Once Bitten (An Anya Maynard Novel)

Chapter Three

One unexpected benefit I've discovered over my first couple of weeks at the diner was the generosity of its customers. I usually averaged about two dollars a person in tips in the city, but here it was closer to five. Even the counter boys who never ordered more than a cup of coffee left at least a dollar on the counter. I was lucky if I got a quarter in the city. I assumed it was because of all the money in the area but Jess said it was just the nature of the people. 

In the city everyone is in a rush, even fast food isn't fast enough for the people there. Which was why I liked it, no one bothered to learn your name never mind your face. It was easy to just fade into the crowd there. 

Here the pace was a slower. Stopping to talk with your customers wasn't a luxury of time, it was a perquisite. Jess knew most of them by name, knew who was sick and who wasn't, asked about their kids who just started college or kindergarten, even congratulated them on anniversaries and wished them happy birthdays. And the town's people knew just as much about her...and wanted to know just as much about me. 

It wasn't as awkward or uncomfortable as I thought to talk to them, to let them know a little about me. They'd ask where I lived before here and I'd tell them -vaguely- this city or that, they'd comment on it but never press. Not once did anyone ask me about why I left, they just welcomed me in, said they hoped I'd finally found my place after moving around so much. Me too…

It was Jim who finally broke me out of my shell. Jess sent me over with his plate one morning and he asked me if I knew what my name meant. I didn't and he told me as much, it was Russian for gracious, merciful, and that I should lean to become what I was meant to be. I thought it an odd statement to make at first, I thought I had always been polite. But then I really thought about what it meant to be gracious. To accept the accolades of others without being ungrateful or regretful, in other words, I needed to stop shying away from others when all they were trying to do was make me comfortable. 

The merciful part, well, that's up to God to decide. 

And that was it. I may still have my wall firmly in place, but at least it had a window now. It may not be as open as a door, but at least I had opened myself up enough to see what was out there. 

With a lower rent and higher tip average here, I not only had my room paid up for the next two months and a brand new set of bedding on my rented bed, but I managed to buy something I have been wanting for years now. Be it was used, and Jess probably sold it to me for way less then she could have gotten for it, but I now had my very own mp3 player. I had an alarm clock radio in my room, but now I could take my music wherever I went. 

I've been taking the long way to work because of it, so I could give myself more time to listen to all the music Jess had left on it. I had no other way to hear it without my headphones, and with over eight hundred songs it was going to take months of the long way to hear them all. 

I was flipping though her "favorites" folder as I strolled through the early morning darkness to work today. It had everything in it from Britney Spears to Breaking Benjamin, Green Day to Gym Class Heroes, Lady Gaga to Lostprophets; she had it all in here. I was finding a lot of songs I had heard before but didn't know who they were by, and was marking them in my own favorites list that Jess showed me how to make. 

I had just found a good peppy beat in a song by a couple of girls listed as The Veronicas when I rounded the corner of the local Gas 'N Go. As it was in small towns like this, it was still closed. The only twenty-four hour establishments were the motel and the diner. And the only reason the diner was allowed to stay open was for the occasional truck driver who found his way into this town. The town wasn't exactly a destination, but it was less than a mile from the interstate and the only thing left after the city till you crossed over the mountains for about twenty miles.