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Read Part 16
Parme had been at the diner earlier in the morning. Pat had dropped her Olds at the shop for an oil change the day before, so she rode in with the old detective. After dating him for nearly a year, she knew that he wasn’t much for talking before his coffee, so she just smiled ahead as they made their way across town to their respective workplaces.
It’s funny how things work out, she thought to herself. Before meeting Parme, she had spent years living in that gray place between anxiety and total panic. Her first husband had been long gone by the time her mother got sick, which, in hindsight, had been a blessing. He had never been a good provider and having to take care of both him and her mother would have pushed her over the edge.
Pat’s mother, Barbara, had worked at the diner for as long as her daughter could remember. She had started there right out of high school and was there when the police department’s new building went up across the street in ‘68. She met Pat’s father a couple of years later and married him, something she would spend the rest of her life warning her only daughter not to do.
“Cops don’t make good husbands,” she would say. “They may serve, but they can’t protect. They may say they do, but don’t you believe it!”
And she hadn’t. Despite the facts that she followed in her mother’s footsteps, starting at the diner before she was even out of high school, and then living in a near constant state of puppy love with the young police officers that frequented the diner, she had never dated one. Instead, she said yes to former classmate who became a successful real estate developer. She married him a year before the big recession hit that wiped him and half of the city’s builders out completely. He had never recovered.
She never really held it against him. Growing up without a father, she had no real example in her life of what a man should be. For many years afterward, she assumed that men were like her ex-husband: little boys; delicate creatures who acted tough until things got tough and then folded up and crawled away. No one she met in the diner convinced her otherwise, though in truth she knew them all only as “customers,” which kept them at a distance from which actual qualities could not be discerned.
Thankfully, Pat had not become pregnant during her short marriage, so she would not have a daughter of her own to warn about real estate developer suitors. Her ex-husband left the area a few years later and she never heard from him again. She was fine with that.
But living on her own, even without children, proved to be difficult and stressful. This surprised her. Stress was new to her and something she had never experienced at work. She could remember every item ordered for a table of 10 and get the order to the kitchen and then back to the right customer without writing it down. She could open the diner, handle the customers, keep the books, pay the taxes and close up at night without ever once worrying that she had missed an important step. But when it came to managing life beyond the diner, she faltered.
The city recovered slowly from the recession and the diner always seemed to bring in just enough to make it to the next pay period. Her pay was well below the poverty line but she never complained. It was her landlord or her car mechanic or her doctors who complained. There were always more bills to pay than paycheck to pay them with.
Her mother helped, as best she could, as did Paul Calloway, her dad’s old partner. Calloway was like an uncle to her growing up. Barbara treated him poorly, but he was often around when she was younger, bringing groceries or money to her mother and gifts to her on birthdays or Christmas. It wasn’t until many years later, when she learned about her father’s passing, that she learned why her mother disliked the man. He had retired from the force years ago.
But even with their support, her life was a constant race to stay ahead of the next collector who caught her scent. She wasn’t an extravagant person, just woefully underpaid. It was a condition she shared with most of the people living in the city. She accepted it, as she accepted most things in her life, as one more order she was called upon to fill and took it with her to the diner, the only place she felt any control over her life at all.
Then, her mother became ill and her world got darker for a long time. And then, she met Parme.
To look at the man, any sensible woman would see nothing worth salvaging and look elsewhere at once. Pat might have done that if she had seen him at all during the first few months he began having his breakfast at the diner, but she only saw him as another customer and settled in to serve him as best she could. She was always good at her job.
Over time, Parme’s conversation with his rookies started to make its way into her consciousness. She listened discretely as he lectured them, mentored them, scolded them and turned them into good detectives. He was the first father figure she had ever encountered, though she did not realize that she saw him that way. She fell in love with him. But love alone was not enough to overcome her mother’s warning, so she did nothing. It took another month for Parme to notice that she was paying more attention to him than his tips warranted. He came around slowly.
When he finally asked her out, it took a few moments for Pat to understand what he was suggesting. She opened her mouth to turn him down, feeling like her mother was watching her from the shadows of the afterlife, but stopped. She just looked at him for awhile, trying to figure out what she was feeling. When she noticed how tortured he looked waiting for her to respond, she couldn’t help but smile. She agreed and they saw a movie.
Afterward, when he dropped her back at the diner to pick up her car and make her way home, he leaned across the front seat to kiss her. Despite his unkempt exterior and the roughness with which he normally carried himself, his kiss was so gentle that it took her breath away. Later, she would think that he treated her like she was made of crystal and that he worried he might shatter her.
It was months before they went to bed together, where he treated her the same way. Afterward, he held her so tenderly that she felt like the most valuable thing in the world. When she looked up into his eyes, he confirmed it and it struck her so that she began to weep. Parme became flustered, worrying that he had hurt her, which made Pat smile but cry even harder. She tucked herself into his chest as tightly as she could and let the emotions run through her. He never stopped stroking her hair.
After that night, Pat decided that should Detective Walter Parme ever ask her to marry him she would say yes without hesitation. Her mother would be disappointed, but she knew she would never love another man like she loved him.
Since then, she had watched him bluster at the younger detectives he was training and learned to see through his angry exterior to the caring man underneath. She had no doubt that he could be as violent as any man, but she could see how much he cared about the younger men he was bringing into the law enforcement business. He was tough, but she could see how hard he was working to teach them to be good at their jobs, capable of both serving and protecting.
Parme parked at the diner and walked her to the door. She unlocked it with her key and he followed her inside. Manuel, the cook, was already in the kitchen, preparing for the breakfast crowd. Pat smiled over her shoulder at him as she moved behind the counter to start her day. Then his phone rang.
She knew he was unhappy by the way he held his mouth against his cell phone. He grunted something and then hung up, telling her he would see her later and asking her to tell his partner to wait for him here. He had a meeting with his captain, but would return soon. She watched him leave the diner and walk across the street, leaving his car in the diner’s lot.
She watched him make his way to the police station’s front entrance with a purpose and smiled. Parme was not happy and that meant that whomever he was meeting with was about to be unhappy. Still, she had no doubt that whatever he did or said, it would be for his co-workers own good.
Read Part 18
