Slow Evenings in Killeen

Delia had a rule about Tuesday nights. She took her dinner somewhere that was not her apartment, because eating over the sink made her feel like a grad student in a documentary about loneliness. The Starlight Diner on the main drag was cheap, the coffee was bad in a way she had gotten used to, and nobody bothered her.

She was halfway through a burger and working on a proof copy of a church bulletin she'd printed by mistake, taking the double run home for scratch paper, when the bell over the door clattered hard. A whole group of soldiers came in at once, maybe eight of them, loud, still in their uniforms from the day. The small diner went from half empty to packed in the space of two minutes.

Delia kept eating. That was her plan, keep eating, look boring, get left alone.

It almost worked. Then a tall guy with a shaved head and a tired face made his way down the row of booths, checking each one. He stopped at hers.

"Is this seat taken?" he asked. He had his tray in one hand and a bottle of water in the other. "Place filled up fast."

She looked at the empty vinyl across from her, then at the crowd stacking up near the register. "No, go ahead. I'm about done anyway."

"Appreciate it." He sat, set his tray down, and started in on whatever meat and potatoes the mess hall had not provided that night. "Long day. Don't mind me if I eat like I haven't seen food since Thursday."

"You're a soldier," she said, mostly to herself. It was obvious from the uniform.

"Yep. Sergeant, out at the post. Callum." He stuck his fork hand out, realized it was the wrong hand, laughed at himself, and switched. "Callum Reyes."

"Delia. Delia Beckham." She shook it. His hand was warm and rough across the palm. "I'm sorry, I don't really know what to do with a sergeant. Do I salute or something?"

"Please don't. I get enough of that." He bit into his burger and talked around it a little before catching himself. "Sorry. Manners. I'm on leave, sort of, which means I'm doing paperwork instead of the fun kind of work, and it's turned my brain to soup."

She took a fry and dipped it. "Paperwork is soup-making. I'm writing a thesis right now, so I know."

"What's it in?"

"Geology. Sediment cores, specifically. I'm out at the satellite campus here, the one they run out of that strip mall by the pawn shop."

Callum pointed his fry at her. "I know that building. There's a nail place next door. My neighbor won't shut up about it."

"That's the one." She smiled before she meant to. "It's not glamorous. I drive out to drill sites and pull up tubes of mud and then spend months arguing about what the mud is telling me."

"About what?"

"Mostly about water. How the lakes and rivers around here behaved over the last few thousand years. Whether it was wet or dry, and when."

She stopped, aware she'd been lecturing. Callum nodded like it made sense, though, and asked another question, and then another, and that was how an hour went.

He told her about the heat, how the past summer had cooked even the guys who'd grown up around here, how his unit had done a training rotation earlier in the year where the AC in the trucks quit and everybody got quiet and mean. He told her he'd been in eleven years and was deciding, this leave, whether he was going to make it a career or get out and do something with his hands where nobody yelled at him before seven in the morning.

"What would you do?" she asked.

"Honestly? Fix cars. My dad had a shop in El Paso. I could rebuild an engine before I could drive one." He shrugged. "Everybody tells me I'd be dumb to give up the pension."

"Everybody isn't you, though."

He looked at her for a beat, then smiled. "No. They're not!"

She told him about the divorce, a little, because he asked what brought her to Killeen and the real answer was that the rent was cheap and she wanted a town where nobody knew her name. She'd been married at 24 to a guy she'd met in her undergrad program, and by 26 it was over, and the whole thing had gone so quiet at the end that she sometimes wondered if it had really happened.

"He wasn't mean," she said, moving fries around on her plate. "That's the dumb part. He just never really... I don't know. Picked me. We were just two people who were there."

Callum didn't say anything for a second. Then he said, "That sounds lonelier than being alone."

"It is. For the record."

The waitress came by and Callum waved her off when she tried to bring a check to Delia's side. "It's on me," he said. "You let a stranger sit at your table. That's worth a slice of pie at least."

"I wasn't done with my pie yet."

