She Begged for Me Back After I Left novel · Chapter 6 of 24
Chapter 6: Closing Time
By nine that night I was washing dishes at a diner on Harbor Road.
The owner was a big, tired woman with thick forearms, and she took me on for cash because I did not ask the pay.
"Eight dollars an hour and the meatloaf at close," she said. "You steal, I find out."
"I won't steal."
"You look like a man who's been robbed already."
"Close enough."
She gave me an apron.
It was the first honest work I had done in three years, and my hands knew what to do with it.
The panel in my eye sat at 0.4 percent, and I tried not to look at it.
Every time I did, I thought of Dalton's cold cup.
It rained from eight o'clock on.
The diner windows fogged, the sign over the door buzzed, and the late crowd came in shaking out their coats.
At ten past eleven, Alana came in.
She had on a bright yellow raincoat and no makeup.
She stood just inside the door with water running off her hood, scanning the room, and when she found me at the pass-through window her whole face opened.
"There you are."
"You can't be here," I said.
"I can. It's a public place."
She walked down the counter and took the stool nearest the kitchen.
"I'll have a coffee," she told the waitress. "And I'm staying until close."
The cook glanced at me through the window and raised an eyebrow.
I kept scrubbing.
She drank the coffee.
She ordered pie, and then a second slice, and ate neither.
At midnight she was still on the stool, and a man at the counter had started to look at her curiously.
"Nolan," she called, over his shoulder. "I know you can hear me."
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