Dusty Springfield at The Pie and Pancake

Two stars was a cause for celebration.

We had only ever gotten one star up to that point. Just about everybody in Scoville had taken the time to stretch out their keyboard fingers and let us have it at one point or another. The pie usually took the worst of it. Casey Ann said she wouldn’t serve that pie to a dying dog, but I didn’t mind the key lime. The custard? No, thank you, but the key lime you could eat if you were starving enough for it. Casey Ann just has refined taste, because before she was a waitress, she used to be married to a car salesman. They would go out for filet and wine once a week at Joey Baker’s Steakhouse over in Tassalane. Then she caught him cheating with their daughter’s math tutor, and now she’s on her feet here every night complaining about one thing or another. I pretend to listen to her while I refill the ketchup.

“Two stars,” she was saying to me on her fourth smoke break in two hours, “Who the hell would give us two stars?”

We were behind the diner enjoying our sweet ten that would’ve been an even sweeter fifteen. We kept poking our heads back into the kitchen to see if Ben Ben noticed that we weren’t back yet. The owner of The Pie and Pancake also doubled as its head chef and baker. Most nights, Ben Ben was too deep in the weeds to keep an eye on how hard we were milking one of our breaks, but if he was paying attention and we went over, we’d get a Turkish tongue lashing like you wouldn’t believe.

Ben Ben opened The Pie and Pancake six years ago after his third wife left him for his second-youngest brother. Out of those six years, I think he’s had three good nights. The first was the time The Harlem Globetrotters stopped in and took a picture with him before catching food poisoning from the tuna melts and whining about it online. The second was when we finally caught that mouse that’d been terrorizing us for the better part of a summer. We set him free near the dumpster and I’m pretty sure he’s returned to his home in one of the flour bags, but we all felt pretty satisfied nonetheless.

The third good night was when somebody donated a jukebox to us. We all thought we were working a true diner once that thing showed up, because only real diners have jukeboxes. It was full-on Happy Days-style with all the colors and the click-click as the record fell into place. Ben Ben was feeling pretty proud that evening. So proud, in fact, that he let me choose the very first song we’d play from that jukebox.

I picked my mother’s favorite--

Dusty Springfield.

When I was a little girl, my mother would put on Dusty Springfield when she was getting us ready to go to church, and I’d sing at the top of my lungs like I was a megaphone in a Sunday dress. My top song of hers was “Son of a Preacher Man” but we couldn’t play that one until Daddy was out in the car, because he thought it was sacrilegious.

When Dusty came up through that jukebox singing about Billy Ray, the entire place cheered. Even Casey Ann let out a whoop, and we thought that would be a new chapter for the Pie and Pancake. Ben Ben said he might even let the health inspector come by again after chasing him off with a shotgun four years in a row.

It wasn’t until somebody went to play a different song that we realized the jukebox was defunct. Once you picked a record, that’s all you were going to hear for the next who-knew-how-long. Dusty and Billy Ray would come on every hour on the hour for years after that and to this day. Damn machine turned out to be more of a clock than anything else. I guess we could have junked the juke, but Ben Ben said that would be a waste, and besides, he likes Dusty Springfield, because she did a concert in Istanbul once and his grandfather said it was the best show he’d ever seen.

Ben Ben’s grandfather was the one who got him cooking in the first place. When they came over to America, he opened the first version of Pie and Pancake in a little shack outside Frasier City. When that went belly up, his father tried again with the name P&P. He attached it to a gas station around Madison Junction. His attempt failed even faster than his father’s and after that he became one of those guys who sells shaved ice outside of hockey games. Ben Ben was not deterred, however, and as soon as he had the money saved up from being a line cook at more successful culinary establishments, he opened The Pie and Pancake. He thought putting a “the” in front of the name would make it sound more prestigious. Maybe if any of those guys had given more thought to cooking and less to naming, they would have had a hit on their hands, but as it turns out, none of them could flip a flapjack or accomplish an apple cream to save their lives.

The only reason the place is still open after all these years is because there isn’t much competition in Scoville. A lot of the folks who live here won’t take the time to drive to Joey Baker’s or even Sally’s Diner, which is just four miles--all highway. It doesn’t feel good to know you’re only getting by because of geography, but I know it could be worse. When my father died suddenly of a stroke sitting on one of those Sunday benches, my mother had to take over his car wash, and after that, she never played a record again. The only sound she produced was the tapping that comes from hitting a calculator too hard as the negatives unspooled on that starchy white paper. At least we never had to go back to church.

After much talk about our two star review, we still had to close up the diner early that night due to lack of customers. Ben Ben had printed the two stars along with the caption that read “Pie was all right. A little dry.” and scotch taped it to the front door. I thought Casey Ann was going to die then and there of mortification. The rave acclaim didn’t do much to get anybody else in there that day, and Ben Ben’s jubilation was extinguished by the quiet and the sound of a mouse chewing on what sounded like our latest celery order.

As we were locking up, Dusty came on and I started laughing. Death and taxes may be the only two certainties in life, but at The Pie and Pancake, Ms. Springfield was the third. My laughter must have had a little contagion in it, because Casey Ann started laughing too. We were at it for a good minute, before we heard a bellow behind us. It was the first time we’d ever heard Ben Ben make any kind of joyous noise. He was hooting so hard, tears were coming down his face as he tried to turn the key in the lock. The poor guy nearly broke it off, and that would have been enough for all of us to condemn the place once and for all.

Once we all collected ourselves, the door shut just fine, and I walked Casey Ann to her car the way I had done ever since we started working together. Above us, there were so many stars, I started to wish I could pull a few down and give them to Ben Ben just to make him feel better about how downhill we were all sledding. I knew eventually we’d hit rock bottom, but tonight, we were still a few feet above that.

I lived most of my life in that place so I know all about it. The way I see it, if you can see the end coming, it means you’re not there yet. So you may as well keep showing up, punching in, and praying the key lime tastes better than it did yesterday. I suppose it’d be nice to work somewhere good, but then again, being good isn’t always easy.

No matter how hard you try.