Pie Before Sunrise
Lottie
The bell over the door rang at 4:51 in the morning, and I knew it was a football player before I turned around.
Nobody else in this town is awake at 4:51 on purpose. The drunks are asleep by then. The nurses use the drive-through on Route 9. The professors don’t exist before eight. But football players in summer are a special kind of animal. They get up in the dark, run until they throw up, and then they come looking for food like raccoons.
“We’re closed,” I said, without looking up from the dough.
“Door was open,” a voice said. Low. Warm. A little bit Southern around the edges.
“The door is always open. Otis fixed the lock in 2009 and it has hated him ever since. We open at six.”
I kept my hands moving. Butter, flour, ice water, fast fingers. Cold dough is good dough. My grandmother Birdie used to say pie crust can smell fear, and if you hesitate, it gets tough on purpose.
Behind me, a booth creaked. The back booth. The one with the crack in the red vinyl that bites the back of your thigh if you wear shorts.
I turned around.
He was enormous. Not fat. Just built on a bigger plan than the rest of us. He was folded into the back booth like a lawn chair somebody had shoved into a closet, knees up against the table, shoulders wider than the seat. Gray university T-shirt, dark with sweat at the collar. A navy number seven printed on the chest. One big hand flat on the table like he needed it to stay up.
He smiled at me. It was a lot of smile for 4:52 in the morning.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Six. I heard you. I’m just gonna sit here real quiet till then. You won’t even know I’m here.”
“You’re the size of a refrigerator. I’ll know.”
“Quiet refrigerator,” he said. “The good kind. Saves energy.”
I did not laugh. I want that on the record. My mouth moved a little, but that was the cold from the walk-in.
“Coffee’s not ready,” I said.
“I don’t need coffee.”
“Everybody needs coffee.”
“I need,” he said slowly, and his eyes went to the glass pie case on the counter, empty and clean and waiting, “whatever that smell is.”
The smell was blueberry. Four pies in the oven, eleven minutes left. The whole diner was full of it, hot fruit and butter and the burnt-sugar edge where juice had bubbled over onto the oven floor.
“Those are for the case,” I said. “They have to cool. You cut a hot pie, it runs all over the plate. It’s a crime.”
“I’d commit a crime.”
“Not in my diner.”
“Is it your diner?”
That stopped me for half a second. It wasn’t my diner. It was Otis Brummel’s diner. The sign out front said SYCAMORE DINER in green letters with the Y burnt out, so at night it said S CAMORE, and the students thought that was the funniest thing in the world. Otis was seventy-one and he owned it, and I baked the pies, and some days that felt like the same thing.
“The pies are mine,” I said.
“Then I’ll wait for the pies.”
He put his head down on his folded arms. Right there, on the table, like a kid in a classroom.
I stared at him. “You’re not sleeping in my booth.”
“I’m not sleeping,” he said into his arms. “I’m resting my eyes. It’s different. My mama does it in church every Sunday. Says the Lord can see her better that way.”
“That’s not how that works.”
He didn’t answer.
I waited. Ten seconds. Twenty. The fryer hissed in the back where Otis was heating it up. The radio on the shelf played a farm report very softly, corn prices and rain. Out the front window, Sycamore Street was blue-black and empty, and half a block down, the lights on University Avenue blinked yellow for nobody.
His shoulders went up and down. Slow. Heavy.
He was asleep.
I should have woken him up. That was the rule. Otis had three rules: no sleeping in booths, no credit, and no singing along to the radio before seven. I broke the third one every day. I had never broken the first.
But I looked at him, and I looked at his hand. It had slid off the table and hung by his knee, and the knuckles were raw and red, and there was white tape around two fingers. And I thought about how my grandmother used to let the night-shift men from the canning plant sleep in this exact booth, back when there was a canning plant. She’d put a blanket over them and tell Otis to mind his business.
I went back to my dough.
The timer went off at 5:03. I pulled the pies out one at a time, and they were perfect. Dark purple bubbling up through the lattice, the top crust golden and cracked with sugar. I set them on the rack by the back window to cool and did not look at the booth.
At 5:20 I made the coffee.
At 5:31 Otis came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a towel. He was small and bent and bald, with eyebrows like two white caterpillars, and he looked at the booth, and then he looked at me.
