“Through the Diner Window”

“Through the Diner Window”
Short story by Brandon James, 2008

The radio station whined and beeped and an urgent public announcement came on. The speaker described a man with black hair and stubble and blue eyes, about six feet, one hundred and ninety pounds. Dangerous but not armed, the speaker said. Dad sat across from me at the table by the window in the diner, the diner my mother always took me to, by the busy intersection with all the streetlights. It had rained on our way to the diner. The rain started when dad picked me up from the park at the corner of the street where my house is. It stopped by the time we got to the diner at nine o’clock. The streetlights reflected off the black wet asphalt: red, yellow, green. When the man on the radio described the dangerous man, my dad stopped talking to me and listened to the man on the radio for awhile, until the man stopped and that old song started playing again. I don’t think the song picked up where it left off.

“What are you ordering?” he asked me. The menu was laid out in front of me.

“When mom brings me here I always order pancakes,” I said.

“Is that what you want?”

“Mom says everything else is too expensive,” I said.

“Your mom don’t call the shots here,” he said, closing his menu. “Your mom ain’t here. Order what you want. I’m ordering the southern-style chicken tenders with gravy. You like dessert?”

“We don’t get dessert,” I said.

“You’re getting dessert tonight,” he said. “Order what you want.”

I sipped orange juice through the straw. Mom never let me drink my orange juice until we got the food but now I can. I don’t remember what dad looked like the last time I saw him but I think he looked the same then as now. My orange juice was halfway full when I stopped and looked at the color pictures on the menu. I saw nachos and cheese and I saw a really big hamburger with two pieces of meat and lots of vegetables and a brown sauce.

Dad saw me looking back and forth between the pictures, and he said, “Order both. It’s OK.”

The waitress came to our table with a pad of paper and a pencil. She wore a white apron and a blue skirt and her hair was brown and short like my mom’s hair. After I said what I wanted and dad said what he wanted and she wrote it all down, she looked at my dad’s face.

“Do I know you from somewheres?” she said.

“No,” he said. “Can you refill my son’s orange juice when you get a chance, please?”

“Yes sir,” she said. She left with both of our menus under her arm. I saw dad looking at her butt as she walked back into the kitchen.

“Dad,” I said, “why didn’t you want mom to come to dinner with us?”

“Your mom can’t know you’re with me,” he said. “Don’t you remember last time?”

I shook my head.

“You probably don’t remember much about me,” he said. “What does mom say about me?”

“She said you tried to set her on fire once,” I said. “Like when you use a stove or burn marshmallows.”

“That’s an exaggeration,” he said. “What else does she say?”

“She said you hit her and once you broke her nose,” I said.

He stopped talking and put his hands on the table, lacing his fingers. I watched his two thumbs as they fought with one another.

“She said you heard voices in your head that made you do things you didn’t want to do,” I said. “Like voices that aren’t really there but only you can hear them.”

“Those are still there,” he said. “That’s not a lie.”

“Mom’s not a liar.”

“She lied about me setting her on fire,” he said.

“She said you tried.”

He put his hands back under the table and nodded slightly to himself. He looked out the big tinted window at the stopped cars and the red lights reflecting off the wet street.

“After you was born,” he said, “your mom wanted to do a paternity test to make sure you was mine. I knew at the time what it meant and that’s when I set the house on fire. In retrospect I don’t know what to make of that.”

“What’s a paternity test?”

He scratched his arm. “That’s when someone ain’t faithful to someone else.”

“What’s in retrospect?”

“I suppose that’s when you’re not faithful to yourself,” he said. “Because later on you second guess what you done, or how you did it, and you’re not so sure it was the right or wrong thing to do anymore.”

“Why not go back and do something different?” I asked. “Like in Back to the Future?”

“That’s just a flick,” he said. “In real life you can’t do things over again. You pay for what you do, all the time, and there ain’t no way around it. Fact of life.”

I slurped on my orange juice. It was all gone. Mom told me never to slurp with my straw but instead to drink the last of it with the glass so it’s quiet. Dad didn’t say anything about it.

“On the walk home from school today,” I said, “I saw a praying mantis sitting on a fence.”

“Did it scare you?”

“Only a little,” I said. “I don’t think they bite you.”

“They do,” he said. “Everything bites.”

“Cats don’t bite.”

“Cats bite,” he said. “If it’s got a mouth, it bites. Think about that.”

The pretty waitress came back to our table with a big platter balanced on her arm and she set four plates on the table. I saw dad’s dinner came with fries. I didn’t think to order fries.

“Darling,” he said, “could you get my son some more orange juice?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “Right away sweetie.”

After the waitress left, dad whistled to himself and watched her leave. I watched her go back into the kitchen, too. “Ain’t seen a gal like that in months,” he said.

“Me neither,” I said. I whistled to myself and he smiled at this. I started to eat my nachos. The burger didn’t look as good as it did in the picture and I wondered if dad would make me eat it anyway.

“Kid, you remember last time I saw you,” he said, holding his hands out toward me, “when I asked you to ask me a real important question about life or the future or something of similar import. You said then you didn’t know what to ask and I told you to think on it and ask me next time we met. Did you think on that, like I told you?”

I frowned. “No,” I said. “I forgot you wanted me to.”

“Because I missed out on the good parts,” he said. “Like your first day of school or your first realization of death and mortality. You know what that is, right? Mortality?”

“Isn’t that the difference between what’s right and wrong?”

“It’s the word what means, everything you know or care for can disappear in a cat’s wink,” he said. “But I asked you to think about something real important because I missed these realizations. They sort of went by like a twinkling in the eye for me, or like a dream I can’t remember. And I asked you to think, what I might be able to teach you about your life or the world. So in the end you’d know I gave you something worthwhile, something to give your own son.”

“I don’t know what to ask,” I said.

“Because we might not meet again for awhile,” he said. He looked into the parking lot outside. It had started raining again, a little harder than earlier. “Ask me something now. Something big.”

I started to sweat and think. I thought about school. I said, “Can I ask you about a girl?”

“Go on,” he said. He kept looking at the parking lot.

“There’s this girl in my class with me and her name is Rebecca,” I explained. “Rebecca gave me a note that said if I wanted to marry her or not and she said I had one week to answer. Mom says marriage is a big deal and she told me that I should only marry her if I love her and can treat her good, like a real man.”

“That’s not a good question,” he said. “Don’t ask me that one. You can’t get married at your age and you won’t know Rebecca later on in life. Ask me something real important about life or morality, right and wrong and death,” he said. He scratched his scruffy neck and I saw that he wore a shiny bracelet on his wrists that I didn’t see before. We looked out at the street together and saw the green light change to yellow and change to red.

“I don’t know what to ask,” I said.

Dad stood up from the table and looked around the diner. Some of the other people in the diner looked at him when he moved out from the booth. The raindrops hit really hard on the roof of the diner so I couldn’t hear what was on the radio anymore.

“Are you hearing the voices?” I asked.

“Only on the radio, kid,” he said. “I got to go now but I want you to think on what I told you.”

He backed away from me and my stomach felt empty. He was backing away towards the bathrooms. The people in the diner stopped eating and watched him.

“What did you tell me?”

“You’ll see me again,” he said. He pushed open the bathroom door with his back and said, “I swear on that. And you don’t forget what I told you. You can’t ever know how important you are to me.”

“I missed what you told me,” I cried. I wiped my eyes with my sleeve. I looked into the parking lot and saw two cops getting out of a cop car. One of them had a gun. I looked back at the bathroom door and didn’t see dad.

No one in the diner said anything for awhile and my glass was still empty.