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The best apple pie on a stick is in Kulbert, Michigan.
Callie Whalen can smell it baking, every morning, before the Russell Ridge Diner starts cooking the “world famous corned beef hash” that probably isn’t world famous, but the truckers love it and often fill the lot at The Ridge, plus the field across the street from Callie’s house on Birch Run Road.
The soundtrack to Callie’s life is her sometime boyfriend Jake playing her love songs on a twelve string guitar Callie’s own brother had pawned at Fred’s Loan, and truck brakes.
And the sheriff’s department knocking on her door asking her if she saw anyone tampering with the Russell Ridge Diner sign.
Callie sent handwritten letters and emails to the Dalowna County Sheriff’s Department begging them not to knock on her door about the sign. Some of them comply, others bang on the door like she is harboring a fugitive.
She tells whoever knocks what they already know:
“There ain’t diddly shit for kids to do in Kulbert, and changing the damn sign at The Ridge is a tradition. Tell Lucien and Mollie to put the specials sign on a tall ass pole that’s hard for kids to reach and pretty please don’t knock on my door at 7am.”
Sometimes the cops knocked after they had already treated themselves to apple pie on a stick, the cop still sucking on the stick itself, soaked in cinnamon oil, just like Lucien’s granddaddy did it in 1971.
The sign changes are mostly harmless, sometimes funny.
The one Callie has seen most often is Nightly Trucker Specials being turned into Suck peNis.
Often Lucien and Mollie send a special wish to their regulars: Happy Retirement Calvin or to the community: Good Luck Fitzgerald High Graduates (many of whom have been salivating since seventh grade at the prospect of altering that particular sign their senior year).
Callie shivered off her sleepiness. Jake had kept her up with three drunken phone calls, the last of which she didn’t answer.
Smelling corned beef hash and not apple pie, she initially panicked that she had overslept and would be late to Radiant Dental. Then she realized it was Sunday, stretched and yawned.
She walked into the kitchen, grabbed a half full, half flat root beer and took a swig.
Church was still in session, because the car section of the parking lot at The Ridge was half empty.
If there was an exceptionally vulgar sign change on a Sunday, maybe the churchgoers would finally convince Lucien and Mollie to make the sign less accessible.
But if there was a vulgar sign, Callie probably would have gotten a door knock.
She burped, pulled back the curtain covering the window over the sink and looked.
The Russell Ridge Diner sign said: Will U maRy me CaliE W
Callie scratched her left thigh. Some kinda bug bite during the night. She pulled a bottle of aspirin off the top of the fridge, pulled out three and washed them down with the rest of the semi-fizzy root beer.
She looked at the sign again.
If it was her-well, I’d never do that in the first place- but if it was her, she’d have misspelled any other word to spell the person’s name correctly.
She called Jake.
“Hi Beautiful!” Jake answered.
He was gonna ask if she saw the sign. She could feel it. So she blurted:
“Jake, sweetheart, the answer is no. Ennn Ohhh. You’re super sweet, great at Karaoke, and I believe you when you say you’re gonna be shop foreman at Moravian & Blount before you’re thirty five. But darlin’, we are not gettin’ married anytime soon, probably ever, and, my little musclepuff, here’s a word of advice: Don’t ask a girl to marry you on a sign, especially one that usually says suck penis or dude get high fuck.”
***
There’s a musical Easter Egg in here. Good luck.
I bet “Good Luck Fitzgerald High Graduates” becomes “Get High Fuck Girls” whenever the high schoolers are able to get their hands on the sign.
You got me thinking with this one.