“Charlotte,” he said.
“I know.”
“Rule one.”
“I know, Otis.”
He looked at the booth again. Then he sighed, the long sigh he saves for the city council and the price of eggs, and he went back into the kitchen without another word.
At 5:40 I poured a mug of coffee, black, and walked it to the back booth. I set it down hard enough to make a sound.
He woke up the way big dogs wake up. All at once. Head up, eyes open, already smiling, like the world had better be good because he was ready for it.
“Oh, no,” he said. “No, no. What time is it?”
“Five forty.”
“Shoot.” He sat up and his knee hit the table and the coffee jumped. He caught the mug before it went over. Fast hands. Really fast. “Workouts at six. I gotta— I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to actually— That’s on me. I’m so sorry, ma’am.”
“Stop calling me ma’am. I’m not your teacher.”
“What do I call you?”
“You don’t. You leave.”
He laughed. It was a good laugh, I’ll give him that. Big and easy and surprised, like I’d pulled a coin out of his ear.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. But can I buy a slice first? To go. I’ll eat it in the truck.”
“They’re still warm.”
“I like it runny.”
“It’s a crime,” I said again.
“So arrest me,” he said, and stood up, and kept standing up. He was taller than the menu board. “I’m serious. I been smelling that for forty-five minutes in my sleep. I dreamed about it. I’m gonna run sprints today thinking about it, and I’m gonna throw up thinking about it. Least you can do is let me eat it first.”
That was disgusting. It was also kind of fair.
I cut him a slice. It ran all over the plate, purple and shining. I slid it into a foam box, shut the lid and handed it to him.
“On the house,” I said. “For being a quiet refrigerator.”
He didn’t take it. He went still, and the smile stayed on his face, but something behind it changed.
“I can’t take free stuff,” he said.
“It’s pie.”
“Doesn’t matter what it is. I’m not allowed. There’s a whole office on campus with people who check. I take a free slice, somebody films it, and I’m in a room with a lady named Ms. Thibodeaux explaining myself for three hours.” He pulled a folded twenty out of the back pocket of his shorts. “What’s a slice?”
“Four fifty.”
“Then here’s twenty.”
“I don’t have change yet. The register’s not open.”
“Then keep it.”
“That’s not how paying works either.”
“Ma’am,” he said, and caught himself, and grinned. “Sorry. Miss Pie. I’ll be back tomorrow. Put it on the tab.”
“We don’t do tabs. We don’t do credit. That’s rule two.”
“What’s rule one?”
I looked at the back booth. He looked at it too. Then he looked at me, and his eyes were very warm, and he didn’t say anything about the forty-five minutes I’d let him sleep. Not a word. He just nodded once, slow, like he was saying thank you in a language he thought I could hear.
He put the twenty on the counter, square under the sugar jar so it couldn’t blow away. He took his pie.
“Five o’clock tomorrow?” he asked.
“We open at six.”
“I know,” he said. “I heard you the first time.”
The bell rang when he left. Through the window I watched him jog to a dusty black pickup at the curb, the pie box held flat on one palm like a waiter’s tray. He set it on the passenger seat. Then he put a seat belt around it.
He put a seat belt around my pie.
I turned back to the counter and found Otis in the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, eyebrows high.
“Don’t,” I said.
“You know who that is?”
“A man who sleeps in booths.”
“That’s Deon Marsh.” Otis said it the way people in this town say the name of a saint or a tornado. “Starting quarterback. He’s on the billboard by the Walgreens.”
“I don’t look at billboards.”
“He’s on the side of the bus, Charlotte.”
“I don’t look at buses.”
Otis shook his head and went back to his fryer, muttering. I picked up the twenty. It was soft and warm from his pocket. I opened the register at six like always, rang up one slice of blueberry, and put the change in an envelope. I wrote on the front in black marker: #7. Change. Not a tab.
I did not think about him for the rest of the day.
I thought about him eleven times. Twelve, if you count the moment I caught myself cutting the first slice of the next blueberry pie extra wide, and cut it back down to normal, and then stood there holding the knife like a fool.
The next morning, the bell rang at 4:50.
“Still closed,” I said to my dough.
“Still a quiet refrigerator,” he said, and the back booth creaked.
