Waiting

Gloria Hope, or just plain Gloria according to the dull, silver name-badge pinned to her dull brown-and-beige uniform, took the bowl of cereal from the tray and set it down in front of the young man who had been sitting in the corner booth staring at the old cracked wall-clock since midnight.

He’d ordered cereal, she knew, because he felt bad about nursing free coffee re-fills for, how long had it been now? She followed his gaze up to the clock, and as she took the milk-jug from the tray milk spilled out onto the lacquered table and pooled dangerously at the raised aluminum lip. She wiped a clean spot on her wrist over her greasy forehead and had the sudden thought of diving into the pool of cool milk, all the sweat and grease slicking from her body as she resurfaced, refreshed and alive.

“No use in crying about it,” she said, running a dirty cloth over the spill and making the white infinity pool cascade onto his shoes, perhaps a little on purpose.

She looked again at the clock because she hadn’t registered the time the first time she’d looked, just the fact that it was the same clock that it had always been, just a little more tired-looking than she recalled. It was two a.m, she saw now. Almost time for a smoke-break. She was down to five a night, which was a small triumph of will, but tonight she’d already smoked five with three hours left before the breakfast shift. Something about watching the young man, the boy, had made her need to smoke more. Had set her on edge. She looked once more at the clock, suddenly unsure if she’d seen the hand at two or three. No, it was two. Wishful thinking. She thinned her lips as she finished wiping the table, but she felt him recoil at their sudden closeness and she stopped wiping and stood up straight.

“Thanks,” the boy said, shifting his feet and shifting his spoon under the cereal which came up in a lump, stuck together with crystalized sugar and old corn-syrup. The pure white milk was yellowing now, polluted.

“Hardly anyone orders cereal,” she said, annoyed at him over the milk and his unwillingness to be near her. “So it’s lumpy.”

This was more than she usually said in a whole shift, except for repeating orders, and the words whooshed up like a deep-sea diver surfacing, and they hurt, like she had risen too fast. When he didn’t answer she wondered if she had actually said them out loud.

A young couple by the window were made double by their reflection so that they were holding hands twice and four bodies moved back and forth in time with the silly little argument they were having, as if they were on either end of a tug-of-war. The girls hands looked soft and white in his, and her own looked swollen and red as she clicked her pen out of habit and underlined the boy’s check twice for no reason.

In the years when she seemed to have all the energy she could ever need, when sleep was the last thing on her mind and she noticed everything without having to be reminded, and her hands were still soft, soft and white like the girl’s and wrapped in her own man’s big, brown fingers that she would let touch and fondle her while she poured him free coffee and slipped him pie, she had felt the world to be a different place, so full of promise that after her shift the sex had felt superfluous, a final act that could have been edited out, her orgasm an anti-climax compared to the promise of it amongst the touching and the cooing.

She snapped her pen twice more.

“That’s two bucks for the cereal,” she told him.

The boy tore his gaze from the clock, and tried to focus on her. “What?” he said, as if seeing her for the first time.

“Well, you can get it for five bucks in town, and a guy with a beard and top-knot serves it to you. But you ain’t down-town. Forget the tip. Two bucks,” she repeated, because he was looking confused and she wanted to retreat into certainties.

He put two bucks down on the table for the inedible cereal and another two for tip. Then he jammed his spoon into the mound of cereal and it slipped off the side and the upset the bowl again. This time the dirty milk spilled directly onto his lap and she walked quickly away and came back with a dry cloth and handed it to him and slid both coins back to him.

“This one’s on the house,” she said, lingering, unsure if she wanted to say what she was about to say, hating the wise-waitress act she had become. “Look,” she said anyway, a softness to her voice surprising her. “She’s not the only girl in the world. You seem like a good kid. Don’t wait all night.” She turned and then turned back, pressed her red hand on the edge of the table and then hid it away in her apron, as if it had lessened her authority. “You don’t belong here,” she said. “Not here. Not at this hour. You go on home. If she comes I’ll tell her.”