"Even better. More to be grateful for." He ordered her another slice anyway, cherry, because the waitress said the apple was gone.

When he left, he paid at the register, tipped too much, and stopped at her booth on the way out. "Delia. It was good talking to you. Get some sleep, you look like a woman arguing with mud in her head."

"I am, always. Goodnight, Callum."

The bell clattered behind him and the diner went back to its normal noise, and Delia sat there with her free pie and felt something she hadn't felt in a while, which was like she'd been interesting to somebody.

* * *

Three nights later was a Friday, and Delia's shift at the print shop ran long because some real estate office came in at six wanting four hundred door hangers by Monday. By the time she got to The Starlight it was past nine and she was starving and grumpy and had printer toner on the cuff of her sleeve.

The place was only about a third full this time. She scanned for a booth and saw Callum in the back corner, alone, a newspaper folded to the crossword in front of him. He looked up like he felt her looking.

He raised a hand and waved her over. Not a maybe-wave, a come-here wave.

She hesitated maybe two seconds. Then she crossed the diner and slid into the seat across from him before she could talk herself out of it.

"You're stalking me," she said.

"You're in my diner. I was here first, actually. This is my booth. I've had it since I got to town."

"You've been here three weeks."

"Long time to establish a booth." He pushed the basket of crackers toward her. "You eat here on Fridays too?"

"Only when work runs long. I was here Tuesday. Different night."

"So this is fate twice." He closed the crossword. "How's the mud?"

"Still mud. I got a date back on a core section I've been fighting for two weeks, so actually pretty good. The core is from about four thousand years ago and it says the lake basically vanished for a while."

"The lake vanished. Just up and left."

"Evaporated. It happens." She flagged the waitress and ordered a burger and a sweet tea, and when the waitress glanced at Callum he shook his head, already done.

They talked about nothing again. Her print shop job, where the worst customer was a funeral home that kept misspelling its own name in the files. His paperwork, which had gotten no better. The weather, which was fixing to turn and everybody in town could feel it in their knees.

Somewhere in the middle of it Delia realized she was leaning forward on her elbows and he was too, and the table between them had gotten smaller in a way that had nothing to do with furniture.

"Can I ask you something honest?" Callum said. He turned his coffee cup in a slow circle on the saucer. "You seemed real glad to see me just now. For a guy who usually can't tell, that one came through loud."

Delia felt her face go warm. "I was."

"Good. Because I thought about Tuesday all week, and I figured either I was imagining it or I'd better say something before I ship out and spend a year regretting I didn't." He said it plain, no move, no hand reaching across the table. "So that's me saying something."

She turned her tea glass around the same way he was turning his cup. Outside the window the parking lot lights buzzed and a pickup rolled through the drive-thru of the chicken place next door.

"I'm glad you said something," she said. "I don't do this. Just so you know. I'm rusty at it and I overthink everything."

"Rusty's fine. I've got time."

She believed him, which was the strange part. The waitress dropped off her burger and asked if they wanted dessert, and Callum said yes before Delia could answer, and they split a slice of lemon meringue with two forks, and it was the least dramatic evening of her whole year and the one she remembered longest.

Delia walked out first, Callum behind her with his jacket over one arm, and the night had gotten cool enough that she crossed her arms on the way to the laundromat lot where her Corolla sat alone under one buzzing light. The chicken place had gone dark. Somewhere a dog was going at a fence.

"That your car?" he asked.

"Ten years old and it still starts. Don't judge me."

"I drove worse for longer." He stopped at the driver's door with her and didn't do anything, just stood there with his hands in his pockets, and she could tell he was working up to something by the way he watched the empty road instead of her.

"You can say goodnight, you know," she said. "It's not a whole ceremony."

"I'm aware. I'm stalling." He laughed at himself. "Eleven years in the army and I still stall."

"For the record, you're bad at it."

He turned then and put one hand up, slow, and cupped her jaw as if to see whether it was welcome. She answered by stepping in. The kiss was soft and a little off-center at first, and then he