I didn’t turn around. I didn’t have to. I could feel him back there, big and warm and settled, like weather.
“I brought you something,” he said.
“I don’t want it.”
“It’s not for you. It’s for the booth.” I heard something land on the table. “The tape on that crack’s worn out. It bit me twice yesterday. I got athletic tape in the truck. Strongest tape in the world. Holds my ankles on.”
I turned around despite myself. He was kneeling on the floor beside the booth, tearing white tape with his teeth and pressing it over the split vinyl with his thumb. Careful. Neat. Long even strips.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said.
“I know I don’t.” He smoothed the last piece down. “There. Now it won’t bite.”
He climbed back into the booth and folded his arms on the table. He didn’t put his head down. He just looked at me.
I walked over and set the envelope beside his elbow. #7. Change. Not a tab.
He read it. His mouth twitched. He slid it into his pocket without arguing, which surprised me, and then he put a fresh twenty under the sugar jar, which did not surprise me at all.
“What’s your name?” he asked. “Your real one. Not Miss Pie.”
I wiped my hands on my apron. Flour, butter, and a smear of blueberry from yesterday that would never come out.
“Lottie,” I said.
“Lottie.” He said it slowly, like he was tasting it. “That’s a good name. That’s a pie name.”
“It’s a grandmother name.”
“Same thing,” said Deon Marsh, starting quarterback, the man on the side of the bus. Then he put his head down on my newly taped table and fell asleep in about four seconds, and I stood there with my floury hands and my stupid heart and listened to him breathe.
The Back Booth
Deon
Here is what nobody tells you about being the starting quarterback in July. Everybody needs something from you, all day, and none of them are wrong.
The freshmen need you at six in the morning, because they’re scared and homesick and some of them have never lifted a real weight in their lives, and they throw up behind the bleachers and look at you like you can fix it. The coaches need you at film, sharp, talking, leading. The receivers need you to stay after and throw till your arm goes numb. The reporter from the local paper needs a quote about leadership. My mama in Macon needs to hear my voice on Sunday, steady and happy, because she works doubles at the hospital laundry and has my two baby sisters to raise, and she has built a whole careful plan on the idea that her son is going to the league.
So I’m steady. I’m happy. I’m the guy on the bus who tells the babies to breathe. That’s my job, and I’m good at it, and I mean it every time.
But by June of my senior summer, I was not sleeping. I lay in my apartment off Fairmont with the fan going and my eyes open, running plays in the dark, and at four in the morning I’d give up and drive. I didn’t know where I was going the first time. I just saw a light on in a diner with half a sign and smelled something through the open door that made me think of my grandmother’s kitchen.
And then there was Lottie.
By the second week I knew some things.
I knew she came down the back stairs at four, because she lived in the apartment over the diner, and that the stairs had one loud step, the fifth one, which she skipped. I knew she wore a blue bandana over dark curls that tried to escape it all morning. I knew she had a burn scar on her left forearm, shiny and pale, shaped a little like Florida, and that she rubbed it with her thumb when she was thinking. I knew she was twenty-four, because Otis told me, and that she’d been baking in that kitchen since she was six, because Otis told me that too. Otis talked to me more than she did.
I knew she sang along to the radio before seven, even though there was a rule against it, and that she sang low and slightly flat, and that she stopped the second she remembered I was there.
“Don’t stop,” I said the first time.
“You’re asleep.”
“I’m resting my eyes.”
“You were snoring.”
“I was harmonizing.”
She threw a dish towel at me. It landed on my head and I left it there, and I heard it then, very small, from behind the counter. A laugh. One short breath of one. She killed it fast, like she was embarrassed it got out, but I heard it, and I kept it.
I knew she had a gap between her two front teeth that showed only when she forgot to be annoyed with me. I’d seen it three times. I was keeping count.
And I knew her pie was the best thing I had ever put in my mouth, and I have eaten my mama’s peach cobbler at Easter, so I don’t say that lightly.
She made a different one every morning. Blueberry Monday. Cherry Tuesday. Wednesday was buttermilk, which I had never heard of and now would fight for. Thursday was peach. Friday was a chocolate one with a crust made of crushed salty crackers that made the linemen weep real tears when I brought them a box. Saturday she didn’t make pie at all, because on Saturdays she made cinnamon rolls the size of a catcher’s mitt, and the line went out the door and around the corner.
