When the president of a toy company, guilty of a tragic negligence, is sentenced to a year of minimum-wage work in an Oregon diner, he loses his familiar Manhattan privileges. But Giles Gibson, now "Tony," gradually learns to appreciate the tangles and complexities of "ordinary" lives, and those who somehow manage to keep on going with compassion and wit. The diner's (secretly kindhearted) boss has other secrets too, as does the curmudgeonly cook. (He'd gone AWOL from Vietnam half a century earlier.) Much of the novel is set in Sunnyside Up, the diner where staff and customers mingle. There's a drug ring just outside town, headed by the ex-sheriff, a lavender farm whose workers tend to be undocumented, a gay couple who aren't quite in or out of the closet.... Each character is an individual, created uniquely by Shari Lane's colors, textures, language, subtle symbols, and deep sense of balance.