I head for the diner, Ray’s written in cursive paint on a sign that’s too small for the building it rests atop, making everything appear dizzyingly askew. BEST APPLE PIE IN GARNET COUNTY! a sloppy cardboard sign boasts from the window. TRY A SLICE!
I push through the heavy glass door and fall into the fifties. Ray’s looks just how it was described to me, red vinyl and turquoise, the waitresses in dresses and aprons styled to match. Bobby Vinton plays on an honest-to-God jukebox in the corner and I stand there, absorbing the nostalgia, the gravy-and-potatoes smell of it all, before I make my way to the counter at the back. The serving station and the kitchen is just beyond it.
I perch on one of the stools and rest my hands on the cool Formica countertop. To my right, a girl. Girl. Woman. She’s hunched over a plate of half-eaten food, thumbs moving fast across her phone’s screen. She has frizzy brown hair and she’s got so much exposed pale skin, it makes me shiver to look at her. She’s wearing black pumps, short-shorts and a thin, tight tank top. I think she works the parking lot. Lot lizards. That’s what they call girls like her. My eyes travel up for a better look at her face and it’s the kind of face that’s younger than it looks, skin ravaged by circumstance, not passage of time. The lines at the corner of her eyes and the edges of her mouth remind me of cracks in armor.
I rest my elbows against the counter and bow my head. Now that I’ve stopped, the drive is catching up with me. I’m not used to that kind of push behind a wheel and I’m fucking tired. The muscles in my back have tied themselves into tight little knots. I focus on tunneling each individual ache into a single pain I can ignore.
After a minute, a man comes out of the kitchen. He has olive skin, a shaved head, and beautiful, full-color tattoo sleeves on both arms. Skulls and flowers. His black Ray’s T-shirt strains across the front of him, tight enough to show off the parts of his body he must’ve worked hard for. He wipes his hands on the greasy towel hooked in his belt and gives me a once-over.
“What’ll it be?”
His voice sounds like a knife that sharpens itself on other people, intimidating enough that I can’t even imagine what it would sound like if he yelled. Before I can ask if he’s Ray, I notice the name tag on his shirt says SAUL. He turns his ear toward me and asks me to repeat myself, like there were words here and he only just missed them.
Mostly, my stutter is a constant. I know it better than any other part of myself, but when I’m tired, it can be as impossibly unpredictable as Mattie was when she was four and started playing hide-and-seek all over the neighborhood without ever telling anyone she’d begun the game. I have talking to do here but I don’t want to waste a possible spectacle on someone I’m not sure will give me what I need, so I clear my throat and grab the small, laminated menu next to a basket of napkins and skim it for something cheap. I give Saul a pointed look, gesture to my throat and mouth sorry like I’m fucking laryngitic. I tap the menu so he realizes this is me, communicating. His eyes follow my finger and its tap-tap-tap to COFFEE … $2.00.
A minute later, he’s sliding a mug under my nose, saying, “Just so we’re clear, you can’t be nursing that all night. Drink it while it’s hot or add a meal to it.”
I let the steam curl around my face before I take that first sip. The coffee scalds my tongue and my throat, waking me up faster than the caffeine ever would, but it tastes strong enough for me to be able to count on that too. I set the mug down and notice a woman at the service window. She’s wearing a black Ray’s shirt, like Saul, and she reminds me of a slightly younger May Beth, except this woman’s hair is dyed black. May Beth’s is all salt with a little pepper. They both have similarly peachy faces and pointed features, though, and everything after their necks is rounder and much less defined. Soft. May Beth used to wrap me in her arms and hold me close when there was no one else to do it—until I got too old for that sort of thing—and I loved that softness. I let the memory inspire a careful smile to play across my mouth. I give it to the woman. She gifts me with one of her own.
“You’re looking at me like you know me,” she says.
That’s something else that separates her from May Beth, besides the hair—her voice. May Beth’s voice is crumbling sugar cubes. This woman’s is tart apple pie. Or maybe it’s not that she sounds like that, it’s what I’m smelling. There’s a pie rack a few feet down the counter, the diner’s famous apple sitting on top with its soft, syrupy pieces of fruit tucked into a beautifully flaky crust. My mouth waters and I know I’ve been hungrier than this in my life, but that caramel-cinnamon-sugar kiss is making it hard for me to remember when. My stomach growls. The woman arches her eyebrow and it’s then I notice the name tag pinned over her right breast says RUBY. It’ll be a bitch pushing that one past my lips.
“Forget it, Roo,” Saul says from behind the service station. “She can’t talk.”
Ruby turns to me. “That true?”
“—”
I close my eyes. A block: a feels-like-forever moment where my mouth is open and nothing happens—at least, not on the outside. Inside, the word is there and the struggle to give it shape makes me freeze, makes me feel like I’ve been disconnected.
“Y-you l—” I fight for the L, fight my way back to myself. I open my eyes. I feel the woman beside me staring. Ruby, she doesn’t even blink and it makes me grateful but I fucking hate that too, because the kind of decency everybody ought to live by isn’t something that deserves my gratitude. “You l-look like s-someone I know.”
“That a good thing?”
“Yeah.” I nod, faintly pleased with its successful landing. Yeah.
“Thought you didn’t talk,” Saul says, unimpressed.
“You want something with that coffee?” Ruby asks.
“I’m g-good.”
She purses her lips. “You know you can’t be nursing that all night.”
Jesus. I clear my throat.
“I w-was wondering if I c-could ask y-you s—” Something. “A question.”
That’s a thing I can do sometimes: fake out my stutter. I psych it up to ruin one word and switch it out with another at the last minute and it somehow never manages to catch up to me. The first time I discovered this, I thought I was finally free, but no; I was being held hostage in a different way. It’s exhausting, doing all that thinking for the kind of talking no one else has to think twice about. And it’s not fair but there’s not much in life that is.
“Sure,” she says.
“Is R—” I close my eyes briefly. “Ray around?”
She winces. “Died a few years back.”
“S-sorry.” Shit.
“What do you need Ray for?”
“Have you w-worked here l-long?”
“Going on thirty years.” She peers at me. “What’s this about?”
“T-trying to f-find someone.”