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Laura Anne hefted her aluminum tub onto a wide hip and banged through the steward’s door that led to the kitchen behind. Other restaurateurs would keep the mullet untaken by customers and refrigerate it for two, three more days or longer in an effort to avoid a loss of inventory and profit, but Laura Anne would rather buy sparingly and tell a customer, “Sorry, folks, we’re out,” than to give them a mullet gone stale.
    That kind of integrity, of course, was one of the several things that made folks drive to the coast from Lake City and Tallahasee or further to dine on hardwood plates at Laura Anne’s restaurant.
    The restaurant seated perhaps thirty tables around a central island and bar. A large, naked-beam interior was cooled with paddle fans and ten tons of air conditioning. Diners inside looked onto a wraparound verandah and patio that faced west to the Gulf of Mexico. The place was called, simply, “Ramona’s.” That designation derived from the diner’s first owner. Ramona Walker was a white woman, a staunch friend to Laura Anne and her husband, and also the victim of a brutal homicide. Laura Anne’s husband caught Ramona’s killer. Laura Anne rebuilt Ramona’s restaurant.
    But in her own image.
    The patio beyond the verandah was added, along with a wide, shaded boardwalk that extended out over the water. There were some changes inside, too. African American and Cajun recipes were added to the menu. Grits and crackers and jumbalai went well with seafood and steak. Bacon bits and green onions tasted good in hush puppies. But the biggest change in the restaurant was its personality. Ramona was a flirt, gregarious, voluptuous, and vulgar. Laura Anne was reserved, polite, and refined. Folks wondered how she’d get along with customers used to Ramona’s ready and provocative wit. What would Laura Anne bring that was distinctively hers to this place of community, this family-wide dining-in?
    What she brought was a piano.
    One of the first things Laura Anne hauled to the restaurant was her own, hard-earned instrument. It was a grand piano won just shy of Laura Anne’s twenty-first birthday in a competition sponsored at Emory University. Her formal background was in music education, and after Laura Anne’s family, the piano was still her first love. At first she reserved the instrument exclusively for herself, pausing from labor in the kitchen to simply relax or, occasionally, to entertain customers, opening the Steinway’s sounding board to the Gulf Coast to sounds never heard or imagined by the sunburned locals on Deacon Beach.
    These were erratic, solitary engagements. But then a pair of graduate students from the music department at Florida State came to Ramona’s looking for summer employment. There was the grand piano. Of course they might play, Laura Anne allowed. She had taught piano for years. She knew that this young man and woman would treat her instrument with respect. And so two job-seeking students became the first waiter and waitress to sit at Laura Anne’s coveted Steinway.
    Later that summer three more students came.
    Word got out that there was a place tucked away on a strip of coastline an hour from Tallahassee where you could eat and, with luck, hear a concert at the same time. Performances became numerous, if irregular. Locals were not, in truth, too much impressed with this change in ambiance, though they tolerated it well enough, knowing that Laura Anne loved her music, but for students seeking a summer gig, or for music aficionadoes seeking exotic fare, the combination of seaside food and uncertain concertos proved irresistible.
    Cellists and violinists brought their instruments to play alone or to accompany Laura Anne’s aproned pianists. Chamber music began to compete with country & western for the locals’ attention. There was still no schedule for these performances, of course, which brought an element of randomness