The Last Light

The neon sign was still on when I pulled into the lot, and that surprised me. Half the bulbs had been dead for a year, so it usually just said SAL WEL S DINE, but tonight every letter glowed, the red buzzing like it was trying hard one last time. The Salt Wells Diner was closing at midnight. Word had gone around three weeks ago. I'd been meaning to stop by before it shut and kept finding reasons not to.

I'd been driving through the Mojave for work all day. Swim lessons in Palm Springs in the morning, then a private pool client out near Amboy, then a long empty stretch back north with nothing but the radio and my own thoughts for company. I'm forty-four years old, I teach swimming for a living, and most of my driving hours are spent noticing how few places are left out here that still want you to stop.

So I stopped. I shut off the engine and sat for a minute with my hands on the wheel, looking at that sign. Eleven twenty on a Thursday. The gas station next door had one truck parked at the pumps and nobody inside the little store. The desert air came in through the window, cool and dry, smelling like dust and gasoline.

The door of the diner jingled when I pushed it, the same broken little bell it had the first time I came through eight years ago. Inside, the fluorescents buzzed over empty booths and a counter with dozens of sticky notes stuck to it. People had written things over the past weeks. GOODBYE ROSA. BEST PIE IN 100 MILES. MY DAD PROPOSED HERE IN 1989. Somebody had drawn a little cartoon of a milkshake with legs.

There was one person in the place, sitting alone in the third booth from the door, and I knew her right away. Georgia. A friend of a friend, the way you meet people out here. She was twenty-nine, a yoga teacher, and she had a lightbox on the table in front of her, the kind with a glass top that glows from underneath. Old photographs were spread across it, and the light came up through them and lit her face from below.

"Geoffrey," she said, and she smiled like she actually meant it. "You came for the last night too."

"Last night's the only night I'm passing through, I guess." I slid into the booth across from her without asking, because that's the kind of thing you can do with a person you've talked to four times over two years. "What's all this?"

"The history." She turned one of the photos toward me. A black and white shot of the diner with a different sign, from the sixties maybe, a big finned car parked out front. "The owner's daughter put together a box of stuff. She said anyone who wanted to could come look through it tonight. I've been here two hours."

The waitress, Alicia, came out from the back and waved at me. She was in her sixties and had been feeding me coffee and bad jokes since my first visit. She took my order for a burger and coffee and went away again, and Georgia and I fell into talking the way we always did, easy and sideways, about nothing much.

She told me the lightbox was on its last legs, that the bulbs flickered when you pressed too hard on the glass. She showed me a photo of the diner flood in 1979, water up to the counter stools. I told her about my day, the kid in Palm Springs who finally put his face in the water without screaming, which was a victory eight weeks in the making. She laughed at my impressions and I liked the sound of it in the empty room.

Then she said the thing that changed the shape of the evening.

"So I leave in a week," she said, arranging photos in a line on the glowing glass. "I took a job at a studio in Tucson. Better pay, actual benefits, a real teaching schedule. It's a good move."

I put my coffee cup down. "Tucson."

"Tucson." She looked at me over the photos. "Yeah."

"Congratulations. That's great." And I meant it, I did, but there was something twisting in my chest while I said it, something sour and small that I recognized and didn't like. Jealousy. Not of Tucson, exactly. Of whoever got to be near her every week. And underneath that, a worse feeling, which was that I'd had two years of chances to ask her to stay, or to ask her anything, really, and I'd spent all of them being polite. Being easy. Being the guy who talks about pool schedules while a woman sits across from him at a diner table.

"Thanks. I'm nervous, but it's good." She squared up a photo against the edge of the lightbox. "I came tonight to say goodbye to this place, and honestly to the whole town. I've been here two years. It felt like it needed marking somehow."

Alicia brought my burger and refilled our coffees without being asked, which was the kind of thing that would not happen at any new job in Tucson. Georgia watched her go.

"I used to come here after close at the studio," she said. "Ten at night, piece of pie, nobody talking to me. Alicia learned my order in a week."

"I know. She told me about you once. The yoga teacher who tips too much."

"She did not."

"She did. Word for word."

Georgia laughed and shook her head and looked down at the photos, and I ate my burger and thought about the sour twisting thing in my chest and what I was going to do about it. The clock over the counter said 11:46. There were maybe fourteen minutes left of this diner's whole existence, and the fact of that was sitting in the room with us, making everything feel heavier and clearer at the same time.

"Geoffrey," she said, after a while. "Can I say something kind of direct?"

"Please!"

"You look like a man doing math in his head." She turned a photo of the neon sign, from back when it was whole. "What's the math?"

I wiped my hands on a napkin and took a breath. "The math is I've enjoyed every one of the four conversations we've had, and I never once did anything about it, and now you're moving to Tucson in a week."

She was quiet for a second. The lightbox hummed.

"Okay," she said. "That's honest. I appreciate honest."

"I didn't want to be the guy who makes it weird right at the end."

"You're not making it weird. It's already weird. The diner's closing. Everything's weird tonight." She smiled, and then it faded into something more careful. "For what it's worth, I've thought about it too. Asking you stuff. I just figured you were married or sworn off people or something."

"No. Just busy. Just good at hiding behind my schedule."

"That's a very common disease out here."

"It's an epidemic."

We both laughed, but not all the way, because the truth was out on the table now, lying there with the photographs. I looked at her. She was pretty in a way I'd noticed the first time and then made myself stop noticing, dark hair pulled back, steady eyes, hands that moved when she talked. Thirty