The second week, she started setting a slice on my table at 5:40, next to the coffee, without asking.
The first day she did that, I reached for my wallet.
“No,” she said. “You fixed my booth. Your money’s no good here anymore. Pie’s on the house. Shut up and eat.”
“Lottie—”
“Shut up,” she said, “and eat.”
So I said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and I ate. And on the way out, while she was in the back pulling the next batch, I stopped at the register where Otis was counting quarters, and I put down a ten.
Otis looked at the ten. He looked at me. His white eyebrows climbed his forehead.
“She said it’s on the house,” he said.
“Yes, sir. And I can’t take it. You know that. I know that. She don’t need to know that.”
Otis studied me a long moment. Then he punched the old register, wrote something on a green order ticket, and stabbed it onto the long metal spike by the window, hard, like he was killing it.
“She’ll be mad,” he said.
“She’s always mad.”
“No,” said Otis. “That’s just her face.”
So that was our deal, me and Otis. Two men who did not need to talk about it.
Workouts that week were a furnace. I ran with the slow group, because somebody had to, and I talked the whole way. Breathe, baby. One more line. Your legs are lying to you.
After, in the film room, the air-conditioning hummed and everybody slumped in their chairs like wet laundry. Except Hale.
Beck Hale was a junior, our backup, number fourteen, and he sat in the same chair every day, the one with its back to the window. He had a scar through his left eyebrow and a navy cord tied around his left wrist, and he didn’t talk much. While the rest of us stared at the screen, he drew. Every play the coaches ran, he drew on his pad in clean little lines, like a map, faster than the film could move.
I dropped into the chair next to him. “What you got, Picasso?”
He didn’t look up. “Cover two. Safety cheats left on every third down. He’s tired. He wants to go home.”
“Don’t we all.”
“No,” Beck said. “You don’t. You want to go to a diner.”
I turned my head slowly. “Excuse me?”
“You smell like cinnamon every morning. Your truck’s parked on Sycamore at five. I drive past to the pool.” He said it flat, no tease in it, like he was reading me a play. “You’re happier after. You smile less with your whole face and more with your eyes.”
The room got real quiet around us. A couple of linemen turned around.
“Rook,” I said, “we’re gonna talk about privacy.”
“Okay,” said Beck, and went back to drawing.
The linemen did not go back to anything. One of them, Ty, leaned over the back of his chair. “Is it a girl? Is Deon Marsh in love with a girl who makes pie?”
“Turn around.”
“It’s a girl,” Ty told the room. “Oh, it’s a girl. Look at his ears.”
My ears were fine. My ears were completely fine.
I threw a water bottle at Ty, gently, and the lights went down. In the dark, with the film flickering, I looked at Beck’s pad. He’d drawn a little square in the corner, away from the plays. A table. A booth. A round thing on a plate with lines across the top. A lattice.
I didn’t say anything. Neither did he. But I took a picture of it with my phone when nobody was looking, and I still have it.
On Friday of the second week, I asked her out.
I did it wrong. I knew it while I was doing it. It was 5:40 and she’d just set down the chocolate pie with the cracker crust, and she was turning to go, and I said, “Come to dinner with me,” in my normal voice, too fast, like a play call.
She stopped. She didn’t turn around.
“I work dinner,” she said.
“Not every night.”
“Every night that matters.”
“Then come to breakfast with me. Somewhere else. Somewhere you don’t have to make it.”
She turned then. Her arms were crossed over her apron, and her chin was up, and she looked at me the way a cornerback looks at a receiver he’s already read.
“Deon,” she said. It was the first time she’d said my name. It went straight through me like a hit I never saw coming. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“How long are you here?”
I knew what she meant. I didn’t want to say it. “One more season.”
“And then?”
“And then wherever the draft sends me. Or wherever I can get a job. Or home, if it all goes wrong.”
“Right,” she said. “So. Students leave. That’s what students do. They come in here for four years, they eat my pie, they cry in that booth over a breakup or a grade, and then they get a diploma and a moving truck, and I never see them again. Football players leave faster.” She lifted one shoulder. “I’m not mad about it. It’s just how the town works. I’m the town. You’re the season.”
“That’s a real sad way to look at it.”
