On the front page.
I tighten my grip so the paper doesn’t shake and give me away because all I can think about is who might’ve seen this, about how they know what I look like now. No—just how I look in black-and-white. I live in color. There’s no red in this photo, it’s still mine. I could—I could cut my hair, if I wanted. I might have a scar now. I touch my forehead. If I don’t, I could make one.
“Sorry the search didn’t turn out,” Holly says.
I crumple the paper and toss it in the recycling bin. I grab my apron and tie it and try to get my head back in the game. When I step into the diner, the fluorescent lights flicker and I hear someone from the kitchen groan before the door swings shut. Just be Tracey’s luck to trade the AC trouble for power outages.
I scan my station and there’s a man in a corner booth waiting on me and he looks familiar in a way I can’t totally place. I don’t like faces I can’t place almost as much as I don’t like the ones I can. I pull the pencil and pad from my pocket and walk over.
He nods at me, his brow furrowing.
“I know you?” he asks.
“No,” I say but I take a closer look at him. There’s something about him, something frustrating about him because I think I do know him. He’s in a plaid shirt. One of his legs is half-stretched into the aisle. There’s a hole in his jeans. He’s young, early thirties, maybe. The kind of young that … that’s been in the sun too long. The man in the parking lot, the one in the truck.
Not safe to be out this late around here. A girl’s missing.
He seems to remember it the same time I do, snaps his fingers. “Well, damn. Didn’t know you worked here. You’re awfully young to be working here.”
“Can I take your order?”
“How young are you?”
“I—” I shake my head a little. “The special today is the club sandwich and it comes with soup. The soup of the day is tomato.”
“I’m just making friendly conversation,” he says.
“I’m just trying to do my job.”
“Well, what if I tip better when you talk?”
I press my lips together. He grins and leans back in his seat, turns to the window. The rain has eased up a little. “I’ll have that special, with a cup of coffee. Black.”
“Okay.”
“Ain’t you going to write it down?”
“I’ll remember.” But I write it down as I go, narrowly missing Claire on my way by. Watch it, Romy, she tells me. By the time I’ve put the order in, I feel wrong. He just makes me feel wrong. Holly notices. She’s getting ready to go out for a smoke.
“What’s up?”
I take her over to the door and point him out. The guy is staring at the ceiling now, tapping his fingers along the table. “That guy there.”
“What’d he do?” Holly asks sharply, because she’s like that. Been here long enough to look out for us girls better than we look out for ourselves. I don’t know what to say to her, though. That he makes me feel wrong isn’t a good enough answer.
But I think it should be sometimes.
“I just don’t like him.”
“You want me to take the booth for you?”
Yes. “No.”
She pats my shoulder and heads outside. I watch Leon work.
“Order’s ready,” he tells me.
I take it out. The man rubs his hands together eagerly while I set the food in front of him.
“Thanks a lot,” he says. I wait for something gross to come out of his mouth, because that’s what my gut tells me should happen—but it doesn’t. I take another booth’s order and head back to the kitchen feeling like I should have lightened up because he didn’t meet the worst of my expectations, like somehow I’m the villain in his story.
“You okay?” Leon asks.
It’s one of those rare, quiet moments when Tracey’s in her office and most of the other girls are on the floor or on break and there’s hardly anyone around.
“Break later?” I ask, because it feels like the easiest way I can be sure of his forgiveness.
He makes me wait a long minute before he wipes his hands on his apron and crosses the room to give me a hug. It makes me want to cry. I forget everything and the forgetting is so nice.
“Sure,” he says.
Leon reminds me of a time before the move across town. When Todd was over a lot, trying to convince my mom we all needed to live together. I came home from school and the house was quiet until a low moan drifted from upstairs and I followed it to her closed bedroom door. I couldn’t keep myself from listening. I’d heard my mom and dad having sex a handful of times in my life. When he was drunk, when he was sober, when she was sad or so angry she couldn’t talk to him, but she was still willing to kiss. It always sounded desperate, like the two of them were clinging to the last way they knew how to understand each other. The way my mom sounded with Todd—it wasn’t like that. It seemed tender, beyond anything I’d ever experienced with someone else. This is tender. I press my fingers into Leon’s shirt and try to memorize it but he pulls away. I want to forget myself in him again.
I get back to work instead. I send out another order and by then, the guy is finished with his. I get him his check. He palms it off the table and says, “Hey, you know you can be professional and friendly.” Then he grabs a napkin and scribbles down some numbers on it, slides it over to me. “Give me a call, you want some advice.”
I don’t know why I take the napkin. It’s something my body does without checking with my head first, like the obligation to be nice to him is greater than myself.