Boone tells me about how his mother grew up in the middle of nowhere, between Millen and Sardis, Georgia. Her parents raised her on a farm during the Great Depression, and work is what she knows. Walton picked cotton, milked cows, raised chickens.

“She was a farm girl, and even to this day she still has her hand in dirt,” Boone says. He shows me a corner full of flourishing succulents — a couple pots of Christmas Cactus, an unruly aloe. “She’s got a knack. I tell you what, she can find a stick on the ground and make it grow. I don't know how she does it, but she touches it, and it grows.”

”What do you remember about working here?” I ask her.

“I think I worked here part-time, didn’t I, son?” She did — on top of another full-time job in town. “You do what you have to do to raise five children.”

“Did you ever get to come here and just relax? Have a drink?” I ask.

“Nope. Nope. There was no relaxing time. I had five children.”

Boone adds, “In restaurants, you have lull time, so it’s pretty much the philosophy of, ‘If you’ve got time to lean, you’ve got time to clean.’”

“I always try to do the right thing,” Walton says. “I don’t know if I did or not, but I tried, and I’ve got five great children. I love them more than anything in the world.”

When Walton took the reins at Desposito’s, good help was nil.

“At one point, I almost got away, too,” Boone says. Walton’s four other children made other plans. But Boone was in his early 20s, cycling through odd jobs: He buried phone cables, restored furniture, joined the National Guard. He points to a photo on the wall in the dining room.

“That’s my guard unit,” he explains. “That’s me with the M16 on the end. The skinny, beanpole-lookin’ one.” It’s a rare image of Boone with no bandana on his head. “But one day I got the phone call. ‘Please help me.’”

He swivels his big green vinyl barstool toward Walton.

“I got a feeling that if I wanna stay living, even after I get rid of the restaurant,” he declares, “I gotta make deviled crabs for some of my patrons, ‘cause they pretty much let me know that that's very important in their lives, and if I want to live without looking over my shoulder, I'm gonna need to keep makin’ ‘em.”

“He's good at everything he does,” Walton says.

“I ain't one of them gooourmet chef-ies.”