“It’s a real way to look at it.”
I sat with that. The radio played something old and soft. Otis clattered a pan in the back.
“Okay,” I said.
She blinked. “Okay?”
“Okay. You said no. I heard it.” I picked up my fork. “I’m gonna keep eating pie, though.”
“That’s fine.”
“Every morning.”
“That’s what the pie is for.”
“And I’m gonna keep asking. Not every day. I’m not trying to be a pest. Just now and then. Like weather.” I took a bite of the chocolate pie, and it was so good I closed my eyes. “You can keep saying no. I’ll keep hearing it. But I’m here till the season ends, and I’m stubborn, and you make a crust that tastes like somebody loves me.”
She stood there a long time.
“That’s not how a crust works,” she finally said. Her voice wasn’t steady.
“Feels like it is,” I said.
She went back behind the counter. She didn’t sing for the rest of the morning. But when I got up to leave, and stopped at the register, and Otis took my ten and stabbed the ticket on the spike, I heard her humming in the kitchen, low and flat and sweet.
It was the next Friday that Otis’s back went out.
I heard it before I saw it. A clang from the kitchen, a sharp word I’d never heard a seventy-one-year-old man say, and Lottie’s voice going high and scared. “Otis? Otis, don’t move. Don’t— I said don’t move!”
I was out of the booth and through the swinging door before I thought about it. Otis was bent over the prep table, holding on with both hands, his face gray. Lottie had her arms around his middle like she could hold him up by love alone.
“It’s nothing,” Otis said through his teeth. “It’s the old thing.”
“It’s not nothing,” Lottie said. “You can’t stand up.”
I got on Otis’s other side. “Mr. Brummel, I’m gonna help you sit. Lean on me. All your weight. I lift heavier than you before breakfast.”
It took both of us to get him to the chair by the back door. Lottie called his daughter, who lived twenty minutes out, and she came and took him to the doctor, and I stood in the kitchen with Lottie while the coffee burned on the hot plate because nobody had remembered it.
She turned the coffee off. Her hands were shaking.
“He’ll be okay,” I said.
“He’ll be okay,” she agreed. “He’ll be flat on his back for two weeks. He did this three years ago.” She pressed her palms against her eyes. “And tomorrow’s the Fourth.”
“What happens on the Fourth?”
She laughed, and it wasn’t a happy laugh. “The parade comes down University at ten. Every family in the county parks on Sycamore. We open at six and we don’t stop till the fireworks. Three hundred people. Birdie used to call it the Big Day. Otis works the grill. I do everything else. And now I’ve got no grill, no Otis, and a girl named Kayleigh who works register and cries if a customer yells.”
“So close for the day.”
“We don’t close on the Fourth.” She said it like I’d suggested burning the place down. “We have never closed on the Fourth. Not when Birdie had the flu. Not the year the roof leaked. Not ever.”
I looked around the kitchen. The big flat grill. The deep fryers. The rack of pie tins and the walk-in cooler and the three-ring binder of Otis’s recipes, stained and fat and older than me.
“What time do you need me?” I asked.
She lowered her hands. “I don’t.”
“Five?”
“Deon. You have practice.”
“It’s the Fourth. Coach gave us the day. Even the weight room’s locked.” I grinned at her. “And I make a real good pancake. My mama taught me. I’m not saying I’m Otis. I’m saying I’m big, I’m fast, and I take orders from scary people all the time.”
“I’m not scary.”
“Lottie,” I said gently, “you’re the scariest person I’ve ever met.”
She looked at me for a long time. Her eyes were wet and furious and something else, something I’d been waiting two weeks to see.
“Four thirty,” she said. “Not five. Four thirty. And if you burn a single pancake, Marsh, I’ll put you in the fryer.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and this time she didn’t tell me to stop.
Flour on the Fourth
Lottie
He was on the sidewalk at 4:22, holding two coffees from the gas station and wearing an apron that said KISS THE COOK in red letters.
“No,” I said, unlocking the door that didn’t lock.
“It was the only one at the Dollar General.”
“You went to the Dollar General at four in the morning to buy an apron.”
“I take this seriously, Lottie.” He held out a coffee. “Also, I don’t trust your coffee before five. It tastes like a punishment.”
I took the coffee. It was terrible. I drank all of it.
