I walked into a diner at three in the morning after slamming into a stranger on their way out. It was one of those 24/7-except-Christmas-and-Thanksgiving-and-sometimes-Labor-Day diners just on this side of being a twee dump desperately pulled from the fifties.
Two guys in trilbies sitting in a booth against a wall were hunched over their cups of steaming coffee whispering. I wondered if they were spies or something of the like and thought tepidly about their government svengalis.
I sat on a red-cushioned bar chair at the counter and wiggled around, listening to the squeak of the plasticky vinyl against the relative monotony of the room.
The waitress rollerskated out of the big metal swinging doors that led to the kitchen in the back and took my
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Probably the drugstore round the corner or the department store a couple blocks over if she got tipped particularly well that day and decided to treat herself.
I resolved to give her a little more than I usually would have, just for solidarity.
I ordered a strawberry milkshake with a steakburger and fries. She went back to the kitchen, notepad in hand, with a glance at the television mounted on the ceiling and blew a bubble along the way. She couldn't have been a day over thirty, but she had one of those ageless faces that could've been twenty-five or forty-six.
There was a baseball game on. I looked up and jammed my hat further onto my head, painfully aware of the stringy strands and the shoddy home dye job that I needed to get redone at a proper salon. Our team scored a home run, and I frowned at its presence at an away game. This city's team almost never won, and I didn't much care for baseball anyway.
My food came quickly -- it was a slow night with only three customers inside. I was the only one who had ordered any food. I left the building for a smoke. On my way out I bumped into a girl wearing a red dress who looked strangely like me, shoddy dye job and