Their
Moment
A short story
by
John William Tuohy
Running in from the rain, he covered the
Valentine’s Day bouquet with his suit coat.
Standing in the vestibule, it surprised him how quiet it was inside the
Diner. The only noise he could hear was
the rain falling on the black tar of the parking lot. In the two and a half decades that composed his
life, he had never been there in the daylight hours and for a fleeting moment,
the stillness made him feel lonely.
What time was it? Wiping a few remaining drops of rain from his
face he looked at the very large black and white clock on the cool steel wall
above the white tiled counter. It read
12:00 and then he remembered it always read 12:00.
He looked at his Timex and cringed. It was 10:30 AM. He hated 10:30 AM he thought and then
corrected himself. He didn’t hate
it. He disliked it. It was
too aloof, pretentious. It wasn’t the
beginning of the morning nor was it close to lunchtime. It was just a stupid, pointless time and he
wondered why they had the clock on the wall if it didn’t work and never
worked. Time means nothing to the people
who work here.
He once had a theory, for he was a young man
with many theories on many things, that there should just be the officially
recognized, important hours.
His mind was wandering again and once again,
he fought an epic losing battle to stay focused in his thinking. He filed his important hour theory to the
archive of his mind and took in the stillness of the Diner. In an hour or so, the lunch crowd would start
to trickle in and the place would liven up, but now the calm made him uneasy
and the darkness of the day and the incessant droning of the rain on the tar
outside made him sad. He had a tendency
to make himself needlessly miserable, so sad came easy to him.
Standing inside the entrance, he was
differential to a small but stern sign written in pen on a single sheet of
paper that directed him and all others to wait to be seated.
“Just sit anywhere,” came a disembodied
voice from behind the black swinging door that led to the kitchen.
He obediently sat himself at the counter,
the restaurant equivalent of economy class where he held desolate court, except
for a seemingly ancient and equally lonely piece of blueberry pie. It was strangely inviting, despite its top crust
having collapsed into the sticky filling.
Over thinking the pie issue, for he had a
habit of over thinking the irrelevant, he figured the scenario of events was
that the blueberry filing, in a desperate last chance dashed for either a
longer shelf life or possibly an escape back to the mother pie. After that, it had slipped out of the crust,
leaked its way slowly across the silver plate, and gathered in one last-ditch
syrupy blob along the rounded edges before it apparently died a silent but
sweet death. The hardened crust, made
even harder by its death, was the only witness to the filling’s last
moments. He thought that he would have
made a fantastic detective.
The sound of a passing truck’s tires
splashing against the rain snapped him out of his pie trance. He once again promised himself he would start
thinking about more important things and stop affixing background stories to
inanimate objects. He would join the
rest of productive society in thinking productive thoughts no matter how
spiritless and boring those thoughts were.
He was a man now, about to head into the mysterious and uncharted land
of serious responsibility.
He turned the stool completely around,
fighting the very strong urge to take a few spins. Adult men were not entitled to such things
because society, that bane in his otherwise happy existence of his life, had an
official cutoff age on people spinning on counter stools…..in public anyway.
Bored, he gazed down the rows of the empty
booths with their overstuffed red Naugahyde coverings that fit too tautly so
that the seat resembled a fat man wrapped in a blanket. He pictured a fat man in a tight blanket and
smiled, but shook his head and promised himself to think about only important
things. If he could not find any
important things to think about, he would, at the least, think about things
that are more realistic. So he played
with his tie, his lucky tie with the picture of the Palm Tree that looked like
it came from Hawaii and he fought the notion to consider everyone in Hawaii
being forced by law to wear grass skirts.
His tie, the lucky tie, was one of three
ties that he owned and was part of the clothes he wore only for important
things like today. His brown loafers,
his good shoes, still held enough of their high shine from the store where he
bought them five years ago that the invading raindrops gathered on their
surface, grouped into tiny clear smears and slid into the tile floor in defeat. He wished he owned black shoes since he was
fairly certain you were supposed to wear black shoes with a black suit, and his
good suit was black. His only suit, actually. Sears.
His mother had gotten it for him for his grandmother’s funeral last
year. He didn’t know what else to wear
for this occasion.
The proposal itself wasn’t a surprise. She had pretty much laid it out for him in no
uncertain terms. “Marry me or lose me.”
But it wasn’t like he was being forced to marry her. He hadn’t asked her to marry him because like
most men who have ever walked the planet he assumed the girl would tell him
when it was time to get married, and when the time came, he’d just go along
with it.
He didn’t want to lose her that was for
sure. He loved her. Not in some complicated and big important
way, the kind they write poems about, but in the only way he knew how to love
someone… deeply, truly and forever. He
loved her because he could tell her all the things that raced through his mind,
including those odd and offbeat thoughts that sat down in the coffee shop of
his brain and stayed a while. She never
disapproved of his thinking colorful thoughts that he told her about, or found
them silly, strange, or odd even though they so often were all those
things. Once, after he had shared his
important hour’s time theory with her, she had laughed and told him he was
weird. He thought better of his openness
and told her that he intended to stop thinking about those sort of thing and
get serious. She gave a worried look and
then smiled her angelic smile and said, “You can’t not be who you are Ludwig,
and I love who you are, weirdness and all.” It was, she thought, her job to protect this
rare species of human being.
The
rain had stopped and the slightest bit of sunlight was peeking out from behind
a cloud and he thought that was pretty funny, so he smiled. He liked the rain and rainy days but
sometimes he liked the sun too, and he particularly liked the often-dramatic
way the sun stepped onto the stage of the play of daily life.
He did not want anything to eat or
drink. However, he felt that since he
was taking up valuable counter space in the empty Diner that he should order
something. As though on cue a homely
little man, draped in a white bib, appeared before him. The black door with the small window in the
middle of it, the kind they have on ships, swung back and forth behind him.
“What’ll you have?” asked the homely little
man who limped badly.
“I’d like…” he began, but the little man cut
him off.
“The waitress isn’t here,” he said.
He felt that he should ask where she
was. “Where is she?” He didn’t care, it just seemed appropriate to
ask.
“Her name is Dolores,” the little man
answered. “She went to pick up her daughter but she’s not supposed to leave
work so don’t tell nobody. What’ll you
have?”
“I’d like that piece of pie,” he said
pointing towards the strangely inviting ancient piece of pie with the escaping
blueberry filing.
“That one there? The one that died an ugly death?”
The little man leaned forward to look at the
pie and he could see that his face was scarred and his left eye drooped. His lower lip seemed to be shoved across to
the right side of his face.
“Looks like the filling was trying to make a
run for it,” he said.
The
little man looked confused and said, “What do you mean?”
The pie was served, and alone now, he
reached into his pocket, pulled out a small black felt box, and opened it. He stared at the quarter-karat diamond
nestled in a bed of bright white satin-ish material. He figured it was about the best diamond ring
in the world and he was proud of it.
He reached under his suit coat and gently
pulled out a bouquet of Peonies and clearing off an area of counter space with
his forearm, laid them down gently as the sunbeams burst in through the
windows.
be happy, here something to smile over..........
