What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [69]
But when reopening the diner kept resurfacing in her thoughts as the answer to the question about what she could possibly do to help after 9/11, she felt compelled to heed it. “I couldn’t go to Afghanistan and I couldn’t drive down to New York City, but I could reopen the diner. I could make a difference to people. I could give people some enjoyment. I could turn the diner into a place where people could stop, like they used to, years ago, for good food and good fellowship,” she said. “I had to reopen the diner.”
Two months later, around Thanksgiving, Jason drove three hours north from his home in Cortland, New York, to visit his grandmother. One afternoon as they talked, she told him that she could not let go of her dream of reopening the diner. Jason, who had briefly owned a pizza restaurant before taking a job at a community college, started to get just as excited as Loretta. With his encouragement, Loretta phoned the property owner, Clyde Turner.
“I pretty much knew what to expect and what it would need: a fresh coat of paint, a new roof, and maybe an extra refrigeration unit,” Loretta told me in her gently fluting voice as she toured me around the place, seven and half hours north of New York City, midway between Gouverneur and Canton.
She never had any interest in turning it into one of those kitschy re-creations of diners of the past. After all, the Silver Leaf had never been a sleek, chrome-studded, post-World War II, American beauty of a diner. It did not have intricately tiled floors. Its exterior was not sheathed in stainless steel. It was not built to make an architectural statement for the age of aerodynamic streamlining the way other diners were in the 1950s. It had always been an unpretentious restaurant, a beacon of comfort, familiarity, and good cheap food. For years, local dairymen had come there to meet, compare notes, and banter over coffee. Teens had come for hamburgers, fries, and Cokes after school. Parents brought their kids for a weekend treat. Night owls passed solitary hours. And long-haul truckers took sustenance and caffeine before heading onto dark upstate highways.
“No, I didn’t really think about that. I had my mind set on a little diner,” Loretta said when I asked if she ever had any intention of replacing the worn gray Formica counter. Its original yellow chevron imprint had been all but scrubbed away by forty-four years of hands, elbows, plates, glasses, and bowls sliding across its surface. The old refrigerated Coke cabinet near the front door would do just fine as a pie keeper, she figured. And the twelve revolving counter stools could keep their original tan coverings, for the time being. “We saw what the place could be, rather than what it was. I really believed in it. I saw what I wanted to see,” Loretta said, standing straight up behind the counter. When she speaks, she looks you in the eyes. And it was hard not to notice how blue her eyes were or how closely their color matched the faded robin’s egg blue of her worn cotton blouse.
The day Clyde Turner let Loretta inspect the diner, with Jason in tow, Turner was not feeling so well. He waited outside, sitting in his van with the motor running. Loretta emerged from the diner forty-five minutes later and handed him the keys. She already knew he was asking $80,000 for the place. “What do you want to pay for it?” he asked.
“Sixty thousand,” she said resolutely. (“It was just a number I threw out. I don’t know why,” she told me.)
“When you get ready to deal, Loretta, I live up the road,” he said.
“When you get ready to deal, I live across the road,” she said and nodded toward her house. That was the beginning and end of their negotiations.
The two had a long history. As a boy, Clyde—whom everyone called “Stan” for some reason unknown even to them—got into some trouble and was on the verge of being sent to reform school when Loretta’s father intervened.