Not even on the night she’d died, when no pie seemed big enough and no coffee black enough to alleviate the pain.
He hadn’t cried, not then, and not for most of his life. Crying was something his mother had been strangely against. Strange because of how much she’d stressed being at peace with oneself and understanding and trusting your feelings. She hadn’t said this the way a condescending therapist might to an uncooperative husband, but in a way that suggested self-strength and confidence. It was what you felt inside, who you were that mattered in life. “Embrace yourself, Lance. Only then can you fully embrace others.” He might have been eight when she’d first offered up this token of wisdom. A typical conversation to have with a second-grader. Typical was something his mother had never come close to achieving. She had been extraordinary. Not in the same ways Lance was extraordinary—wouldn’t that have been helpful?—but in a way that allowed him the trust and confidence in her to share his world with her and have her love him and help him and stand by his side as he grew and developed in every way you could imagine, and in ways you couldn’t.
But now she was dead and Lance was completely alone, stepping off a bus two hundred and thirty-seven miles away from home with the previous night’s horrific events still burning fresh in his tired mind.
He had no plan. Hadn’t had time for a plan. The bus was the first one headed out of his town, and he didn’t care much where it was going. He’d had to leave, been forced to run.
Now he was here.
He was hungry.
Food was as good of a start to a plan as he could think of.
He didn’t need to wait for the bus driver to haul his luggage from one of the holding bins along the bottom of the bus. Everything he’d been able to take with him from home was stuffed into his backpack—an expensive thing gifted to him by the owner of a local sporting goods store years ago, when Lance had helped him with a problem—and the backpack had remained in the seat next to him for the bus’s entire trip. He adjusted the straps over his shoulders, turned and thanked the bus driver for getting them all to their destination safely—an act that was met with a confused expression and a mumbled reply that might have been “You’re welcome”—and then headed across the street, through a large and mostly empty parking lot, and stopped briefly on the sidewalk.
He breathed in deeply and closed his eyes. Exhaled and opened them. Turned right and started walking, the soles of his basketball sneakers making gentle scraping sounds against the concrete. A warm breeze blew into his face, and a warmer sun was just rising above the horizon at his back. He walked with the traffic, the occasional vehicle slowly passing by on his left. The drivers all looked bored. Looked like they’d rather be anywhere else. It was Thursday morning, so Lance imagined that might surely be the case if they were all headed to a nine-to-five so they could pay the mortgage. Well, that’s one thing I don’t have to worry about.
He kept walking.
A mile later, after passing a small strip-mall and a McDonald’s, he found what he’d been looking for. The momentary flit of happiness the sight caused him was so brief it might not have happened at all, just a teasing scent carried off by the wind before it could even be enjoyed.
Lance felt something pushing it away.
The diner was called Annabelle’s Apron and looked like it might have been built before Nixon resigned. A rough shoebox of a place with a shiny aluminum front and lots of windows. The roofline looked to be sagging a bit, and there was no telling whether the bright neon signage atop it actually still had any juice left, but there were a few faces on the other side of the glass windows, and all of them were forking food or sipping coffee. Lance stepped off the curb, allowed a pickup truck to back out of a parking space, and then crossed the lot and pulled open the door.
The interior of Annabelle’s Apron looked, sounded, and—most importantly—smelled exactly as Lance had hoped. Directly ahead was the long counter with a matching row of stools. A few folks seated there, elbows resting atop the counter as they read the morning paper while they ate. The windows were lined from end to end with booths, the upholstery a bright blue—robin’s egg, that’s what his mother would have called it—and the tabletops showed their age, full of cracks and streaks and blemishes. The battle scars of thousands of meals, tens of thousands of cups of coffee and tea and glasses of orange juice and soda pop. The air hummed and chimed with the noise of the kitchen crew working hard, glimpsed sporadically through the open window behind the counter. Two waitresses went to and fro from table to kitchen to table. Smiles plastered on and only a faint sheen of sweat on their brows so far. Hushed conversation and soft-playing country music from a lone overhead speaker were occasionally punctuated by the yelling of a young child in the rearmost booth—a location surely chosen as a strategy by its not-our-first-rodeo parents.
