Peyton

At the very minimum, Peyton St. Germaine expected a private interview. When she’d asked her dad for money for gas ―gas, for God’s sakes, not clothes, not shoes, not a designer bag or a weekend in New York with her best friends, but just a few bucks for gasoline― and he’d handed her the help-wanted ads (the ad for Mo’s Diner circled in red), she assumed he had at least called the owner to arrange a one-on-one. He owed her that much, didn’t he? Couldn’t he at least try to make the whole ordeal just a little more bearable? Apparently not. Instead she found herself dumped in a room with three other job applicants like she was a complete nobody. Like she’d just wandered in off the street.

She shifted in her seat, barely containing her simmering resentment. This wasn’t supposed to be happening. Not to her, for God’s sake. In her old life, she wouldn’t even eat here, let alone work here. Exercising what she considered remarkable restraint, she forced her anger aside for the moment and trained her thoughts on what Gloria Reed, the owner of Mo’s, was saying.

“Everything we serve comes from farms within a fifty mile radius,” Gloria said, explaining the diner’s ‘locally grown’ philosophy. She was tall and fit, attractive in that Vermonty sort of way: no-make-up, hand-dyed silk pants, Peruvian sandals. Dark eyes and dark, curly hair, cropped pixie-short and just beginning to show signs of gray. Peyton guessed her to be somewhere in her early fifties. “We buy local, we sell local, we hire local. Saving the planet, one hamburger at a time.”

Fabulous: an aging hippie with a mission.