The Diner Debacle

My name is Lorraine Baker, I'm thirty-four years old, and I've worked security at Hollis Feed and Seed for six years. Six years. That's longer than some marriages last around here. Longer than most, honestly.

My job is mostly watching grain. Grain, and the occasional raccoon that gets into the back lot. There's a camera feed with eleven angles of mostly nothing, a folding chair with a bad spring, and a security room that smells like grain dust and old coffee. I know it's dust from the grain because I vacuum the vents myself every month and nothing changes. The dust always comes back. It's part of the building now. Probably part of me too.

Anyway. The point is I know every person who walks through that store. I know who writes checks, who steals pennies from the penny dish, who lets their dog pee on the seed racks. So when a new face showed up a year ago last spring, I noticed.

Harry Vogel. Thirty-six, or so he said. Tall, pale, dark hair, weirdly good posture. Walked into Hollis Feed and Seed on a Tuesday and within a week half the town acted like he'd been born behind the counter.

He didn't buy anything, most days. He just leaned on the counter and talked. And people loved it. I watched him on camera eleven, the one over the register, and I could not figure out the trick.

That first Tuesday he had old Mr. Duttweiler laughing so hard he had to sit down on the bags of cracked corn. Wednesday the Denny twins, who have not agreed on anything since Little League, were both nodding along to whatever Harry said about soil pH. Thursday a woman I'd never seen smile in her life, not once, was giggling at the counter like she was at a dance.

"Who is that guy?" I asked Carla at the register, over the radio.

"Harry. Isn't he something?" she said.

"He's something all right."

"He told me my hair looked nice today."

Carla is sixty-one. Her hair is blue. I didn't say that out loud, because I'm a professional.

This is the thing about me, and I know how it sounds. I've dated a bunch of guys since college. Nothing stuck. Every one of them was fine, and fine got boring, and I ended it, and everybody in town calls me picky behind my back. I've heard them. Break room. They think I can't hear through the vent. I can. The vent carries everything in that building except the smell of grain dust, which never leaves.

So maybe I was already in a mood when Harry came in that Friday morning, same as every Friday for a year, and charmed the entire feed store in under an hour. Or maybe it was the day he walked past the security office and said, "Evening, watch commander," with this little smile, like my job was cute. Like I was the town's pet guard.

Either way, I got an idea that night, and it was a bad one. I want that understood up front. It was a bad idea and I did it anyway.

Mel's Diner stays open twenty-four hours. It has six vinyl booths, all of them sticky, and a jukebox that plays the same ten songs in a rotation that hasn't changed since roughly the flood. Everybody knows everybody at Mel's. Which means if you want to be a stranger in Bountiful, you have to work at it.

I worked at it. I have a wig from a Halloween two years back, a dark red bob that is nothing like my real hair, which is brown and usually in a ponytail because who am I impressing, raccoons? I put on a green blouse I bought for a wedding I ended up not attending. Lipstick. Actual lipstick. I looked in my bathroom mirror and said, "Well, hey there," in a voice one notch higher than mine, and I cracked myself up so bad I had to sit on the tub edge for a minute.

Then I drove to Mel's.

The plan, such as it was: Harry showed up at Mel's most evenings around eight. I'd seen it on the news scanner at work, because I track everything in this town, it's literally my job. I'd sit in a booth, be a mysterious new woman, flirt a little, be a little odd, and see if Mr. "Evening, watch commander" could charm somebody with an actual brain. If he fell for it, great, I'd have something on him. If he flopped, also great. Either way I won. That was the plan. Plans made in grain dust rooms should be reviewed by someone else first. Noted for future reference.

I took booth three, by the window, because the light was bad there and the light being bad helps a wig. Ordered coffee I didn't want. Waited.

Eight-ten. The bell over the door jingled. In he came, coat off one shoulder like a guy in a commercial, and I swear the whole diner adjusted itself around him. Dot behind the counter perked up. A guy at the counter stopped mid-burger.

He scanned the room. I ducked my head, sipped my terrible coffee, and became a woman deeply interested in the salt shaker.

I heard him order. Heard Dot laugh. Then, footsteps. Vinyl squeak. And he slid into my booth across from me like we had an appointment.

"Is this seat taken?" he asked, already sitting in it.

"It is now, I guess," I said, in my fake voice. Up a notch. Breezy. "I don't bite."

