Patty’s alarm went off at four forty-five and she hit it without opening her eyes because her hand knew where it was.
Same nightstand, same clock, same spot on the mattress where her body had worn a shallow valley over the years.
She lay there for ten seconds. Maybe fifteen. Long enough to hear the refrigerator humming through the wall and the nothing beyond it.
Then she got up and turned on the bathroom light and didn’t look in the mirror because she’d see what she always saw and there was no reason to confirm it.
The apartment smelled the way it always smelled, like the vape shop below her leaking through the floorboards.
The kitchen table had one chair because she’d given the other one to Vera when Vera’s grandson broke hers, and then she’d never replaced it and then it had been long enough that getting a second chair would feel like a statement about something.
She ate a piece of toast standing at the counter. No butter. She’d forgotten to buy butter on Monday and then again on Wednesday and she’d probably forget again today.
She put on her shoes, the white ones with the rubber soles that didn’t slip on the tile, and she drove to work in the dark with the radio on low and nothing in particular on her mind.
Hank’s sat off Route 4 about a quarter mile past the overpass. Long low building with aluminum siding and a parking lot that needed repaving five years ago. Hank’s, the sign said.
Hank had been dead for seven years.
His daughter owned it from Tucson and called once a month to ask about the numbers and never about the people.
Patty unlocked the front door at five fifteen. Eddie was already in the kitchen because Eddie was always in the kitchen. Big man with forearms and a Braves cap that had molded to his head years ago.
She could hear the fryer warming and the exhaust fan clicking on and the radio he kept tuned to a station that played country songs she didn’t know anymore.
She made the first pot of coffee. Wiped down the counter even though she’d wiped it before she left last night. Filled the sugar dispensers. Rolled silverware into paper napkins until she had two dozen bundles lined up in the plastic tray. Her hands did all of it without her.
Dale came in at six fifteen. Eggs and toast. He sat at the same spot at the counter, third stool from the register, and set his cap on the stool beside him. He looked the way he always looked, which was tired and somewhere else.
Patty poured his coffee and put the order in and didn’t ask how he was doing because she’d stopped asking people how they were doing a long time ago. She could see how they were doing. That was the problem.
Dale ate his eggs the way he ate everything. Slowly, looking at the plate, not at the room. He left exact change plus two dollars and nodded at her on the way out and she said “See you tomorrow” and he didn’t answer but he’d be there tomorrow.
The morning filled in the way mornings do.
Three truckers who wanted everything on the menu and left their napkins on the floor. A woman with a toddler who ordered pancakes and spent the whole time on her phone while the kid smeared syrup on the table.
A man Patty had never seen before who ordered black coffee and a newspaper and sat in the corner booth reading it front to back without speaking.
She carried plates and refilled mugs and wiped tables and reset them and carried more plates, all of it running together the way shifts do. Fifteen years of this. She’d been thirty when she started, back when Hank was alive and the parking lot was smooth and she’d taken the job because she needed something to do with her hands while she figured out what she was going to do with her life.
She hadn’t figured it out. The job had just become the thing.
Eddie rang the bell and she picked up two plates and delivered them to the truckers and one of them called her sweetheart and she didn’t react to it because reacting took energy and the energy had a better use, which was getting through the shift.
Around ten the morning rush had thinned out. Two booths occupied, nobody at the counter. Patty was marrying ketchup bottles, pouring the half-empty ones into each other, when the door opened.
A woman came in alone.
Not a regular. Regulars came in with their shoulders down. They knew where the bathroom was and which booths had the tear in the vinyl and how strong the coffee was without asking. This woman stood just inside the door and scanned the room and Patty watched her the way she watched anyone who came in alone on a weekday morning looking like they hadn’t slept.
She sat at the counter. Not a booth, not a table. Patty had seen it enough times to know what that meant.
She was maybe forty. Maybe younger. Hard to tell because she’d been wearing whatever she was carrying for a while and it had settled into her face. Dark circles so deep they looked like bruises. Hair pulled back but not recently. Her hands were on the counter and they were still, the kind of still that takes effort.
“What can I get you,” Patty said.
“Coffee. Please.”
Patty poured it. Set it down. The woman wrapped both hands around the mug and held it but didn’t drink. Just held it there.
“You want to see a menu?”
“No. Thank you.” She reached into her jacket and pulled out a phone. Held it up so Patty could see. A photo of a dog. Brown, medium-sized, standing in a yard somewhere with a clean red collar and a coat that was shiny and a face that looked straight at the camera.
The photo was from a different time than the one this woman was living in now.
“Have you seen this dog?”
Patty looked at the photo. Looked at it carefully.
“No, I haven’t. I’m sorry.”
The woman nodded. She’d heard this answer before. Enough times that her face had learned how to take it without moving. She put the phone on the counter next to the mug and sat there.
“How long have you been looking?” Patty asked. She didn’t know why she asked it.
