A short story by Doug Richardson
The new girl started work last Monday. The diner has been short-staffed since Barbara left; she said 23 years is long enough. The new girl, Rachael, looked like she wasn’t from around here, had more of a city look, like the girls who grow up on the outskirts, on farms, and start out early dressing the part of getting to a city where all the possibilities are. So it seems she was lost.
All the regulars had the same alarmed look when they first spotted her, someone different behind the counter. It was a reaction as though returning home and finding a new chair in a corner. It fits in the space and looks normal, but it’s so new that the lizard brain sends a brief alert that it might be a bear.
Most of the regulars have been around since the old days of the mill. They would meet in the morning on their way to work, and they got to know each other that way. They rarely ran into each other in the acres upon acres of the mill compound. And Greg was the only office worker, everyone else had worked out in the weather and with the machines. But Greg was a pleasant enough guy. He didn’t put on airs, and the scruffier guys slowly let him into their group. Now, over twenty years after the mill fully closed, they meet just as early in the morning, but then spend a couple hours nursing 75 cent coffees with the local TV news droning on in the background.
Counter help couldn’t have come soon enough. Flanders said at least three times that “Service is as slow as two dead snails.” It made him chuckle to himself every time. But he’d reached his limit. He and everyone else knew you only got to use a good zinger like that three times at most. Any more and it just got annoying, like someone trying too hard to coin a catchphrase.
The diner had been a center of stability with Barbara running things. Frank, the owner, thought he ran things, but really it was Barbara. She taught every cook that blew in how to put out consistent food, and there have been more than a few cooks over two decades. Most didn’t stay longer than four years before moving on, and up. With the diner training under their belt they usually found it easy to get work for more pay in cities – or at least bigger towns that had more to do and more romantic possibilities.
And the same with waitress help. There have been some long runs where a girl hires-on part time in high school and then stays a few years after graduation. The job is always a way station for the cooks and waitresses, but not for Barbara. She didn’t yearn for the city, for excitement, for the unknown. For her, that seemed like taking a big risky chance with your life, like making a 50/50 bet as the dice tumbled to the other end of the table. You could lose.
She was afraid of losing. She wasn’t afraid of much else, but after marrying right out of high school, she and her husband, Alan, were frugal, a bit lucky, and saved up enough to buy a house three years after graduation. She was quietly proud of this achievement, and that house was the rock of Barbara’s life. She would no sooner leave her house to try life in a new town than leave one of her children on the highway.
Back then Alan had a good paying position at the mill, while Barbara stayed home raising their family and building their home, one garage-sale find after another. Soon, years passed and dust gathered in corners that never get fully cleaned out that you just get used to. It was comfortable, and Barbara knew exactly what to expect for the next day. She was happy, and flourished.
But the winning streak ran its course. Alan saw the writing on the wall with the layoffs, how with more and bigger machines just as much lumber was processed but with a third the manpower. So he made his move to the office. He started making excuses to get in the door – anything, needing a timecard, or dropping off paperwork. After a while he got to know Carol, the secretary, the shortest person Alan had ever met. She was friendly, and would usually take the time to have a brief conversation about the weather, or ask if he had any luck fishing.
Eventually the managers got to know him too. Alan had become a familiar face. This was a long game he was playing, and it took close to a year. He had come in to drop off a Christmas gift to Carol, a desk bowl of assorted candies, when he overheard that a junior manager was leaving.
“Say Carol,” Alan asked, “do you know if the office has anyone in mind for that manager position opening up?”
“Not that I know of,” Carol said.
“Do you know what the requirements are?”
“Not much really, just experience. Most of these guys started out in the yard like you. Are you interested?”
“I might be.”
“Well, you’ve been around long enough, you know the ropes. Here,” she said, pulling a sheet of paper from a side drawer, “take an application and bring it back. I’ll make sure someone sees it.”
And it was that easy. That kept them going another ten years. Then the logging slowdown started and there was no other angle to play. The mill compound was a ghost town to its former hey-day, when there were guys in grubby hard hats and big trucks and machines everywhere. It was much more efficient now, but Alan could never get over how eerie it felt with so much space and so few guys running it. And it smacked as rude when near the end everyone had to either accept a pay cut or risk closing the mill, which just forestalled the inevitable closing.
With their two boys gone to college and only their daughter, Katie, still living at home, the Burns settled into an even quieter life than their already quiet life. For once, there were no boys stomping around slamming doors and breaking things, taking every opportunity to make a loud noise. It took Barbara a week to notice it when her last son, Jason, went to college: the silence. And when she did notice, she had a momentary flash of heart-breaking nostalgia for the incessant, startling racket that had frequently irritated her.
It was around then that the mill closed for good. Alan did get a small retirement package, but there was no other industry in Spruce as a backup, nowhere else to go. The mill is what gave the town its only jobs that were not service positions in auto shops and grocery stores. The mill is why the town existed at all.
Barbara did the math and found they were in good shape, considering. Their house was nearly paid off and expenses were low. So she took a part time job at the diner to bring in a little more each month, and the habit stuck. Twenty three years went by as if in a day. There were eras though, like in the early days when that chef started the fire. He stayed on another year – maybe out of guilt, but he let Frank know a month ahead that he would be leaving soon, to give him more time to find a replacement.
And there was the time that Barbara considered her best years, when Rayna worked with her. They became instant best friends, and it made the hours at the diner more of a social occasion than work. Sometimes Barbara even looked forward to going to work, taking extra care with her makeup and changing up her look and jewelry so as not to get into too much of a rut or be too predictable.
But Rayna too would become another in a long string of characters to pass through as Barbara stayed on. Rayna’s ticket out was to marry a truck driver who started stopping by the diner on his route. For two years Earl could usually be found at the same seat in the diner at around the same time, 10:30am, which was sort of a lull hour after the breakfast rush. Earl’s spot was close to the register, which gave him lots of opportunity to chat up Rayna. He lived eighty miles away in Lake County though, so when the couple finally bridged the gap to romantic interest, they had trouble getting together to get to know one another outside of the diner. Rayna would later say they got married so they could date.
After Rayna there was just one transient after another to help Barbara run the place, rarely someone from town that she knew, and each person painted the place with their personality and vibe, which looking back is as clear as a picture. There were the bright days of Rayna, then that blue stretch when what’s-her-name showed up and really caused a fuss. Rachael is the latest, but it’s clear she won’t last long. She’s no Barbara.