Free Salem Falls by Jodi Picoult

chasing each other, tails scrawling trails in the snow. “It would be nice,” he agreed softly. “But I lost my best investigator a year ago.”
* * *
At first, when Addie was watching Jack, she told herself it was because he was a new employee-she needed to make sure he didn’t put the salt back on the storage shelf where the sugar was supposed to be; she had to be certain that he loaded the dishwasher in a way that would maximize cleaning and minimize breakage. Then she admitted that she was watching Jack simply because she wanted to. There was something mesmerizing about seeing him run a mop over the checkerboard floor, his mind a million miles away. Or listening to Delilah with rapt attention, as if learning how to make bouillabaisse was one of his life’s goals. He was handsome, certainly, but plenty of handsome men had come through her diner before. What was so attractive about Jack was his exoticism-the fact that he looked completely wrong there, like an orchid blooming in the desert, yet acted as if there was no place else he’d rather be. To Addie-who felt as much a part of the diner as its bricks and mortar, and equally as unable to separate from it-Jack was the most fascinating creature she’d ever seen.
She was figuring out a tab one afternoon when Jack looked up from wiping down the counter, glanced out the front window, and suddenly sprinted into the kitchen. Curious, she followed, to find him handing Delilah an order.
Addie pulled it from the cook’s hand. “There’s no one at table seven,” she said.
“There will be. Didn’t you see him? The kid with the long hair and the philosophy book-he’s on his way in.”
Addie knew immediately to whom Jack was referring. The student was a fairly new regular but a consistent one. He came in at 2:20 every day but Sunday, slid into the booth in the back of the diner, and pulled a dog-eared paperback of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil from his battered knapsack. Every day for the past three weeks, without any deviation, he’d ordered a BLT, hold the tomato, with extra mayonnaise. Two pickles. A side of cheese fries, and black coffee.
Delilah pushed the sandwich toward Jack, who picked it up and hurried into the front of the diner. The student was just sliding into his customary booth when Jack, smiling triumphantly, set his usual order down in front of him.
The kid paused in the act of removing his book from his knapsack. “What the fuck is this?” he asked.
Jack nodded toward the window. “I saw you coming. And you’ve ordered this almost every day for the past three weeks.”
“So?” the student said. “Maybe today was the day I wanted a fucking burger.” He shoved the plate across the booth, so that it toppled off the edge onto the banquette. “Fuck you and your mind games,” he said, and he stormed out of the diner.
From her vantage point by the swinging doors, Addie watched Jack begin to clean up the food. He angrily wiped mayonnaise from the plastic seat and stacked the pieces of the ruined sandwich back on the plate. When he turned around, he found Addie standing beside the table. “I can take that for you,” she said.
But Jack shook his head tightly. “Sorry I lost you a customer.”
“It wasn’t intentional, I’m sure.” Addie smiled a little. “Besides, he was a lousy tipper.”
There was something in the tense curve of Jack’s shoulders and the flat blank of his eyes that told her he had been slapped down before when he’d only been trying to go out of his way for someone. “Some people don’t know what to do with an act of kindness,” Addie said.
Jack looked directly at her. “Do you?”
What kindness would you show me? she thought, and shocked herself. Jack was an employee. He was as different from her as night was from day. But then she thought of how, that morning, he’d taken over the grill for Delilah and had made pancakes in the shape of snowmen, then slipped them onto Chloe’s plate at the counter. She thought of