When it starts to get really slow about an hour before closing time, Pop lets me hook my phone up to the sound system they normally only use to play the radio, and when “La Vie en Rose” comes on first, he eyes me like I’m an alien.
“This is the music you like?” he asks, his hands flat against the counter like he can’t believe it. I shake my head and spin around on one of the barstools.
“It’s the music I love,” I correct him, and he laughs. “My Gigi listened to it all the time,” I say, remembering her collection of records, her rough hands and how they’d lay the disc on her record player as gently as she braided my hair when I was small. Pop pulls Miss Dolly from the break room and dances with her in the narrow space between the barstools and the back windows, and for a second I’m sad my phone is playing the music, because if it weren’t I’d be taking photos of them.
It’s nice, sitting there watching people who have loved each other longer than I’ve been alive. I feel something that the last few months have left wrecked and ruined being restored little by little.
Before Willa and Sydney get up to leave, I ask Willa for her number, because she’s promised we’ll all go see the Cover Girls together. “I’ll text you, okay?” I promise. “And I’ll see you tomorrow.”
They wave goodbye when they head out and I feel warm and fuzzy inside, and so much better than I did when I first arrived. I secretly hope that the three of us will sit together in the cafeteria tomorrow, but I try not to set myself up for disappointment if we don’t.
When “Feeling Good” by Nina Simone comes on a little while later, the few customers left in the diner start singing along, and I wonder if this is a better idea than just doing a fundraiser for Dolly’s—playing music, or maybe bringing in a live band. Maybe even the Cover Girls, if they’re as good live as they sound recorded. I look around, and there’s enough space near where Miss Dolly and Pop are dancing for a singer and a keyboard. I make a mental note, but I have no idea if Dom will think of this too as charity he doesn’t want or need.
As the dining room empties, I walk over to Pop where he’s counting the cash in one of the registers. “Need help closing up too?” I ask. I already let Mom know I’d be late. Pop writes something down because he still does all his math on paper.
“Why don’t you go back and grab a broom from Dolly? You can get started sweeping the dining room floor.” I nod and head to the back, my music still playing over the sound system even though we’ve already locked the front doors.
“Hey, Miss Dolly?” I say just before I walk past her. I place my hand on the knob of a small closet just outside her door. “Is this where you guys keep the broom?” I glance into the break room from the hall and I see a photo I didn’t notice the first time I was in here with Dom. It’s of a pretty, dark-skinned woman and a baby, and once I step a little closer, I can see that the woman looks a lot like Dom. When Miss Dolly sees me looking at the photo, she smiles. Maybe I shouldn’t, but I take her expression as an invitation.
“Is this…Dom’s mom?” I ask. Miss Dolly nods.
“Yep. That’s my baby girl. Mallory. Pop calls her Molly. So we were Dolly and Molly.”
I bite my bottom lip and step farther into the room. I point to the baby in the photo. “Is that…?”
“Baby Dominic? Sure is.” Miss Dolly picks up the photo and looks at it a little more closely. She smiles, but her eyes look sad.
“Molly got pregnant with Dominic when she was eighteen. She’d already been accepted into Brown, and we weren’t going to let that opportunity pass her by. So when she told us she wanted to keep the baby, we told her to defer a year, and we’d help take care of him while she went to school. Dominic’s dad, John, was around too, but he had just joined the military. So off they both went—Molly to school and John to basic training, and somehow…they just never got back to being full-time parents. Something would always come up. First Molly wanted to get her graduate degree, then John got deployed. Then Molly met someone while she was in grad school, and when John found out, he took on another tour. We didn’t want Dominic to be jerked around—to have to move from place to place while they figured their lives out—so we just held on to our boy. By then we were pretty attached anyway. And by the time they had both settled enough to handle having a child, Dominic was nine or ten, and mostly as uninterested in living with them as they had been in him.”
“You’d already made a life here,” I say, because I get that part at least. They have a house and the diner and each other. They’re happy.
She nods. “Yeah, and it’s a good one, too.”
But then I remember Dom at that party in the summer, how he said he’d just moved here. “But I thought Dom just moved back to New York this past summer?” I ask.
“Ah, yes. He usually spends his summers in Washington, D.C., with his dad, so after middle school that’s what he did again. But then he wanted to give living with his mom a try. Henry and I were upset, because we had a feeling Molly wasn’t ready. I don’t know how the girl thought she could go from no children to raising a teenager. But I didn’t let Dom know that I felt that way. I just hoped for the best. So he moved to Atlanta with Molly. He started ninth grade there with her, but unfortunately I was right. She couldn’t handle him. He started acting out, and she didn’t know what to do. I honestly think Dom missed New York and maybe us a little too, though he would never in a million years admit it.” She chuckles and I smile. “We didn’t want to pull him out in the middle of the school year, though, so I let him finish out the year before he came back. I’m not letting him go again, I can tell you that much right now.”
She reminds me of Gigi, the way she talks about Dom like he’s everything she ever wanted. It’s how my grandmother always made me feel when I was with her.
I swallow and dip my head a little, so happy to be in this small room with her and so grateful for her story, but a little sad that Dom isn’t here with us.
“Dom’s…upset with me,” I say. “And I really don’t want him to be, because I’ve had a pretty rough couple of months and he’s been kind of great about it all.”
Miss Dolly looks concerned, but I want to make it clear to her that this isn’t about me. “What can I do to make things better between us? I’m still learning how to be his friend.” And as soon as I say it, I know this is what I failed to do with Layla—she changed and I didn’t adapt. Maybe I changed too, and she didn’t try to learn what the new me needed either. I don’t want that to happen with Dom. “I don’t know how to give him what he needs, I guess. I want to be the best friend I can be.”
“He’s very proud,” Miss Dolly says, without asking for any more details even though she’s just basically given me her entire life story. “He’s very stubborn,” she continues. “And he’s a little too smart for his own good,” she finishes. “Sometimes, with Dominic, the easiest thing to do is to let him figure things out on his own.” She leans back in her chair and squints at me, and her dimples pop into her cheeks even though she’s only smiling a little. She wags her wrinkled finger at me. “He likes you, I can tell.”