Open Late

Chapter 1: The Skylark

The Skylark Diner sat on Route 42 like a thing that had simply decided, a long time ago, to stop moving. It had a chrome-edged counter, fourteen stools with cracked red vinyl seats, and a neon sign out front that had been missing the "k" in "Skylark" since 1997. Locals called it "The Skylar" without irony. Linda Nielsen had always meant to fix that sign. She'd meant to do a lot of things.

Now she was dead, and the sign still read SKYLAR, buzzing its pale blue against the November sky like a half-finished thought.

Mark Nielsen saw the sign from the highway and felt something tighten behind his sternum. He'd driven past it a thousand times growing up, but today the approach felt ceremonial and grim, like walking the last hallway of a hospital. He pulled his rented Audi into the gravel lot and sat for a moment with the engine running, staring at the diner's flat roof and the way the afternoon light caught the windows.

He was forty-two years old. He was a senior associate at Kramer, Voss & Whitfield in Chicago—or he had been, until the restructuring memo landed on his desk three weeks ago. The memo didn't say "you're fired." It said "realignment of practice group leadership," which was worse, because it meant they hadn't decided yet, and the not-knowing was a kind of torture that Mark, a man who planned his socks the night before, found physically unbearable.

He checked his phone. Two emails from the office, both marked urgent, both from people who would not have marked them urgent if they understood what the word meant. He silenced the phone and got out of the car.

The gravel crunched under his Italian loafers. He'd packed wrong. He'd packed for two days—funeral, reading of the will, drive back to Chicago. He had one suit, one pair of dress shoes, and a gym bag with a change of clothes that he'd grabbed from his trunk. He hadn't expected to need more.

The diner's front door was unlocked. A small bell chimed when he pushed it open, and the smell hit him like a freight train: coffee, bacon grease, lemon cleaner, and something underneath all of that—something warm and floury that was just the smell of his mother's life.

Bobby Mosier was behind the counter, wiping it down with a rag that had seen better decades. Bobby was sixty-one, built like a retired fullback who'd kept eating like an active one, with a gray buzz cut and forearms that suggested he could still bench-press a Buick. He'd been cooking at The Skylark since Mark was in middle school.

"Mark." Bobby didn't look up from his wiping. "You look like you drove here from a catalog."

"Bobby." Mark slid onto a stool. "How are you holding up?"

"I'm vertical." Bobby tossed the rag into a bus tub. "Your mother would've wanted me to say something more poetic, but she also would've wanted me to be honest, and honest is: I'm vertical. Coffee?"

"Please."

Bobby poured without asking how he took it. Black. Bobby remembered everything. It was one of his more unsettling qualities.

"Jill here yet?" Mark asked.

"Flight lands at four. Tommy's picking her up."

Mark paused with the mug halfway to his lips. "Tommy has a car?"

"Tommy has your mother's car. The Buick."

"The Buick still runs?"

"The Buick will outlive us all, Mark. It's a 1998 LeSabre. Those things are basically cockroaches with leather seats."

Mark sipped his coffee. It was terrible. It was the best coffee he'd ever had.

"How's Tommy doing?" he asked, carefully.

Bobby gave him a look that contained multitudes. "You could ask him yourself."

"I'm asking you."

"Then I'll tell you what I told your mother every time she asked me to referee between you three: I'm a cook, not a therapist, and I charge extra for emotional labor."

Mark almost smiled. "Fair enough."

He sat at the counter and drank his coffee and looked at the diner. The booths along the windows. The specials board in his mother's handwriting—her actual handwriting, still up there, the last thing she'd written before the hospital: TUESDAY: MEATLOAF DINNER $8.95. COMES WITH TWO SIDES AND A LOOK OF DISAPPROVAL IF YOU DON'T CLEAN YOUR PLATE.

That was Linda. Funny to the bone, even when the bone was tired.

Mark's phone buzzed. He ignored it.

"Bobby," he said. "Did she suffer?"

Bobby stopped wiping. He put both hands flat on the counter and looked at Mark with an expression that was neither kind nor unkind but simply true.

"She had cancer, Mark. It's not a spa treatment." He picked up the rag again. "But she was tough. And she had Tommy."

The way he said it—she had Tommy—carried a weight that Mark didn't fully understand yet. He filed it away.

The bell above the door chimed again, and Mark turned to see a woman he almost didn't recognize. Jill Nielsen had left Ohio at twenty-eight with a backpack and a one-way ticket to Lisbon. She'd been gone ten years. In Mark's memory, she was still the sharp-jawed, restless girl who'd fought with their mother about everything—college, careers, boyfriends, the proper way to season a cast-iron skillet. The woman in the doorway was thinner than he remembered, with sun-darkened skin and hair cut short in a way that made her look both older and more alert, like a bird that had learned to sleep with one eye open.

Behind her, holding the door, was Tommy.

Tommy Nielsen was thirty-four and looked it in the wrong ways. He had their mother's broad face and their father's height—their father, Gerald, who'd left when Tommy was six and sent increasingly sporadic birthday cards until he didn't. Tommy was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt and work boots, and he had the slightly apologetic posture of a man who'd spent his whole life being the youngest and least impressive person in every room.

"Hey, Mark," Tommy said.

"Hey, Tommy."

They did not hug. The Nielsen family had a complicated relationship with physical affection, which is to say they avoided it the way other families avoided talking about money.

Jill crossed the diner in four strides and sat on the stool next to Mark. "Bobby, I need coffee and I need it to be strong enough to have its own opinions."

"Coming up." Bobby poured. "You look good, Jill."

"I look like I've been on three planes in twenty-six hours. But thank you for lying."

Tommy settled onto the stool on Mark's other side, creating a lineup at the counter that hadn't existed since they were children: Mark in the middle, Jill on the left, Tommy on the right. Linda used to serve them breakfast in this exact configuration. Pancakes for Mark, eggs over easy for Jill, cereal for Tommy because Tommy was the kind of kid who'd eat cereal for every meal if you let him.

"So," Jill said, wrapping both hands around her mug. "Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Mark agreed.

The funeral was at ten. The reading of the will was at two. They all knew this. They were all pretending it was news because talking about logistics was easier than talking about the fact that their mother was dead.

"The church is handling the reception," Tommy said quietly. "Mom set it up months ago. She planned everything. The flowers, the readings, the music. She even picked the sandwiches."

"Of course she did," Jill said, and her voice cracked just slightly, just enough for Mark to notice and pretend he hadn't.

They sat at the counter of their mother's diner and drank Bobby's terrible coffee and didn't talk about the things that mattered. Outside, the neon sign buzzed. SKYLAR. A name without its last letter, glowing against the coming dark.