Love, Lose, And Repeat

Third Shift

    He came in drunk, smelling like whiskey, smelling like vomit-, smelling like five feminine perfumes at once. Tammy was there, always working the night shift, always praying for big-tippers, always tired, on her feet still at five in the morning. She was in an apron stained with coffee, smelling like fried food and ketchup. Her hair was in a static bun, pulled tight and unmoving. Her eyes wandered from cleaning check-top tablecloths to the man in the ripped-up leather jacket smoking his way to his unassigned seat. He was flicking ashes onto the plate Tammy was on her way to clear. She went over anyway clearing plates and plastic cups.
    She asked for an order.
    "You don't want this table do you?" He said though slurred syllables. Tammy repeated the specials and reminded him they were out apples and cantaloupe.
    His hair was shaved close to his head and his neck wobbled like it was about to break. He ordered black coffee. Then, he asked her to stay and turned his eyes up to hers. She saw they were steel gray with lines of black like when the moon falls back under the earth.
    "You could use some highlights." He reached up for the tightened black bun on top of her head; he even leaned forward for it. She pulled away and asked if he wanted to order anything else.
    "Two eggs?"
    She asked if that was all.
    "No. As long as I keep ordering, you have to stay." He slipped his tongue between cracked, yellow teeth and red lines around his eyes appeared. She saw his hands were cut up and sparked black at the tips.
    "So, what's your story?" He turned his eyes up and his hands behind his head.
    "I don't have a story; anything else?" She turned to go, but his voice shattered across the empty place.
    "Let me guess it then sweetheart...you're twenty eight."
    There were no souls sitting in plastic covered seats. No other orders were coming in. No other waitresses there to share in the nonexistent load.
    "Thirty two."
    "You live alone--two cats."
    "Four."
    "You've had a string of inoffensive but boring boyfriends, who move too fast and make you feel like you're living in a cardboard box." His eyes were glassy and red. He kept shutting them and forgetting they were closed but still talking. His hands were fidgeting--always moving, to his legs, to the check-top table cloth, through his hair.
    "Your mother calls a lot to ask how you are but really is just waiting for you to get pregnant so she can buy baby clothes and have something to talk about at her knitting circle."
"--book club." Tammy rubbed her temple with one hand and stuffed her notebook in her black apron. Her hair was falling into her face. The face she had so carefully tied above her head.
    "You work here why, because college costs a couple thousand more then you can afford and this was--close to home."
    "About ten minutes from moms." She whipped her head around. No one at the door, no one waiting to be sat. She sat down next to him; not a smile or a smirk formed on her face, "What else?"
    "You buy frames, lots of frames, but you have nothing to put in them so you wait. You wait for something to happen so you can take a picture of it and call it a memory. I bet you watch reruns a lot."
    Her eyes squinted and he smiled. His face was squirming with pleasures in the dimples of his cheeks and the wrinkles under his eyes. He was almost half-sober, eyeing, out windows, if any bars might be open. She held her hair behind her ears and looking out at a window brimming with a rising sun. The light streamed in and she could see a small scar cutting across his eyebrow.     "How did you get that scar?"
    "Your turn to take a guess."
    "I'm no good at that." Her first smile. He saw it and he reveled in it. His eyes and neck and hands stayed still as he watched her smile stay too.
    "Why don't you take a walk with me and I'll show you. Take that risk you've been thinking about since her first year working here."
    She put her pen in the pocket of her apron and watched her relief waitress walk into the kitchen. Tammy watched the sun take its first stabilizing step towards morning. "My shift's not over for another hour."
    He stood up and wobbled getting out from behind the booth. Then he lit another cigarette, "What are you going to do when you are all out of excuses?"
    She slowly stripped off her apron, then her name tag, and left it on the table. She looked up, and the sun was greeting the wall-to-wall windows, "Why don't you tell me?"