2. The Diner
The Diner
Monika
The city never sleeps. It only pretends to, between the hours of four and five, when even the drunks have staggered home and the drug dealers have counted their money and the last of the night-shift nurses have clocked out for the morning.
That's the only quiet this place knows—a thin, fragile thing, like ice on a puddle, gone the moment the sun touches it.
I've been here eight months, and I still haven't gotten used to the noise.
The diner sits on the corner of LaSalle and something-that-used-to-be-a-neighborhood, its neon sign buzzing a cheerful blue lie into the darkness.
EAT, it says. 24 HOURS. The letters flicker when the wind blows, and the wind always blows, dragging gutter trash and cigarette butts and the smell of wet concrete through the parking lot.
Inside, the light is yellow and unforgiving, the kind that shows every crack in the vinyl, every stain on the floor, every tired line around every tired eye.
My eyes are twenty years old. They look forty in this light.
The clock above the pass-through says 1:47 AM.
The short-order cook—a man named Del who smells like cigarettes and regret—is sprawled in the back booth with his jacket over his face, snoring softly.
The radio plays something from the eighties, low and tinny, the kind of song that makes you think about people you used to know.
The coffee pot is two hours old and tastes like rust. I pour myself a cup anyway, because the alternative is water, and water doesn't have caffeine, and caffeine is the only thing keeping me upright.
Eight months. Eight months of the graveyard shift, eight months of watching the city's underbelly crawl through these doors, eight months of wiping down counters and refilling ketchup bottles and pretending I don't notice the way men look at me when they think I'm not looking back.
I used to blush. I don't anymore.
I used to flinch at sirens. I still do, sometimes—a small, involuntary tightening of the shoulders, a memory of something I can't quite name.
But I've learned to hide it. I've learned to keep my face still, my hands steady, my voice flat.
The city doesn't care if you're afraid. The city will eat you alive and ask for seconds.
So I've learned to be something the city doesn't notice.
A fixture. A piece of the furniture. The girl behind the counter who pours your coffee and doesn't make eye contact and definitely doesn't have a name, even though her nametag says MONIKA in cheap plastic letters.
I'm wiping down the counter when the door chimes.
It's 1:53 AM by the clock, though I don't look at it. I don't need to. I know the shape of this night the way I knew the shape of the barn—every creak, every shadow, every small betrayal of the body that tells you something is wrong before your brain catches up.
The chime is cheap and cheerful, the kind of sound that's supposed to say welcome. But nothing about the man who walks through that door says welcome.
He's tall. That's the first thing I notice, because he has to duck slightly to clear the frame, and the door is standard height.
Tall and broad-shouldered and wearing a suit that probably costs more than I'll make this year, which is not a sentence I ever expected to think about anyone who walks into this diner at two in the morning.
The suit is charcoal, maybe, or navy—it's hard to tell in this light—but the fabric catches the fluorescent glow and does something expensive with it, something that makes the vinyl booths and the cracked linoleum look even shabbier by comparison.
His hand is pressed to his side. His other hand is braced against the doorframe.
And there is blood seeping between his fingers.
Not a lot. Not the kind of gush that says artery. But enough. Enough that I can smell it from here—that same copper tang I remember from the barn, from Bella, from Mercy, from all the nights I spent with my arms buried inside something that was trying very hard not to die.
The man's face is pale. Pale in a way that has nothing to do with the cold and everything to do with what's happening under his shirt. But his eyes—grey as winter, grey as the sky before a snow, grey as something that has seen too much to be surprised by anything—are steady. Calm. Almost bored.
He has been shot before. I know this the way I knew the calf was breech—a recognition that lives somewhere below the brain, in the bones, in the blood.
He knows the drill. He knows how much blood is too much, how fast his heart should be beating, how long he has before the world starts to go soft at the edges.
He is not panicking. That's what scares me most.
"You need a hospital," I say.
The words come out flat. Professional. The same voice I use when someone orders the club sandwich at three in the morning and I have to explain that we're out of turkey.
Del is still snoring in the back. The radio is still playing something I don't recognize.
The world is still spinning, even though something in my chest has gone very, very still.
