Jack O'Connell - Box Nine

Rollie’s Grill is a classic Quinsigamond Lunchcar Company diner circa 1925. It now rests on the original site where it was put down years ago. It was moved twice in the course of its life, but now it’s back where it belongs on the corner of Frenchman’s Boulevard and Fourier Avenue.

The current owner, a Cambodian who calls himself Harry, has done pretty well since he hauled ass out of his homeland in ’75, just steps ahead of the bloody knives of the Khmer Rouge. Improbable as it might sound, he married a Puerto Rican girl named Isabelle and they’ve got quite the family now — four little girls who are always playing in the last booth next to the exit. Harry has trained them to scream when someone tries to bolt on a check.

Harry and Isabelle own an ark of a house, a sprawling three-decker crammed with people spanning almost a hundred years in age. It sits like a mirage behind the diner in a state of perpetual renovation. Harry’s rounded up a few cousins who managed to escape genocide and he’s trained them, made them into solid short-order cooks, though he thinks Lon is a little inconsistent on the omelettes. Isabelle, for her part, has a huge extended family, all of whom seem to work at irregular intervals, in one capacity or another, at the diner. The air during the dinner rush is a wild mixture of Spanish, Cambodian, and a fractured but street-hip English. The menu, scrawled at the start of each day on an enormous chalkboard that hangs by a chain from the barreled ceiling, often features an unlikely combination of paella, Kompong Som soufflé, and franks and beans.

Isabelle has done wonders with the diner. She’s got a real knack, a genuine instinct for design and color. The Grill had become tired and shabby when Harry picked it up from its previous owner. In the past year the place has come back to life. While Harry secured iffy bank loans and scrounged for secondhand kitchen equipment, his wife retooled the whole of the diner. Isabelle swears she had no plan in mind besides restoring cleanliness and order, but one look inside Rollie’s and you’re forced to doubt her. She went back to the basics, scrubbed and rescrubbed the tilework and taught herself how to regrout. She stripped an awful yellow paint job from the booths, brought them down to the original wood, and then stained them into a subtle sheen. She recovered the torn stools, sanded down windowsills, spent hours scraping grease from the grill’s backing wall.

And when everything passed her severe standards, she took the diner a step further. She branded it with the stamp of Harry and Isabelle, personalized it, made it unquestionably theirs. She went about this last step with the devotion and scrupulousness of a borderline fanatic. She mined their native cultures and combined the results for a weird but pleasing style. Two framed and matted maps of Cambodia and Puerto Rico now hang over each doorway. Shelves are crammed with carvings, curios, talismans from each homeland. The cash register is watched over by statues of both the Buddha and St. Anthony. It’s as if Isabelle has formed a tiny new nation composed of artifacts from two very different worlds. And it’s as if this minute, barrel-roofed nation immediately transcended its origins and wound up stronger and more peaceful than its forebears.

Dr. Woo has been waiting ten minutes, studying the decor, when Lenore comes through the door. She’d given him directions that were a little more vague than was necessary and she’d wondered more than once about whether he’d make it. She says, “How goes the war?” to Harry’s cousin Lon as she walks past the counter and slides into Woo’s booth. Lon closes his eyes, grows a huge smile, and nods rapidly. Lenore thinks he’s got a monster crush on her.

“Any trouble finding the place?” Lenore asks, sliding out of her jacket. The diner is always a little bit overheated.

“Not at all,” Woo says too fast. “You give excellent directions. One of the benefits of police experience, I suppose.”

Lenore grimaces and makes a fast, reflexive shushing sound. She realizes she’ll have to explain this, though she doesn’t want to.

Woo looks around and asks, “Have I said something wrong?”

Lenore raises her eyebrows. “It’s just that nobody here knows I’m a cop and, I don’t know, I’d rather keep it that way.”

Woo looks interested. He lowers his voice conspiratorially. “You think that their attitude toward you would change if they knew you were a police officer?”

Lenore shrugs. “No idea. Probably not. I don’t know. I just like this place. I kind of stumbled upon it and so far it isn’t real popular. It hasn’t been profiled in the newspaper yet. It’s still mine right now. I just don’t want to endanger — what is this?”

Woo doesn’t know how to answer the question. This woman suddenly seems a lot more erratic than he’d thought at the briefing.

“What is what?” he finally says, trying to show the confusion on his face.

Lenore lets out a deep breath. “Look, I’m working on a few hours of sleep here. A few hours out of like the past twenty-four. I mean, you asked me to lunch, remember. I assumed there was something you wanted to discuss regarding the briefing. I knew this wasn’t a good idea.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you, Miss Thomas,” Woo begins, but Lenore interrupts, saying, “It’s Detective Thomas,” then she hesitates and softens slightly, “or Lenore. Just call me Lenore, okay?”

“And you may call me Fred,” Woo says.

“Are you serious?” Lenore asks.

“I don’t understand,” Woo says.

“Whatever you say. Freddy it is. Your friends call you that?”

Woo is on the verge of being affronted. He says simply, “That is my name.”

By way of a semi-apology, Lenore mumbles, “Tell you the truth, I’ve never been crazy about ‘Lenore,’ you know?”

There’s a couple of seconds of silence as they both stare sideways up at the menu board. Then Woo asks, “How did you find this place?”

Lenore smiles, indicating that she likes the question, and Woo is pleased. “Okay,” she says, “my old man was a mailman, right? This neighborhood was one of his routes. And a couple times a week he’d eat lunch in here. Always the same thing. Cup of ham and bean soup and a grilled cheese sandwich. Back then it was owned by Rollie. The original Rollie. From the name, you know? So my father took us, my brother and my mom, here once or twice. I was pretty young. Then Rollie died and the place closed down for a while. Then it reopened and changed owners about every other year. Got real run-down. Got to look like a place you just didn’t want to eat in. Then Harry and Isabelle bought it and cleaned it up again. I was working one night, over a year ago I guess, and I could not stay awake. I usually don’t have that problem, but this one night, Jesus, I was just out. I was working, stakeout, you know, about a block away from here. Down off Ironhouse Avenue. And I came in here for a coffee. And that was it.”

“That was it,” Woo repeats.

Lenore nods. “Yeah. The coffee was great and the place was great. And Harry was wonderful. I mean, charming. That’s the word I would have to use. Charming. So I started coming in a couple of times a week for lunch …”

“Just like your father,” Woo inserts, pleased with himself.

“Yeah, right,” Lenore says. “Just like my old man. And I got to know Isabelle, and then a bunch of the relatives.”

“And now,” Woo says, vaguely gesturing with his hands, “you’re a regular.”

“I guess so,” Lenore says flatly, secretly pleased by the comment.

“So what’s good?” Woo asks, and it’s a second before Lenore understands that he’s referring to the lunch menu.