And all of this was accompanied by the smells of bacon and eggs and butter and coffee and biscuits.
Lance had been standing at the door for too long, and the woman behind the counter called out as she refilled a patron’s coffee, “Sit anywhere you’d like, sweetie. Be right witcha.”
He looked over his shoulder, back to the parking lot and the everything beyond it. Scanned the horizon. The sun was higher now, almost full-form. Then his stomach grumbled and he took a seat at the counter, setting his backpack at his feet and taking the laminated menu from the woman who’d told him to sit. The menu was smudged with grease and dried grape jelly, but the text was readable. Lance ordered four scrambled eggs, bacon, hash browns, and a large stack of pancakes. The woman behind the counter—early sixties, Lance guessed, and with a look of no-nonsense experience creased into her aged brow—looked him up and down one time before asking, “And to drink, sweetie?”
“Coffee, please,” Lance said.
She nodded and tore the order ticket from the pad in her hand and turned to post it on the wheel in the window. She spun the ticket into the kitchen, where it was quickly snatched by a fleeting glimpse of a cook’s hand, and then she returned with a black plastic coffee mug and poured from a full pot. “Just brewed this one, sweetie. You’re its first.” She winked and asked if he needed cream or sugar.
“No, thank you,” Lance said, doing his best to smile.
“Margie, I’ll take some of that,” a gentleman—a regular, apparently—called from the end of the counter. The woman—now Margie—put a hand on her hip and said, “You’ve been tryin’ to get some of this for twenty-three years, Hank Peterson. Today’s not gonna be no different!” This got a chuckle out of Hank and the two other waitresses, and Margie went off to fill Hank’s coffee.
Lance sat in silence, looking down at the counter and listening to the sounds around him and sipping his coffee as he waited for his food. His mother had always said that diners were some of the greatest places on earth because everything was real—the food and the people. Honest Americans cooking good ol’ American comfort food. The potential of diners always excited her, like each one was an individual mystery just waiting to be unraveled.
Margie refilled Lance’s coffee.
His food arrived shortly after.
The bars on the stool were a little too high for him to comfortably rest his long legs—at six foot six, this was the type of problem he’d grown accustomed to—and he had to adjust himself repeatedly to keep his legs from falling asleep. But the coffee was strong and the food was delicious, and the general ambiance of the diner did its best to revive his spirits.
Margie cleared his plates when he’d finished. “I wasn’t sure you’d be able to eat it all, t’be honest. Large stack usually fills up most folks.”
Lance wasn’t most folks.
“I don’t suppose you’ll be wantin’ nothin’ else?”
Lance was about to say no, but then paused. Said, “Do you serve pie?”
Margie laughed. “You kiddin’?”
“No, ma’am.” Lance shrugged and smiled. “I have a high metabolism, I guess.”
“We don’t s
et it out till lunch, but I can get you a slice from the back. Apple okay?”
“Is it fresh?” Lance asked, feeling a twinge in his heart.
Margie smiled. “I bake ’em fresh every morning.” Then she disappeared into the kitchen and came back a minute later with a large slice of apple pie on a tiny saucer. “That’s bigger than a normal serving,” she said. “Figured you could handle it.”
Lance felt the warmth of the woman’s kindness and smiled and nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you very much.”
He was halfway through his pie—it was fresh, as promised—when he noticed the woman sitting on the stool next to him. He wasn’t sure when she’d arrived, but she was there now and looking directly at him.
“I used to put more cinnamon in it,” she said. “I don’t know why they cut back on it. It was much better that way if you ask me. I think it’s too sweet now.”