“Weeks.” Flat. Then she picked the phone back up and angled the screen. “Almost a month. He got out. I nearly had him once and then he was gone again.”
“Let me ask Eddie,” Patty said.
She walked back to the kitchen window. Eddie was scraping the grill, dragging the flat edge across the surface in long strokes. She leaned against the ledge.
“Eddie. Woman out here looking for a dog. Brown, medium-sized, red collar.”
He didn’t look up right away. Finished his stroke, set the scraper down, wiped his hands on his apron. “Couple days ago. Out by the dumpster. I was taking the grease out and it was standing back there by the fence.”
“Brown dog, red collar?”
“Yeah. Skinny.” He said it flat, already moving on. “It just stood there looking at me. Then it went off toward the overpass.”
“Which way?”
“East. Through that gap in the fence where the kids cut through.”
Patty went back to the counter. The woman was sitting exactly the way she’d been sitting. Both hands on the mug. Coffee untouched.
“My cook saw him,” Patty said. “Couple days ago. Out back by the dumpster. Brown dog, red collar, skinny. He said the dog was moving slow. Headed east past the overpass.”
The woman’s hands tightened on the mug. Her whole body went still in a different way. Before it was exhaustion. Now it was something else.
“East,” she said.
“That’s what he said.”
“Is there anything east? Towns, anything?”
“Miller’s Creek about eight miles up. One stoplight. Past that it’s farmland for a while and then Decatur.”
The woman let go of the mug. She was already reaching for her wallet. She put a twenty on the counter next to the full cup of coffee.
“That’s too much,” Patty said. “Coffee’s a dollar fifty.”
“Keep it.”
She was standing, moving toward the door, putting her phone back in her jacket. She pushed the door open and the daylight came in bright and then the door swung shut and she was in the parking lot and then she was in her car, a sedan covered in road dust, the kind that takes days to build up.
Patty watched through the window. The woman sat in the car for a moment without starting it. Head down. Hands on the wheel. Then the engine turned over and the car pulled out and turned left. East. Past the overpass.
Patty picked up the twenty and put it in the register. She picked up the full mug and poured it out in the sink. She wiped the counter where the woman had been sitting. The surface was already clean. She wiped it anyway.
—-
Eddie rang the bell. She picked up a plate and carried it to the booth by the window. The morning kept being a morning.
At two o’clock the lunch rush was over and the diner was empty except for old Frank in the corner booth, who’d been nursing the same cup of coffee since noon and would sit there until she told him they were closing, which she never did because where was he going to go.
She refilled his mug without asking and he raised it an inch off the table, which was his version of thank you.
Her shift ended at three. She hung up her apron in the back, said goodnight to Eddie, and walked out to the parking lot. The sun was still up and the air was warm and the overpass was there to the east, gray concrete over the highway.
The road went on past it toward Miller’s Creek and the farmland and wherever the farmland ended.
She drove home. The drive was seven minutes and she’d driven it so many times she didn’t remember driving it, she just arrived. Up the stairs past the door that used to lead into the hardware store. Into the apartment.
The apartment was quiet. It was always quiet but she noticed it now in a way she hadn’t this morning, like something had been peeled back and now she couldn’t put it over again. The refrigerator. The nothing.
Her shoes came off by the door. The couch took her weight, her legs heavy after eight hours on the tile, and she turned on the television and watched something about people renovating a house in some state she’d never been to. They were arguing about a backsplash.
She watched them argue about the backsplash for twenty minutes and then she turned it off and the room was quiet again.
Leftover soup went into a pot on the stove. Chicken noodle from a can. She ate it standing at the counter, the warmth of the bowl good against her palms, because the table had one chair and even that felt like too many.
The bowl and the spoon went into the sink, then the drying rack. The drying rack was small. She’d bought the small one years ago.
The couch again, nothing on. The window was getting dark. Her phone was on the coffee table. She’d go to bed at nine or nine thirty and set the alarm for four forty-five and lie in the valley in the mattress and listen to the refrigerator until she fell asleep.
Through the window she could see the street and the closed hardware store sign and the parking lot of the laundromat across the way. A car went by with its headlights on.
She got up and went to the kitchen and opened the cabinet above the stove. There was a bag of dog treats in there. She didn’t know why she still had them. She’d bought them three years ago when the neighbor’s dog used to come to the back door and she’d give it one through the screen and it would eat it and leave and come back the next day.
Then the neighbor moved and the dog went with them and the bag stayed in the cabinet.
She closed the cabinet.
The faucet ran cold over her hands even though they were clean, and the chill felt good after the warm apartment. The kitchen light clicked off and she stood in the living room in the dark for a moment. The apartment looked the same as it always looked. The couch still holding her shape from earlier. The television reflecting the room back at her.
She went to bed and set the alarm.
The refrigerator hummed.
Outside, a car started somewhere and pulled away and the sound faded and then it was just the apartment again, holding the silence the way it always did, the way it had been built to do.