By six, he’d made two hundred pancakes.
I’m not exaggerating. I counted the batter. He stood at Otis’s grill with a spatula in each hand and the KISS THE COOK apron stretched across his chest, and he flipped pancakes in rows like he was reading a defense. Left to right. Pour, wait, bubbles, flip. Pour, wait, bubbles, flip. He hummed while he did it. He talked to them.
“Come on, baby. You got it. Don’t rush. There you go.”
“Are you coaching the pancakes?”
“Pancakes need love too,” he said, and slid six perfect golden circles onto a plate without looking.
By ten, the parade was coming down University, and every booth was full, and people were standing three deep at the counter, and the noise was a wall. Kayleigh cried once, in the walk-in, for ninety seconds, and then came out and took orders like a soldier. Deon ran the grill and the fryer and carried bus tubs of dirty dishes over his head through the crowd like a waiter in a movie. Kids stared at him. Their fathers stared harder.
“Are you Deon Marsh?” a man in a flag shirt asked, holding his eggs.
“No, sir,” Deon said. “I’m the dishwasher. But I hear that guy’s real handsome.”
The man laughed so hard he had to sit down.
I made pie. I made more pie than I have ever made in my life. Cherry, because it’s red. Blueberry, because it’s blue. A buttermilk with whipped cream on top for the white. Birdie called it the flag set, and I made it every Fourth because she did, and because if I stopped, then she was really gone.
At one point I looked up from the dough and he was watching me from the grill. Not the way men watch me when they want something. He was watching my hands. The way I folded the edges. The way I pressed my thumb into the crust to make the little waves.
“What?” I said.
“You do it without looking,” he said. “Like it’s in your fingers.”
“It is in my fingers. Birdie taught me when I was six. She stood behind me on a milk crate and put her hands on mine and we did it together till I could do it alone.”
“Teach me.”
“You have pancakes.”
“After,” he said. “Teach me after.”
We closed at nine, the way we always do on the Fourth, fifteen minutes before the fireworks start over the stadium. Deon said, “Y’all should see them,” to Kayleigh and to me, like the diner was his, and Kayleigh’s mother picked her up with a sparkler already lit, and then it was just us.
The kitchen was a disaster. Flour on every surface. Syrup on the ceiling, somehow. Six hundred pancakes and nine hundred dishes.
“Leave it,” he said.
“I can’t leave it.”
“You can leave it for twenty minutes. Come on.” He pushed the back door open with his hip. “Fireworks.”
The back door opens onto three cement steps and an alley where the dumpster lives, and past the dumpster, over the roof of the laundromat, you can see the top of the stadium lights. Birdie used to sit on those steps with a cigarette she wasn’t supposed to have and tell me the stadium was a spaceship. When I was little, I believed her.
I sat on the top step. He sat on the one below, because if he sat beside me, we wouldn’t both fit. Even one step down, his head came up to my shoulder.
The first firework went up gold and broke open over the stadium with a sound like a door slamming far away. Then red. Then a white one that hung there and fell down slow, like glitter in water.
“Oh,” I said, before I could stop myself.
He didn’t look at the sky. I could feel him not looking at it.
“You’ve got flour,” he said quietly. “On your face.”
“I’ve got flour everywhere.”
“Right here.” He turned on the step and reached up, slow, so slow I could have moved away a dozen times. His thumb touched my cheekbone. Brushed once. It was the gentlest thing a hand that big has ever done. “There.”
I didn’t breathe. A green firework opened over us and lit his face from above, and he wasn’t smiling. That was the thing that undid me. Deon Marsh, who smiled at everyone, who smiled at freshmen and old men and pancakes, was not smiling at me. He was looking at me like I was a question he’d been trying to answer for two weeks.
“Lottie,” he said. “I’m gonna ask you something, and you can say no. You’ve said no before. I always hear it.”
My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
“I want to kiss you,” he said. “Right now. On these steps. And if you tell me no, I’ll go home and I’ll come back at four fifty tomorrow and sit in my booth and never say a word about it.” His thumb was still on my cheek. It wasn’t moving. It was waiting. “So tell me. Yes or no.”
Above us the sky broke open in red and gold, and the whole town cheered from somewhere far away, and I opened my mouth to tell him no.