The woman looked much older than Margie, eighty at best but more likely closer to ninety. She wore a plain brown cotton dress and brown leather shoes, stockings visible on the bit of ankle that showed at the hem. Her hair was gray, but still thick, done up in a tight bun atop her head. Her face was so deeply wrinkled it was as if her skin were modeling clay, and somebody had dragged the tines of a fork up and down its entire surface.
“I don’t think it’s too sweet,” Lance said, then turned to see if Margie was in earshot. “But I do think less sugar and more cinnamon would be an improvement.”
The woman nodded once. “Of course it would.” Then she was quiet for a while, staring ahead toward the kitchen window. Lance stared ahead with her, waiting. She spoke again, this time a little quieter, sadness creeping into her voice. “I don’t know why the thing with the pie bothers me so much. They’ve kept things pretty much the same around here all these years, but the pie … I was darn near famous for that pie. People used to come from two counties over for my pie, and then one day these floozies decide to up and change the recipe. Who do they think they are?”
Lance considered this, took his last bite. “Well,” he said, “the folks that remember your pie, they’re going to know that this pie isn’t your fault. In fact, if it was as good as you say, those folks are probably just as disappointed as you.”
She looked at him and smiled. Her teeth were yellowed, but mostly intact. “I suppose you’re right, son. I suppose you’re right. Guess I never thought of it like that.” She pointed an arthritis-gnarled finger at him. “You’d have liked my pie. I know it.”
“Yes, ma’am. I believe I would have.”
Then they were quiet again. Margie cleared Lance’s plate away and he declined more coffee. Hank Peterson paid his tab and left his newspaper when he was finished. The man two stools down took it and flipped to the sports section. The family with the loud child had left and been replaced by two high school–aged boys who looked sleepy, and Lance wondered why they weren’t in class. Through the kitchen window, he could see one of the two waitresses counting her tips and joking with one of the unseen cooks.
“So,” Lance said, turning to look at the woman on the stool next to him, “how bad is it here?”
The woman closed her eyes, almost as if she were fighting back tears. When she opened them, she suddenly looked very tired. “Bad,” she said.
Lance nodded. “Yeah … that’s what I was afraid of.”
“Are you going to help?”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“You don’t believe that.”
Lance placed a twenty on the counter, stood and grabbed his backpack. “No,” he said. “But sometimes I wish I did.”
He waved goodbye and thanked Margie and then headed for the door. He stopped. On the wall to the left of the door was a photograph in a rough wooden frame, yellowed with age. It was a picture of the woman who’d sat next to him, only in the photograph, she was behind the counter, holding a whole pie in her hands and putting on a small grin for the camera. Beneath the photograph was written:
Annabelle Winters
1905-1990
Lance turned and looked at the barstool where she’d been sitting, now empty. Then he took one last glance at the photo and pushed through the door, out into the world.
2
Lance didn’t always see the dead. His world wasn’t a nightmare where he walked around all day amongst restless souls and lingering spirits with unfinished business. He didn’t check out at the grocery store staring into the faces of demons.
But demons were real.
And he did see the dead. Not every day, but frequently. Most were friendly, though often troubled. Others were not so friendly. Annabelle Winters had been of the former variety, despite her pie grievances, and her visit had had a clear meaning that was nothing to do with pastries.
Lance continued west on the sidewalk. The traffic on the road to his left diminished to only single vehicles passing by with large spots of silence in between. He’d apparently left the outskirts of town—where the strip malls and diner had been—and made his way into what passed as downtown. It was a quiet, tranquil setting—old-school, a place where you could imagine Andy Griffith as sheriff, or Hallmark coming to town to film a Christmas special. The street was lined with rows of brick buildings with dull-colored awnings. Above the awnings, large hand-painted sections of the brick exteriors—badly faded by the sun and years of rain—advertised businesses and stores whose proprietors (and revenue) had surely died long ago. He glanced into a few of the windows on his right as he walked, saw a bakery, a small hardware store, a used bookstore, a lawyer’s and a CPA’s office side by side. A few faces stared back, eyes locked onto him as he passed. He couldn’t blame them. He knew that in a town like this, newcomers would be easily spotted. Especially ones as large as he. He tried to smile, hoped he’d succeeded.
