91 Somewhere in Maine. A Diner.
Somewhere in Maine. A Diner.
It was hours later when they finished with us at the police station.
On our way out of town, I asked my father to stop at a drugstore so I could buy sanitary napkins.
I didn’t care anymore that they weren’t as cool as tampons.
I didn’t care if the person at the cash register looked at my face as I bought them and knew what it meant that I was doing this.
Even if the cashier was a boy, or a man, I didn’t care about that either.
We were heading back to New Jersey now. It occurred to my father that we hadn’t eaten anything for a long time.
Before hitting the Maine Turnpike, we pulled into a diner in some little town.
Not a town like Lake Catherine. The kind of town we were more familiar with, where people drove old cars and played bingo at the VFW hall.
Or went nowhere, more likely. The kind of place where people like us would live if we lived in Maine instead of New Jersey.
There was a family at the next booth over: a father and a mother and three kids—a couple of them were teenagers, one who looked close to my age.
I noticed them because they looked happy.
They looked like one of those normal families that go out for pancakes on a Sunday afternoon, and afterward, go to a ball game or something.
Or they just hang out and don’t worry about much.
There was something about this family that made it hard for me to take my eyes off them. Even at a moment like this one—after spending three hours being interviewed by a police officer in the aftermath of Regina showing up dead—I couldn’t help looking at them.
It sounded like they were talking about an exhibition Red Sox game in which one of the New York Mets had hit five balls over the wall in a single night.
I didn’t understand what they meant when they called it the Green Monster, or any of the rest of what the son and the father were talking about in the booth next to ours.
I just liked the sound of their voices, the easy, comfortable way they talked to each other.
The parents’ backs were facing me, but the way the mother had her hand on the father’s arm made me know these two people liked each other.
Across from them, the younger son was making a stack out of sugar packets and trying to knock them down by blowing on them with his straw—just the kind of dumb, pointless thing a kid his age would do.
He looked happy and normal too. Not like some boy who’d stick a picture of Michael J.
Fox over the drawing of a naked man that he’d ripped out of a sex book and put it in the bike basket of somebody who didn’t even like him.
I tried to imagine I was sitting in that other booth instead of the one with my father. Now he was lighting a cigarette.
I was listening so hard to what was going on in the next booth, with the normal family, that I didn’t hear the waitress asking me for my order.
“You ready, hon?” she said. From the sound of her, this must not have been the first time she’d asked.
“I’ll have the pancakes,” I told her.
“I don’t blame you for staring,” she said. “They’re our local celebrities. You’d never know to look at him that he’d be the type to write all those weird, twisted stories, right?”
I had no idea what she meant. This was when the dad got up to go to the bathroom or something, and I saw his face for the first time.
It was Stephen King.