Chapter Three
730 Words
Mia’s POV
It had been almost a year since the last time he'd sat in that same booth, and Mia had thought about it more than she wanted to admit.
"You," he said, sliding into the booth by the window. "You still work here."
"You remember me."
"Hard to forget the girl who told off a man twice my size for talking to her like garbage." He smiled, and it changed his whole face, made him look younger than he probably was. "Julian."
"I remember." Mia set the menu in front of him. "Mia."
"I know. You had a name tag last time too."
"Right." She felt her face warm and hated it. "Coffee?"
"Please. And whatever's good. I trust you more than the menu."
"The meatloaf's good if you like meatloaf. The pie is not fresh, no matter what Gary tells you, and Gary will tell you it's fresh."
Julian laughed, a real laugh, and Mia found herself smiling before she could stop it. She went and got the coffee and when she came back he was looking out the window at the gray afternoon like he had somewhere better to be but wasn't in a hurry to get there.
"Last time you were in here," Mia said, setting the coffee down, "some guy was giving me a hard time about his order being wrong. You told him to apologize."
"He did apologize."
"He did. Nobody's ever made a customer apologize to me before."
"He was being an a*s. People don't need money to be decent, they just need somebody to remind them sometimes." Julian wrapped his hands around the coffee mug. "You looked like you'd had a long week."
"I'd had a long year."
"Better now?"
Mia thought about the rent, about her mother, about the four walls she split with three other girls who barely spoke to each other some days. "It's a diner. It pays what it pays."
"You ever think about doing something else?"
"Every single day." She said it lighter than she meant it, a joke wrapped around something true, and Julian looked at her like he'd heard the true part underneath.
"What would you do? If money wasn't the thing stopping you."
Nobody had ever asked her that before, not really, not like they wanted the actual answer. "I don't know. I used to be good at numbers. Math. I liked how it always worked out the same way no matter what was going on around it."
"Accounting?"
"Maybe. Sounds boring when you say it like that."
"Everything sounds boring until you're good at it and it pays your bills," Julian said. "Then it sounds like freedom."
Mia didn't have an answer for that, so she went and got his order, the meatloaf even though he hadn't asked for it specifically, because she had a feeling he'd like it, and he did, cleaning the plate and telling her so.
When he left an hour later, he left cash tucked under the coffee mug, and Mia didn't look at it until after he was gone, until the door had jingled shut and the suit had disappeared down the street toward wherever men like that disappeared to. Two hundred dollars. For a plate of meatloaf and a cup of coffee that cost four dollars together.
"Carla," Mia said, staring at the bills in her hand. "Carla, come look at this."
Carla looked, and her eyebrows went up somewhere near her hairline. "Well. Guess suits aren't all bad."
Mia folded the money carefully and put it in her apron pocket, and she thought about it the whole rest of her shift, not just the money but the way he'd asked her what she'd do with her life like the answer actually mattered to him. Nobody asked her things like that. Nobody looked at her like there was more to her than the uniform.
She never saw him again after that day. Not for a long time. She told herself it didn't matter, that men like that passed through places like Duffy's and never came back, that it had been a nice afternoon and nothing more.
She was wrong about that, though she wouldn't understand exactly how wrong for another year, when a different night in a different room would put his face back in front of her in circumstances neither of them would ever have chosen.
- Writer