He kept walking. Passed more businesses and crossed side streets before downtown finally spat him out onto an intersection of two rural routes that stretched off into land beginning to show signs of residential development and larger industrial buildings. He crossed the main road and headed south. The sidewalk wasn’t as well maintained here, and his sneakers kicked up stray rocks and chunks of concrete as he went. Weeds grew through cracks. The sun was getting hot, and his t-shirt began to stick to the small of his back. A half mile later, he stopped. Ahead he could see where the sidewalk finally died and bled into grass, and a memory flashed in his head of his mother reading to him from Shel Silverstein’s Where the Sidewalk Ends. He enjoyed the image briefly before storing it away.
He stepped off the sidewalk and walked into a crumbling parking lot with only a handful of cars that could be called clunkers at best. He’d found what he’d been looking for.
Another telltale sign of a small town is that a lot of things are named after their owners. Annabelle’s Apron was the first example, and now Lance stood in front of Bob’s Place. An L-shaped one-story museum of a building whose sign—medium-sized and, again, hand-painted—advertised simply: ROOMS. BAR. The office was at the far end of the longer segment of the L, and the rest of the structure was punctuated with eleven blue doors that had once likely been deep and royal, but now more resembled the light (robin’s egg) blue of the diner’s tables. A Coke machine hummed at the L’s intersection, an ice machine with the words Out of Order written across its door standing silently at its side. Window A/C units drooped from next to each room’s door, only one of which was buzzing and rattling in the window frame as it worked. Two modern satellite dishes were mounted on the roof above the door to the office.
Lance checked the license plates on the few cars parked in the lot as he headed toward the office. Found all but one to be in-state. The lone exception was from Alaska. Alaskan plates always seemed very foreign, Lance found, considering you had to drive through a whole other country to get from Alaska to the forty-eight.
Large trees loomed from behind the building, the perimeter of what appeared to be deep forest. He grabbed the handle of the office’s glass door and pushed. A small bell mo
unted above the door frame jingled loudly as he did so, and he was instantly overwhelmed with the smell of lemon—some sort of cleaning product that had been applied so heavily he felt like he’d stepped into a bottle of Pine-Sol. He coughed once and his eyes began to water, blurring his vision.
“Oh my goodness, I’m so sorry! I wasn’t expecting anyone so early!” a female voice, high and pleasant and young, called from somewhere ahead. Lance used the sleeve of his t-shirt and wiped his eyes, then breathed in heavily through his mouth. When his throat stopped burning and his vision began to clear, he was genuinely surprised at what he saw.
The outside of the building suggested that the office’s interior would be run-down at best. At worst, it might have had hourly rates posted on a sign beside a pane of bulletproof glass, which the desk attendant would sit behind and take wads of cash through a sliding metal drawer and immediately forget any faces seen coming or going.
In actuality, the office was immaculate. The floor was a freshly polished (maybe it was Pine-Sol) wood whose color matched an elegant front desk that ran along the short left wall. Centered on the right-hand wall, a large television was mounted above an entertainment center with a satellite receiver sitting on top, along with a large tray full of various neatly arranged liquor bottles. Six small glasses and a small ice bucket with tongs filled the rest of surface, nearly sparkling in the overhead lighting. An old but inviting leather couch provided seating. Lance looked at the liquor for moment (It poisons the mind and the body) and then over to the front desk, behind which stood a girl whose beauty was as elegant as the office itself. “Is that the bar?” he asked, pointing to the entertainment center.
The girl smiled, a grin that suggested she wanted to laugh, but her professionalism kept it inside. “It is.”
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