"No hospitals."
His voice is low. Rough, but not from pain—from use, from years of speaking in rooms where everyone listened.
He slides onto the stool at the counter, leaving a smear of red on the vinyl, and I watch him move the way I used to watch injured animals move.
Carefully. Deliberately. Conserving energy for something important.
He doesn't wince when he sits. That's impressive. That's also a little frightening.
"Do you have a first aid kit?" he asks.
"A first aid kit isn't going to fix a gunshot wound."
"You'd be surprised." His mouth twitches—not quite a smile, not quite a grimace, something in between that might be amusement or might be pain or might be both. "The kit. Please."
I should call 911. I should dial the number and let the paramedics handle this and go back to wiping down the counter like nothing happened.
He's a stranger. He's a stranger with a bullet in him and a suit that costs more than my rent and eyes that have seen things I don't want to know about.
I owe him nothing. I owe him less than nothing.
But he's bleeding. And I have steady hands.
And my mother taught me to lean in.
The first aid kit is under the register, a white plastic box with a red cross that's mostly rubbed off.
I grab it. Then I grab the bottle of vodka from the shelf behind the counter—the good stuff, the one Del keeps for special occasions, because he's an alcoholic with expensive taste—and a pair of tweezers from the drawer where we keep the spare pens and the roll of tape that no one has used since 1987.
The tweezers are cheap. The vodka is not.
I use Del's lighter to sterilize the metal, holding the flame under the tips until they glow faintly orange, and I don't think about what I'm doing.
I don't think about the fact that I'm about to perform field surgery on a stranger in a diner at two in the morning.
I just do the next thing. Then the next thing. Then the next.
He watches me the whole time.
His eyes track my hands—from the kit to the vodka to the lighter to the tweezers—and there's something in his gaze that I can't read. Not hunger, exactly. Not curiosity. Something older. Something that looks like recognition, though I can't imagine what he thinks he recognizes in me.
I pull the stool beside him and sit.
"I need to see the wound."
He unbuttons his shirt with his free hand—slowly, because his other hand is still pressed to his side—and I force myself not to look at his chest. The muscles.
The scars. The map of a life that has clearly involved more violence than I want to think about.
I look at the wound instead. That's the job. That's all this is.
The bullet is shallow. I can see that immediately—a small, dark hole just above his hip, blood welling up around it in a lazy pulse.
The bullet is still inside, lodged somewhere in the meat of his side, but it hasn't hit anything vital.
No major vessels. No organs. He's lucky, or he's been shot enough times to know how to take a bullet without dying.
Maybe both.
"I'm going to take it out," I say. "It's going to hurt."
"I know."
"This is going to hurt a lot."
"I know."
He's not looking at the wound. He's looking at my face. I feel the weight of his gaze like a hand on my cheek, and I don't understand why, but I don't have time to understand. I have a bullet to remove.
I pour vodka over the tweezers. I pour vodka over the wound. He doesn't flinch when the alcohol hits the raw flesh—doesn't even blink—and I feel something shift in my chest. Respect, maybe. Or recognition. The way you recognize a kindred spirit, even when you don't want to.
"Talk to me," he says.
"What?"
"Talk to me. While you work."
I should ask questions. I should demand answers.
I should want to know who shot him and why and whether the shooter is going to walk through that door next.
But I don't want to know. I want to stay in this small, sterile space where the only things that matter are my hands and his blood and the bullet that needs to come out.
So I talk.
"I grew up on a farm," I say, and the words come out like water from a tap—easy, endless, unstoppable.
"In Pennsylvania. The middle of nowhere.
Our nearest neighbor was a mile down the road, and our nearest grocery store was forty-five minutes away.
We had cows. Chickens. A couple of pigs, one year, but my mother said they smelled too much and we never did it again. "
The tweezers find the edge of the bullet. I press gently, feeling for the shape of it, the way it's wedged against the muscle.
"I was the youngest of four girls. My sisters are all married now. One of them lives in Ohio. One of them lives in Florida. One of them lives in the same town we grew up in, which I think is the saddest thing I've ever heard, but she seems happy, so what do I know."