Pancakes at The Diner (on pause)

07: In Which Milo Listens

The first thing Milo hears is the dull thud of the door closing, and the small jingle of bells that accompany it. A glance up reveals Andrea sitting alone, her face flushed an angry red, glaring at the closed doors. The tremors in her shoulders would be invisible to anyone else, but Milo's seen this before. Andrea's the type of person who shoves all her emotions down inside her body, hidden somewhere she probably thinks is impenetrable. Milo's dad is like that, stoic, won't let anyone see him cry.

He feels a kick in his chest, a protective instinct almost. Over the past few years he's come to view Andrea as a sort of little sister, albeit one he didn't know much about. But she's someone to protect, someone he feels responsible for. As if he didn't have enough people to watch over already. Maybe it's the fact that he could never protect his dad; not from losing his job, not from his mom's cancer diagnosis, not from the pain of seeing his only son forced to come home and leave a college education behind to take care of his family.

There's something so fragile in that kind of angry defiance, he thinks. It's the rage of a girl who knows she's broken but can't do much to fix it.

"Milo! Get in here!" Martha calls, jolting him out of his thoughts again. And just as well; Milo had been wiping down the same table for more than five minutes.

"Yeah?" he asks, wrenching his gaze away from Andrea and turning back into the kitchen.

Martha's standing in front of the open cupboard, hands on her hips. Alice offers him a small smile, glancing up quickly from her chopping board and the pile of vegetables on top. She was hired as another waiter, Milo knows, but recently she's become Martha's kitchen helper, leaving Milo alone to take orders and bring food. Not that there's usually a crowd, but still.

Martha shifts her weight, and now Milo can see Gregory's jacket and pancake box in her hands. He'd left too soon to collect them, again. "Whose are these, and why were they in my pantry?" Martha demands.

Milo glances at his feet. It's terrible, but he's gotten in the habit of storing things — notebooks, scraps of paper, a customer's leftover jacket — in the cupboard over the years. It's always half empty, leaving plenty of extra space for odds and ends. There's only one problem: Martha despises anything extra in her space, so Milo has to go to great lengths to hide them. And this time she found out.

"They're a customer's. He left them last night," Milo explains quietly. "I thought he'd come get them today."

"But he hasn't?" It's a rhetorical question, Milo knows, and he wants to sink into the floor. When Martha's angry, she's really angry, the kind of anger that makes everyone around her automatically feel guilty. Milo hates to disappoint her.

"No."

Martha makes a loud "hmmph" noise, one Milo's never quite sure exactly what it means. "Get it out of my sight."

He almost wants to snap a salute, but instead grabs both the jacket and the to-go box and hurries out of the kitchen as fast as possible.

Besides the kitchen and the restaurant itself, there's not much other space in The Diner. Off to the side there's a small hallway that leads out to a back alley, and that's where Milo finds himself. He glances up and down the small enclosure, searching for a good place to hide a jacket and some cold pancakes. He settles for placing them both in a corner and covering them with a cardboard box. No one ever comes back there anyway, he reasons.

Once he's back inside, he sees the two old ladies have already left. "I got their check," Alice says as she passes him. "So don't worry about it."

Milo smiles and nods, preoccupied with searching for Andrea. He finds her easily, as there's now no one else in The Diner. She's got her head in her hands, running her fingers through her hair. The shaking's diminished slightly, but not by much.