I looked through the opening in the window, and saw into the kitchen. The cook-- some new guy I didn't know-- was rushing around as though the place was busy.
Then Roz walked from the bathroom. She had long wavy black hair. A white apron hung from her waist. Her uniform, a light blue shirt with a collar, was stretched tight across her breasts.
All in all, she was looking pretty good, like a beautiful park in which I could never play.
When she saw me sitting at the counter, she tipped her head slightly. That was all she showed. She never smiled at the sight of anybody, but approached everybody in a guarded way, as though she was always expecting something bad to happen. I couldn't blame her for being that way-- what with everything she'd suffered.
“Coffee?” she asked, as she slipped behind the counter.
“Well, I don't know, maybe,” I said.
“So it's like that?” she asked.
“Pretty much so.”
She still poured a cup of coffee, and set it on the counter before me. After she placed the pot back into the coffee maker, she walked back over to me. She crossed her arm before her, watched me sip some coffee, and asked, “Why don't you just start applying for regular jobs?”
“I'm not a regular guy,” I said, and set the cup down on the saucer. “Hey, you got a smoke?”
She rolled her eyes-- it was most expression I ever saw from her.
“Had to give it up,” she said. “Just too much of a dent in my budget. Besides, you can't smoke in here anyway now.”
That was right. The state had passed the new law about smoking in public places. If I ever laid my hands on another cigarette, I'd probably have to crawl down into the sewer to smoke it.
Roz was looking out the frosted front window at the cars and trucks passing down the snowy street. She always seemed to look away like that whenever she talked and the conversation took an awkward turn.
“I lost my carfare,” I mentioned. “Had to walk home. Lost my smokes, too-- almost a full pack.”
She grunted, still gazing out the window.
Just then a bunch of people enter the diner, talking loudly, and stamping the snow off their shoes on the doormat.
Roz flinched at their sudden appearance. Her eyes showed a flash of panic, and then, after she seemed certain all the newcomers were safe, she reached beneath the counter, pulled out a stack of menus, and set about handing them out.
Bushy Bob heaved his bulk onto the stool next to mine. I hadn't seen him come in, and wondered how I could have missed him; he was, after all, a good three hundred pounds, and tended to wear colorful mismatching outerwear. Everybody called him Bushy Bob because of his eyebrows, which didn't look like eyebrows at all but like a couple caterpillars that somehow strayed onto his moon-shaped face and taken up residency above his eyes.
He was like me in many ways-- almost unemployable, pitifully poor, and often scorned by females of all sizes and ages.
He now made a big, noisy deal of pulling a newspaper from his coat pocket, and spreading it out on the counter. When he found the page he was looking for, he smoothed it out with his big hammy hand, and started to read.
Finally he said to me, “What's your sign?”
“My sign?”
“Yeah, your sign,” he said.
“I don't know-- I always kind of like No Parking, I guess.”
“No, no, no,” he said. “Your astrological sign.”
I looked at him dully. I was never interested in that kind of thing.
“Well, when's your birthday?”
“June fourteenth.”
“Ah, a Gemini,” he said knowingly, and looked down at the paper in a way that suggested he needed glasses. “It's says the time is right for romantic interludes--”
Just then Roz, passing by behind the counter, didn't ask him if he wanted coffee; she just set a cup on the counter next to his paper. Bob always wanted coffee.
“Thanks, darling,” she said, not looking up from the paper.
Roz asked if I wanted a fill-up on my coffee. He told her no-- because I felt bad I wasn't paying for it-- but she murmured “Shut up,” and filled up my cup just the same.
After she'd gone to wait on the tables, Bob asked, “You doing anything with that?”
