BeforeCalifornia.com

The same guy had been into the diner every night this week and the waitresses made a game of guessing what he would order. Monday, it was waffles. Tuesday, it was hash browns. On Wednesday it was back to waffles again—which Tami correctly guessed—but on Thursday he switched it up and ordered cherry pie. On Friday, Kate, Ann and Carla all guessed right and found themselves bringing him sausages, fried eggs and hash browns throughout the night. He was a skinny, scrap of a man but none of the staff at Ruby’s found themselves questioning his voracious appetite. Instead, they watched with hawk eyes as he ploughed his way through his food and wondered aloud what it was that brought him to their diner every night at 1 a.m. and why exactly he ordered a mug of decaf coffee each time, without fail.

‘Maybe he’s got the evening shift working security down at the factory,’ Ann suggested.

‘Nah.’ Tami was sitting in front of the counter painting her nails, barely bothering to look up at the others—though from time to time they would catch her shooting a glance over at the mystery man. ‘He’s too well-dressed to be security.’

Carla leant in all of a sudden, her movements so sharp and expression so serious that the other girls found themselves moving closer to listen.

‘Maybe he’s a spy,’ she whispered, and the girls all laughed.

In all of this speculation, Kate was silent. She liked to play their little guessing game as much as they did, but pre-empting an order in a diner was so much easier than trying to figure out the man behind the order. Instead, she slipped away quietly whilst her friends were talking in hushed tones and made her way over to the man’s table.

‘Can I get you a refill?’ she asked, gesturing to the mug of coffee which she knew perfectly well was still half-full.

The man looked up at her with a smile and a shake of his head before returning his attention to the newspaper on the table in front of him. When Kate didn’t immediately leave, he looked back up at her and she could see his eyebrows knitting together in curiosity.

‘I wondered if I could ask you a question,’ she blurted, forcing the words from her mouth before she could chicken out.

Still bemused, the man shrugged and offered her a seat across from him. ‘Sure. Go ahead.’
Once seated across from him, wringing her hands awkwardly under the table, Kate cleared her throat, hazarded a glance over at the other girls—two of whom were still chatting, the other having left to wait on some customers—and said, ‘You come in here every night at the same time. Well, for the past few nights, anyway.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do. What was your question?’

‘Well, it’s just…’ She found herself wringing her hands so hard that he must have noticed, so she forced herself to stop and lay them on the table instead, palms-down, and met the man’s eye. ‘You order decaf every time,’ she said quietly, as if it were a sordid topic.

The man laughed and Kate laughed too, reflexively. Suddenly it all seemed so much less awkward.

‘So what you’re wondering,’ he began, pausing to squint and get a look at her name-badge, ‘Kate, is why I don’t order caffeinated since it’s one in the morning and that’s what everybody else is drinking, right?’ With a nod from her, he continued, ‘See, the last thing I need is something to help me stay awake. I’ve been trying my damnedest not to stay awake.’

‘You can’t sleep?’

‘Uh-uh.’

‘Have you been to a doc about it?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Why not?’

When he laughed again, Kate couldn’t help but feel she had crossed the line somehow and leant back, brushing her hair nervously out of her face.

‘I thought you said you wanted to ask me a question. You’ve asked me four so far. If you want to play 20 questions that’ll cost you a fresh pot of coffee.’

Kate was taken aback but there was something accommodating about this guy. His grin told her he was just teasing, but she went up to the counter anyway, told the others she was taking her break and returned to the man’s table with an extra mug and a hot pot of decaf, brewed specially.

Once the man had drained his own cup and allowed Kate to refill it, he looked at her frankly. ‘I’ll answer any question under the sun for you, but first I want you to do something for me.’

She took her time filling up her own mug, right to the brim. When she thought about it, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to hear what he was going to say, but then who did she think she was sitting down and bombarding him with questions, anyway? The overwhelming urge to get up and go back to the other girls seemed like a great idea all of a sudden; the only thing that stopped her from standing up and leaving him to his coffee was curiosity.

He spoke before she could have second thoughts. ‘I want you to look over at the table on the other side of the room, under the neon “diner” sign, and tell me what you see.’

Kate opened her mouth to question the man but he simply smiled and gestured with a nod of his head, waiting for her to look. She had only been working at the diner for a couple of months, but she didn’t need to think twice before knowing which table he meant. Her eyes tracked across the room to the bright red neon sign, then down to the table beneath it, where a young man sat—and was currently looking over in her direction. When their eyes met, he looked away quickly, his face flushing red.

Kate turned back to the mystery man at her own table. He seemed amused. ‘There’s a customer sitting there,’ she said, ‘but I don’t—’

‘He’s been watching you from the second you walked over to my table,’ he interrupted. ‘And he was here before I arrived. In fact, every night I’ve come in this week, he was here before me. And every time he sits at that same table.’

‘I don’t see—’

He cut her off again, this time with an infuriating wave of his hand, and Kate was tempted to storm off. He spoke before she had the chance to.

