Peaches at the Hargrove Diner
I've poured coffee at the Hargrove Diner off Route 9 for nineteen years, and I know most everybody who drives through this stretch of the Blue Ridge foothills by their order before they sit down. So when a woman walked in that Tuesday afternoon in late August, wearing a linen dress that didn't come from any store in Hargrove, Virginia, and stood in the doorway a beat too long, I figured she wasn't from around here anymore, even if she once was.
She asked for a booth by the window, the one that looks out over what used to be the Colfax orchard before the new owners put in a parking lot. I brought her a menu and a glass of water, and she barely touched either. She was watching the tree line past the lot, where two old peach trees still stood, gone half-wild, dropping fruit nobody bothered to pick anymore.
"Ma'am, you want a minute?" I asked.
"I'm looking for somebody," she said. "Dale Whitfield. Does he still own the barbecue place on Route 9?"
I told her he did — Whitfield's Smokehouse, quarter mile up, been there going on fifteen years, built where his daddy's tobacco barn used to sit. She thanked me and left her water untouched.
I didn't think much more of it until she came back three days later, this time with her sister, and I caught enough of their talk refilling sweet teas to piece some of it together. Her name was Renata — Renata Alcott, though her sister called her Nita. She'd flown in from Milan, where she'd lived for over two decades, to celebrate her fiftieth birthday back home. She wanted to book Whitfield's Smokehouse for the party. Her sister told her, careful as somebody setting down glass: Dale still owned the place, and this Saturday the whole banquet room was already reserved — his daughter's wedding.
Something shut behind Renata's eyes. I've watched enough people take bad news over pie in this diner to know that particular closing. She asked her sister something too low for me to catch, and her sister answered, "Twenty-six years old. You knew her as a baby, Nita. You held her once, before you left."
I refilled the sugar caddy at the next table and kept my ears open, which I'm not proud of, but the diner was slow and the AC unit rattled loud enough that nobody noticed.
Here's what I gathered over that visit and a couple after: Dale Whitfield and Renata had grown up two farms apart, out past the county line where the land turns to orchard. Everybody in Hargrove over fifty remembers the wedding that never happened — Dale left her at the church a week before the ceremony, because a girl named Peggy Souther showed up pregnant. Dale married Peggy instead. Renata left for Italy not long after, and nobody around here had seen her since, not at Christmas, not at her own mother's funeral, which her sister handled alone.
That Saturday I wasn't scheduled to work, but I stopped in anyway to pick up my check, and the smokehouse parking lot down the road was jammed with cars, string lights strung up in the trees for the reception. I saw Renata's rental car parked at the diner, engine off, and she sat there in our lot, eyes fixed on the lights down the road like she was working through a math problem that wouldn't add up right.
I went and knocked on her window, just to check she was all right — habit of the job, I guess. She rolled it down. A phone sat lit up in her lap, the screen showing a name — Andrea, with a photo of a gray-haired man in front of what looked like a fountain, maybe Rome. She let it ring itself out.
"You need anything, hon?" I asked.
"Dale asked me to stay," she said, like she needed to say it out loud to someone who wasn't family. "Said his marriage was over years ago, that he only stayed married for Callie — that's the daughter. Said once she's married off this weekend, he's filing for divorce. Said he never stopped loving me." She looked down at the phone, still buzzing against her leg. "There's a man in Rome who's been waiting eleven years for me to marry him. Never once lied to me. Never once left me standing anywhere."
I didn't have advice for that. Wasn't my place. I told her the pie was good if she wanted a piece before she decided anything, and something close to a laugh got out of her before she could stop it.
She came into the diner two more times that week. The second time, she carried a manila folder, the kind you get from a bank or a lawyer's office, with a pen clipped to it. She asked to use our phone charger at the counter, and while it charged she made two calls I couldn't help but overhear, since I was restocking napkins three feet away.
The first call went to a realtor in Rome — I only caught pieces, something about her apartment near Trastevere, wanting to know if the paperwork for adding a second name to the deed could be handled remotely, or if she needed to fly back to sign in person.
The second call, she made outside, standing by her rental car, but I could see her through the window. She had the folder open on the hood, one hand flat on the pages like she was holding them down against the wind. When she came back in, she paid her tab, left me a twenty on an eleven-dollar check, and told me she was catching a flight out of Roanoke the next morning.
"Tell your boss the pie's the best thing about this town," she said.
I asked, careful, whether she'd talked to Dale again. She said she had — gone by the smokehouse that morning, before the lunch rush, while he was restocking sauce bottles behind the counter. Told him thank you, and no. Told him she wasn't staying, that she'd already called her bank in Rome to add Andrea's name to the deed on her apartment, the one she'd bought with money she'd earned scrubbing floors and waiting tables her first two years in Italy, twenty-three years back. Told him the ring Andrea had offered her three times, she was finally going to accept it, and that she'd be wearing it before the year was out.
She said Dale just stood there behind the counter with a bottle of sauce in his hand, and didn't say anything back. His daughter came out from the kitchen in her rehearsal dress, asking who the woman was, and Dale told her, "Nobody, sweetheart. Old family friend."
Renata didn't correct him. She just picked up a bag of peaches from the roadside stand out front — the same wild trees from the old Colfax orchard, still bearing fruit every August whether anyone wanted it or not — paid for them in cash, and drove off toward the interstate.
I never did find out if she made her flight, or what Andrea said when she called him from the gate. But the next summer, Dale's daughter Callie came in for lunch with her new husband, and mentioned, just making conversation, that her father had gotten a postcard from Rome. A photo of a woman standing under a fountain, wearing a wedding band, no return address. Callie said her father read it twice, folded it along its crease, and tucked it into his shirt pocket before he went back to the grill.
