they can get somebody else, I’ll tell you!” Carry dropped a cover over the bacon with a deliberate clank and rattle. She bet herself a third of a Milky Way bar after closing time she would, indeed, be asked to rejoin the downtown Winewood merchants’ association, which she had resigned from the previous autumn, ostensibly because of her health, but actually because she had wearied of listening to that “bunch of long-winded complainers” over a decade earlier.