‘While you and the other waitresses have been busy keeping a hawk eye on me—yeah, I noticed—you haven’t paid much attention to that young man over there under the neon sign. Do you know that every night he sits there, alone, and doesn’t order anything until a waitress comes to him? Mostly he just orders himself refills of coffee and, well, I don’t think he’s much of a coffee-drinker.’

Kate reflexively glanced over and saw that, as expected, the man had a dishevelled look to him, his eyes wide and expression grim. The hand that lifted a napkin to his mouth was shaking, and Kate could almost hear the paper of the napkin rustling all the way across the diner.

‘Doesn’t order coffee when you come by, though, does he?’ The mystery man was smiling when she looked back to him. When she seemed bemused by what he had said, the smile split into a grin. ‘You really are blind, aren’t you?’ he teased. ‘He sits there, looking all antsy and frantic like he’s gonna jitter right out of his seat when you pass him by and then when you finally notice him…’

He was looking at Kate expectantly, like he wanted her to fill in the blanks, but she was lost. Something told her that this was something she should know, and if she couldn’t figure it out it’d just solidify her in the man’s mind as completely self-absorbed. Her pride, if nothing else, forced her to think on it.

The guy was of average height, brown-haired, pale like a real, red-blooded Californian shouldn’t be. Kate always noticed him briefly when he first walked in, if only because the other waitresses chimed in about having a pot of coffee ready for him—but the second he sat down he always seemed to vanish. He became a part of the fabric of the diner itself, as much as the other customers or the neon sign above his head.

She thought harder, really struggled to pinpoint him in the blur of faces she saw every night. There he was every night, under that same old neon sign, but damn it if she couldn’t remember what he ordered…

A sigh cut into her thoughts. The mystery man was clearly unimpressed. He held a folded-up slip of paper out to her and waved it at her to get her attention.

‘Go over there,’ he said. ‘Go over, ask for his order and give him this.’

‘But—’

‘Just trust me.’

Kate took the scrap of paper and stood up, uncertain, studying it in the palm of her hand awhile before looking once more up at the man. ‘You know, you never told me your name,’ she stated.

A smile. ‘John. Now, go.’

Brushing down her uniform, Kate set off for the table across the diner, glancing from time to time back at the mystery man—John—only to see him give her an encouraging nod. Halfway over, she hesitated, suddenly suspicious, and quickly opened up the note. If she hadn’t known it already, she probably would have recognised the writing as John’s from the quick, careless scrawl. The hand it was written in didn’t matter, though; what mattered was what it said.

My shift ends in an hour. Want to go get a drink?

Anger flashed through Kate for an instant and it was all she could do not to march back over to John and tell him to get out. It was only then, of course, that she realised her legs had carried her all the way across to the table of the young man. Half his face was bathed in red neon as he looked up at her, curious. Kate wanted to turn on her heel and leave.

Instead, she took a chance.

‘Can I take your order, sir?’

The man’s gaze flitted from the coffee mug in his hands back up to Kate’s face and she noticed for the first time—no, remembered—that his eyes were a striking blue. Even before he spoke, it all came back to her again.

‘Can I get you anything, hon?’

He bites his lip and pauses, like it’s the hardest decision in the world, and every night—like clockwork—he says the same thing.

‘W— Uh, what do you recommend?’

Kate could see his mouth shaping the words and, surprising herself, she took another chance.

‘Tell you what,’ she said, before he could speak. ‘We’ve got a whole apple pie, hardly touched. I’ll warm you up a slice with some cream, how’s that sound?’

The man nodded, gratefully. Kate could see the little indentations in his bottom lip where he’d bitten it so hard. Under the table, she felt her fingers close over the paper in her hand, as if for reassurance.

‘Listen… I finish in an hour. If you wanna go get some coffee or something…’

She fully expected him to say no, and it took a moment for her reeling mind to right itself and tell her that the terrified look on his face had nothing to do with the prospect of going on a date with her.

‘Ah.’ She smirked to herself. Of course. ‘Decaf, that is,’ she said softly, giving him her best smile. ‘Or tea, or lemonade, or ice cream…’

He almost startled her, bright as the smile was when he reflected hers. ‘Yes!’ he said, suddenly, before remembering himself. ‘I’d… I’d love to. Ice cream. Yes.’

When Kate made her way back up to the counter to regroup with the other girls, they pounced on her like cats on a mouse.

‘What was that?’

‘Damn, girl, did you just ask him on a date?’

‘Two guys in one night? You’re on a roll!’

Kate laughed along with her friends and told them whatever they wanted to know, unable to shake the smile from her face. It was only when Ann had to refill someone’s coffee that Kate suddenly remembered John. When she looked over to his table, he was gone. The smile faltered for an instant, but then she remembered she had promised her date some apple pie. It was still her shift, after all.

The nagging thought entered her mind that she had never gotten the chance to ask him some of her burning questions, but she knew it didn’t really matter.

She had the strangest feeling she wasn’t going to see John again.