Chapter 7
JOELLE
Itell him to stay after closing. He probably thinks that's good.
That's the part I keep snagging on, all through the dinner rush and the lunch crowd and the long slow afternoon, that he's sitting in that booth right now thinking he's been invited.
That stay meant the same thing tonight it meant two nights ago.
He doesn't know I'm going to take the one warm thing that's happened to me in three years and end it on purpose, because ending it myself is the only version where I'm the one who gets to leave.
Marie leaves at seven. Hank leaves at seven-thirty, which is early for Hank, and on his way out he looks at me, and then at Colt in the booth, and then back at me.
He takes a longer pause than usual before he folds his paper and puts on his coat.
Hank misses nothing. Hank has clearly decided this is a thing he doesn't want to be in the room for, and Hank is right.
The diner empties. I lock the front door.
Colt is still in the booth, his booth, on the vinyl I cannot look at without thinking about the napkin dispenser and a man's forehead against mine in the blinking dark.
But I am not going to think about it, because thinking about it would make this harder, and this is already going to take everything I have.
"I took the three-forty," I say.
He looks up.
"The check. I took three hundred and forty dollars because that's what the turkeys cost. That was the line.
I drew it and I thought you understood it.
I thought we were clear." I'm standing behind the counter, because the counter is where I stand when I need the barrier, and tonight I need it more than I've ever needed it. "You moved the line."
"The dinner needed more food. You were going to short the order because ...”
"Because that's what I could afford. That was my decision. Mine."
"I know."
"Do you? Because the tables should have been my decision too. And the seating plan. And the menu. And every single piece of this thing that you heard me talk about from that booth and then went out and solved without once asking me whether I wanted it solved."
He goes quiet. I watch him run through it, eyes down to his hands, a long pause, back up.
He's looking for the error. He's looking as if it was a joint that won't sit right, turning it, checking the cut.
And he can't find it, and that's breaking my heart even as I stand here with my voice level: he genuinely cannot find what he did wrong.
He thinks he was good to me. By every law he was raised under, he was.
"You've been listening from that booth for two years," I say.
My voice is steady. I keep it steady on purpose.
Loud would be easier, loud, I could hide in.
"You heard me talk to Marie about the tables, and you bought tables.
You heard me say 'please' to a turkey supplier, and you wrote a check.
You heard me tell Dave I couldn't afford the upgrade, and you called him yourself and paid for it behind my back. You hear everything I say."
I stop. The counter rag is in my hand. I didn't know I'd picked it up. I set it down.
"And you have never once talked to me."
The diner is quiet. The clock above the register ticks. The Christmas lights blink in the front windows.
"I let you move the chairs," I say, and my voice catches on chairs but I push through it.
"Do you understand what that was? I stood on a chair and I watched you do my work and I did not get down and tell you to leave.
I never let anyone do that. Not once, not in three years.
I let you. That cost me something. I was paying you, the whole time, in the only currency I've got, and you didn't even know there was a transaction. "
He's staring at me now. I have his whole attention, which after two years of the top of his head over a newspaper should feel like a victory and feels like the opposite.
"You want to know what's hard?" I say. "It was never the money.
It was never the tables. It's 'How are you, Joelle.
' It's 'You look tired.' It's one sentence that costs you something to say.
That's all. That's the entire thing I needed, and I have needed it so long I forgot it had a name.
" My throat is closing and I talk straight through the middle of it.
"And instead you write checks and you buy folding tables and you call my supplier behind my back, because those things are easy for you, and one honest sentence to my face isn't. You'd rather spend five hundred dollars than say four words. You did. You literally did."
He stands up.
And I watch him try. I have learned the look of it by now, the gear shift, the way his shoulders set when he's going to reach for words against the grain of himself.
He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.
And some stupid, traitor part of me, even now, even tonight, leans toward him, hoping.
Hoping that this is the moment. That I pushed hard enough.
That the one sentence is finally coming.
"This dinner isn't really for the town," he says. "You're building the Christmas your mother never …”
He stops.
He cuts himself off mid-word, like a man who's felt the floor give under his boot a half-second too late.
But mid-word is not soon enough. The end of the sentence is already in the room.
It doesn't need him to finish it. I finish it myself, silently, standing behind my own counter, because I'm the only one who can.
My mother. A woman who worked doubles every holiday season and left me with whatever neighbor would take me.
She came home smelling like the restaurant and slept through Christmas morning with the door shut.
She loved me, I think, when she remembered to, in the gaps between shifts.
She’s the reason a nine-year-old ate a gas station hot dog alone at a kitchen table one Christmas Day because the double ran long and the neighbor had gone to her sister's and nobody, not one person in the whole world that day, thought to check whether the kid had eaten.
The dinner is for the town. I have said it to myself every single day since October, the way you say a thing you need to be true. It's for the town. It is not for that nine-year-old. It is absolutely, in no way, for that nine-year-old.
And he saw her anyway. From eight feet away, over a coffeepot, without my ever saying one word about it, he saw her, and tonight, the first night I begged him to use his words, the words he found were the ones with their fingers around her throat.
It undoes me. Not the hurt. The fact that he was right, and that being seen that clearly by him, in the same breath as everything else tonight, is more than I can stand up under. I wanted to be known by this man. I did not know that being known would feel like being skinned alive.
So here we are. Two people who've seen each other more clearly than either of us ever agreed to. He doesn’t know about that Christmas day and yet he saw the girl with the hot dog.
I saw the man watching his marriage end, certain he just hadn't given enough.
We are a matched set. And I cannot do anything with that tonight except get it out of my diner before it finishes me.
"Get out," I say. "Get out of my diner."
He doesn't argue. He doesn't explain. He doesn't reach for me or spend one more sentence.
I notice, with a bitterness that surprises me, that now he knows when to stop talking.
He picks his coat up off the booth and walks to the door.
I unlock it for him, because the alternative is standing next to him while he fumbles with the deadbolt, and I am not going to survive that, so I do it myself, fast, and step back.
He leaves.
The door closes behind him. I lock it. I flip the deadbolt. Through the window I watch his truck start, watch the headlights swing across the lot, watch them straighten out and shrink and then it's only snow and the empty road.
I stand in the middle of the diner.
Then I walk over and unplug the Christmas lights.
I don't decide to. My hand just does it, finds the cord behind the register and pulls.
They die mid-blink, the live half going dark all at once, the dead half already dark, until there's no difference between the bulbs that worked and the ones that never did.
The whole string, finally honest about itself.
The diner is quiet and cold. Tomorrow I have to peel fifty pounds of potatoes. The dinner is in eighteen hours. A hundred people are going to sit in this room and eat a meal I wanted build with my own two hands, and I am going to give it to them and smile while I do it, because that is what I do.
I pick up the rag. I wipe the counter.
My hands are shaking. I watch them do it like they belong to someone else.
I set the rag down and grip the edge of the counter with both hands and hold on and stand there in the dark with my head down until they stop, which takes longer than I want to admit, and which nobody is here to see, which is exactly the way I have arranged my entire life.
Then I turn off the lights and drive home in the dark.