"Mm." He flagged Dot with two fingers. "Coffee, please. And a slice of pie if the coconut is fresh."

"It's always coconut," Dot said. "Nobody eats it."

"One slice, then. A sacrifice."

Dot went off cackling. See? Cackling. At nothing. Eleven camera angles of this and I still couldn't find the trick.

"So," I said, and leaned an elbow on the table, and did the thing with my hair where you tuck it back. I'd practiced in the car. "You come here often? God, sorry, that's terrible. I'm new in town. Just passing through. Lorraine. No! Sorry, habit, names slip out. Call me..." and I panicked and picked the first name that wasn't mine, "...Renee."

"Renee," he repeated.

"Renee," I confirmed, dying a little.

He looked at me the way you look at a crossword clue you already know the answer to. Two minutes. I'd been in the booth with him two minutes. I got my coffee, I got my coconut pie I did not order, and I was mid-sip working up to a genuinely good flirty line about the jukebox, and he set his fork down, folded his hands, and said:

"Hello, Lorraine."

Coffee went down the wrong pipe. I coughed for a solid thirty seconds while he watched, patient, like I was weather. When I could breathe again I hissed, "What did you just call me?"

"Lorraine. Lorraine Baker. Security, Hollis Feed and Seed, six years. Watch commander." He smiled. It was not his counter smile. It was something else. "The wig is very good, by the way. The voice is less good. You dropped it twice."

"You don't know my name."

"You put it on your work vest. Right above the pocket. I read it the first week."

That was true. It was on the vest. Okay. Fine. Recover. "Lots of people read my vest."

"Nobody else calls you watch commander, though. I made that up. I wanted to see if it bothered you." He picked his fork back up. "It did. You did that little jaw thing."

My jaw did a thing. I clamped it shut.

"Okay," I said. "Fine. You got me. Congratulations. Enjoy the story at the counter tomorrow."

"I will, probably. Dot tells stories well." He pushed the pie plate to the middle of the table. "But that's not why I followed you here. Well. You followed me, technically. I just sat down."

"Semantics."

"Yes!" He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and lowered his voice. The diner noise kept going around us, jukebox, grill, Dot arguing with the burger guy, but it felt farther away than it should have. "Here's what I actually came to say. Or, no. Here's what I've been waiting a year to say, and tonight you finally gave me the opening."

"That I put on a wig?"

"That you got bored enough to put on a wig and drive across town to pick a fight with me." His eyes were doing something. I want to describe it right, because it matters. His eyes were doing something, and it took me a second to name it, because the color kept moving. Like oil on water. Like a coin turning at the bottom of a fountain.

"I've watched you for a year," he said, quiet. "You watch everyone. You catalog everything. You think nobody notices because you do it from a little room that smells like grain. I noticed. I've been waiting for you to do something reckless."

"I'm not reckless."

"You're wearing someone else's hair at a diner where everyone knows you."

Good point. Terrible point.

"Who are you?" I asked. "Seriously. What's your deal, Harry Vogel? Because nobody strolls into Bountiful out of nowhere and has the whole town eating out of their hand in a week. Nobody's that smooth. I've been watching. I watch everybody, it's my whole thing, apparently."

"It is your whole thing," he said, "and you're good at it. Better than you know."

His eyes flickered again. Not a trick of the fluorescent light. Not the jukebox. Silver. A clean flat silver, like a quarter held under a lamp, and then gone, brown again, like nothing.

I sat very still.

"Your eyes just did a thing," I said.

"Did they?"

"They went silver. Don't 'did they' me, Harry, I watch people for a living. Your eyes went silver."

He glanced around the diner, casual, like checking for the waitress. Then he reached across the table, took my hand off my coffee cup, and turned it palm up. His thumb pressed the center of my palm. His skin was cool. Not dead cool. Marble-in-the-shade cool.

"Keep your voice down," he said, "and I'll tell you what I am. You're going to want to scream. Don't. Dot thinks we're on a date and I'd like to keep it that way for about four more minutes."

"We're on a what?"

"Lorraine," he said, and his eyes went silver and this time he let them stay that way, "I'm not from here. And I mean not from here in a way that's going to require you to finish that coffee first."

I finished the coffee. Don't judge me. If a man tells you to finish your coffee before he says something that'll make you scream, you finish the coffee.

He waited. He actually waited, hands folded, while I drained the cup and set it down with a clink that sounded way too loud to me and not loud at all to anyone else.