“Very well, then.”
She hadn’t finished writing her full name down on the application before Punjab returned with a mug and a small stainless-steel carafe of steaming chicory root coffee, a Mobile trademark. He filled the mug and left the carafe on the counter. The coffee was thick and hot and smelled like heaven.
“If you need anything else, feel free to ask. I will be just through that door.” He pointed at the double swinging doors leading to the kitchen. He looked at his watch. “Sarah, my head waitress, will be here any minute, which works out perfectly. She’s really the one that needs the help.”
“Sounds good, sir.”
Punjab tapped the counter with both hands and disappeared through the swinging doors.
Marion was on her third cup of coffee and the back page of her application when she heard Sarah Watson come through the front door.
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” Sarah said, and her voice soured the air in the room. Marion felt that the day and her luck had just taken a turn. The short, squat redhead flipped up the hinged counter, tucked her purse below the bar, and strolled up to Marion’s stool. Marion knew this girl from high school, from another life. She was a big girl then and an even bigger girl now, with a face covered in freckles, but not the good, sun-peppered kind. Sarah’s freckles made her look like the victim of a big truck speeding through a nasty mud puddle.
“Hello, Sarah, you look well,” Marion lied.
“A mile better than you. That’s for sure. How long’s it been? Three years? I suppose the rock star thing didn’t work out too good.” Sarah stared at Marion’s face as if she were watching a car wreck. “Jesus,” she said, her own pudgy face all twisted up. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I’d rather not talk about it, if that’s okay. I’m just here for a job.”
“Is that a fact?” Sarah picked up the carafe and poured the remaining coffee down the sink without asking if Marion was finished with it. “Isn’t it funny?” she said.
“What, Sarah? What’s funny?”
“How life is, you know? How all through high school you and all your perfect little friends never even saw me in the halls, never even gave me a second thought, and now here you are, needing something from me. I just think that’s funny, is all.”
“Yeah, it’s hilarious.”
Sarah snatched up the application from the counter. After a minute of cycling through a gamut of disgusted expressions, she tossed it back on the bar. “You’re kidding, right? I mean, you know there’s no way Punjab is going to hire you with your history.”
“What history?” Marion said softly, involuntarily scanning the empty diner.
Sarah mocked her and looked around the diner as well, then leaned in with her own low tone. “Everybody knows about you, Marion. The whole Gulf Coast knows what happened with you and your father.”
“He’s not my father.”
“Whatever you say, honey,” Sarah said. She crossed her arms and peered straight down her mud-splattered piggy nose.
“It’s not just what I say. It’s the truth. Nothing happened.” Anger was seeping in around the edges of Marion’s voice.
“Not the way I heard it.”
“I don’t care what you heard.”
“Not the way everyone else heard it, either. Your old man do that to your face? You guys have a lover’s spat?”
“Fuck you,” Marion blurted out on instinct. Her words dropped on the counter like a cinder block. Sarah’s sneer twisted into a smile—a freckled pig smile.
“Listen, Marion, I’m going to do you a favor here, since clearly you are lost and in need of some direction. You know the Time-Out over off I-65?”
Marion could taste acid building in her mouth. She fought the urge to spit it in Sarah’s face.
“I can see that you do. That’s good. I hear they’re always looking for girls like you. I bet they even got a late-night slot where that mangled-up face won’t be such a big issue. I mean, let’s be honest. Nobody goes there to look in a girl’s eyes, right? So why don’t you take your scary face, your family business, and your burned-up twat down to where you belong and do what it is you do. This here is a diner. We serve food. We ain’t hiring whores.”
Marion saw what might happen next in her mind’s eye. She grabs two big handfuls of Sarah’s tight red ringlets, pulls down and bashes her smug grin into the bar. Her nose busts like a ripe tomato, but Marion doesn’t stop. She keeps bashing Sarah’s head down over and over into the black-and-white-tiled counter. Screaming at her, wailing like a banshee about how she was molested and almost raped by her piece-of-shit stepfather, about how she was the fucking victim. She keeps bashing and bashing until the fat girl’s face is nothing but pulp and her lifeless body goes limp. Marion lets it slide to the floor.
But that’s not what happened.