Again her words didn’t seem to register, and she was about to repeat them when the girl from the window foursome ran past them, taking her refection with her, and a stifled sob escaped her and propelled her faster, thrusting her out the door. Her boyfriend, husband? - Gloria was too old suddenly to guess which, or what couples called themselves these days - hadn’t bothered to get up. Maybe tomorrow the girl would feel too alone and call the bastard, afraid he might already have let go of his end of the rope, afraid of falling backwards into nothing. Then she would ask him in tangents why he hadn’t run after her.

Gloria removed the boy’s bowl and the milk jug, setting them on her tray as the boy resumed staring at the clock, as if she hadn’t spoken.

“The suitcases were the worst thing,” she said, almost to herself, as she moved away.

Well, it was true. She hadn’t known what to do with them. Too heavy to drag back in her soft hands, she’d sat on the larger suitcase all night, outside the cafe, until her father had come to pick her up in the morning and take them and her home, in silence. She’d spent the next month in her room with them still packed. Still waiting. Still holding on to her end of the rope.

“I’m going out for a smoke-break,” she said, this time definitely to herself, sure now that the boy could not hear her. “Try not to spill anymore. If you start to drown, come get me.”

She started as he slid out of the seat, as if set into motion by the current of her voice, although she was sure he wasn’t listening, and as he struggled with his coat she waited for him.

“If she comes in, I’ll let her know. You leave me your number,” she said, like she should keep talking to keep him conscious.

“She knows it,” he said, seeming to see her properly for the first time and writing down his number anyway on a napkin, with the pen she offered him from the recesses of her apron. “I call her all the… How will you know it’s her?” He spoke quickly, the hour of the morning and the coffee and his decision making him seem jittery. “She has blonde hair, cut short, so it makes her eyes look even bigger, and she’s kind of my height, but nice. And she’s pretty.” He had the grace to look embarrassed for giving her this last detail, though it still made her chest feel tight. “And her name is Ali.”

He said the name with reverence, like it was saintly, beyond reproach. If only you could know her, he seemed to say - she isn’t at all like you.

“Ali. Got it.”

Gloria lit a cigarette, her sixth that shift, as the boy disappeared around the corner with one last hopeful look.

She put her lighter away and looked the other way, into the bright lights of the city, and she saw a figure of a girl emerge from them, wrapped in a waist-length faux-fur jacket, bare legs shimmering in the street lights.

“You missed him,” Gloria said, blowing out hard blue smoke under the cafe’s awning, not looking at the girl as she neared. “You’re late. Too late. He’s gone.”

“Oh,” the girl said, confused for a moment before she hardened against Gloria’s tone. “Do I know you?” she asked the older woman, looking up and down Gloria’s brown-and-beige uniform but missing the name tag.

Gloria’s appearance seemed to disgust her. This didn’t upset Gloria, as she too was often disgusted by her appearance.

“No, but I know you. Leave him alone. He didn’t do anything to you. Let him be. Don’t keep him dangling, his heart ain’t hard enough yet.” She blew out some more smoke and her thin lips hardened, making the crinkles in them deeper. “So I never saw you and you never saw me. And he can start the new-year fresh. Find some nice girl who really likes him.”

“Maybe I really like him,” the girl said, defiantly, unsure why she felt the need to defend herself.

“Maybe you don’t know what you like. I’ll give you that. Until you do, let him alone.”

Gloria balled up the napkin with his number on it in her apron pocket, held it tight in her fist, protecting it.

“Thanks for the advice.” The girl stepped back, shaking her head, eyes rolling as she scrolled on her phone. Gloria thought could see a little bit of panic in her eyes as she searched, until finally she held the phone to her ear and looked right at her, triumphantly.

“Eddy, can you come and get me? I’m outside the cafe. I don’t have any money for a cab or anything. Why didn’t you wait for me?…Of course I was coming, silly.”

Gloria took a drag on her cigarette and flicked it away, the sparks flew from it and seemed to light up the street as the boy came running back around the corner, looking wide-eyed and nervous and relieved and so pleased to see the girl that Gloria’s chest hurt again.

A gust of wind blew the trash around on the wet street, and rolled her cigarette into a puddle by the side of the road, where it lay until all the light in it fizzled out. Gloria wondered how long it would lay there before someone swept it up, or it just slowly, little by little, disappeared.