The Men She Left Behind

By STEVE LOPEZ

Harry loved a girl named Diane. He guesses he was 12 when the very sight of her--the hazel-eyed beauty from the next town over in North Carolina--knocked him back on his heels. "I think it might have been at a church social," he says, 59 now and dusted at the temples. Harry courted her with the little time he didn't spend working the tobacco and cotton fields his family farmed: "We wrote to each other when I went away in the service. She was my military sweetheart."

They moved north and were married in 1965, and 30 years ago, they opened a restaurant that became an institution in downtown Newark, N.J. SOUL OF THE SOUTH, HEART OF THE CITY, say the place mats at Je's Restaurant, where Harry and Diane worked alongside each other. They raised three handsome sons and sent them to college, and all three, despite other pursuits, continued to help their parents run the restaurant that became Newark's kitchen.

"This is home--you know what I mean? This is the place, and Diane was the soul of it," says David Morton, a police officer. Morton and thousands of others are part of a family of regulars who come for grits and home fries, catfish and okra, smothered chicken and peach cobbler. Je's after Sunday Mass is a sight, Newark all dressed up in finery and extended families marching straight from the hallelujah to the harvest.

"This was her pride and joy," Harry says of his wife, Christmas decorations all around as he stands behind the counter in his white apron. And so it was, but there was a price for the success of Je's. The same price we all pay when, in balancing a work life with a home life, work too often wins. "If you got a break for a minute on a Sunday, you'd look out and see all these families together," says Jason, 29, who came after Harry Jr., 30, and before Chad, 24. "It was hard to deal with sometimes, because we never got a chance to do that. We worked side by side, but that wasn't the same as being together as a family." The four Sutton men begged Mom to slow down, maybe close Je's two days a week instead of just one, but she couldn't stop.

"I'm a sharecropper's daughter," she would tell Harry Sr., and that said everything. Newark needed to be fed, so she catered free meals to charities, and if someone knocked at the back door hungry and penniless, she couldn't say no. To the very end, that was Diane. "We were at home that night, and she had trouble breathing," Harry says, eyes glistening. "She started coughing, and next thing, she was unconscious." Chad performed CPR on his mother, 58, who had no history of serious illness. Harry called 911 and kept pleading with his wife, who was having a heart attack. "You just can't leave me like this!" They were close to retirement, the house nearly paid for, the boys self-sufficient. Harry had this saying for himself: prepare to die and hope to live. But he wasn't ready for Diane to go. "You just can't leave me like this!"

Diane Sutton passed on that August night, and for days, customers left flowers outside Je's. To Harry, it feels as if she died yesterday. The faces at the counter, the light through the window, the time on the clock--the meaning of it all escapes Harry, who lost his girl and can't find his way. He and the boys will keep Je's open for now, but they won't work themselves to death like she did. There will be a different balance now. "You spend your whole life working, planning for the day when you can take some time together, and then it's gone," Harry says, beautiful with pain and touched by grace, his wife's reflection in every glance. "I don't know what it means."

It means that for all the unexplainable mysteries of life, the grounding truth is that Harry loved a girl named Diane, and she returned his love in ways that will carry him. He sees her in his sons, in his granddaughter, in the stream of customers who keep coming in. Once he gets through Christmas, it will be easier. Christmas Day would have been Harry and Diane's 35th wedding anniversary.

E-mail your story ideas to Steve_Lopez@timeinc.com