by Mary Rae
Diner Deeds
Done Dirt Cheap
An Aspie Girl in Massachusetts
Diner Short Story Mysteries 1
Lisa Shea
Copyright © 2016 by Lisa Shea / Minerva Webworks LLC
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Lisa Shea
Book design by Lisa Shea
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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I count each step as I make my way through the light drizzle of the chill April night. Eighty-seven. Eighty-eight. Eighty-nine as I curve around the large, muddy puddle that has swelled on the cracked sidewalk. There’s no reason that I count; it just seems right. I always do it when the occasional urge for human company drives me from my small apartment and out into the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts. And I know from experience that the trek from the top floor of my olive-green triple-decker to the well-kept Boulevard Diner on Shrewsbury Street is exactly six hundred and forty two steps. So there’s still a distance to cover.
I wish sometimes that I had a dog to walk with me. Not a huge one, which might pull me and interfere with my steady rhythm. And not a tiny one whose pea-sized feet might have trouble with the tilted stones and rocky potholes that define Worcester. No, it would be something medium sized. A cocker spaniel, maybe. Friendly. Quiet. Patient.
One hundred six. One hundred seven.
But I know I won’t get a dog. Dogs have complex care requirements, where I do best with simplicity and solitude.
When I finished high school, it was made clear to me that college wasn’t in my path. It’s not that my grades were poor. I was always good in English, maybe because I spent all my spare time curled up in a corner of the Worcester Public Library, reading my way through their shelves. But I just didn’t deal well with people. Or noise. Or noisy people.
The idea of voluntarily subjecting myself to more unpleasant classroom situations, with my fellow students staring at me and laughing, gave me hives.
So my parents had found me a job working from home. I edited books for self-published authors. Everything was handled through email. My mom worked as a website designer and set everything up for me. I could live on my own, pay the rent, and live a life that suited me just fine.
Four years later, and it has become routine.
Two hundred fourteen. Two hundred fifteen.
My dad grumbles sometimes that I should get a real job. Go out and work in an office. But I know it would never work. It isn’t because I have Asperger’s. I hate that label. It makes people judge me. Treat me differently. As if somehow I were the diagnosis. It’s just one small aspect of me. Like my short, light-brown hair or the slender shape of my body. Was my mother defined by her breast cancer? Or my father by his lame leg?
No.
Three hundred sixty five. Like the days in a year. Except in a leap year, of course. Which happens every four years. Or sometimes not, if it is divisible by a hundred. There are rules and then there are exceptions. Life is like that, which makes it incredibly hard to navigate. Just when I think I’ve figured out a rule, someone finds a way to alter it.
So, no dog for my small apartment. But I do have a hermit crab. He lives in a small tank next to my computer. He is quiet, peaceful, and his name is Hermie. He keeps me company while I work on my editing.
I turn onto Shrewsbury Street. It is fairly quiet, now that it is after eleven p.m. Still, there is a scattering of restaurants open. A drunk couple weaves out of the beer place and heads toward their car. This is why I don’t drive. Too many impaired people out there. People texting, people surfing, people drinking. Maybe someday when the self-driving cars are everywhere I’ll give it a try. Not until then.
The Boulevard Diner is, as always at this time of night, sparsely populated. Two men sit separately at the counter. I can see them through the long windows. The Boulevard Diner is a classic Worcester Lunch Car diner, built right here in Worcester. It’d been put together way back in 1936. Back before anyone had even an inkling of World War II and all the death it would cause.
The building is tan with red highlights, and a neon sign announces its purpose.
Diner.
I move to the silver box-canopy at one end and walk in. There are small, wooden booths with red cushions down one side and red stools along the counter. The two men, one stout with graying hair, the other hunched with a Patriots baseball cap, barely look up as I pass. It isn’t that they are unfriendly – we just understand each other.
I settle down onto my traditional stool at the far end. The cook gives me a brief nod before she turns to assemble my tuna melt sandwich. She is heavy but moves with the grace of a ballerina. I often wonder what she does for a hobby that gives her that agility, but I’ve never asked. Her long, brown hair sways with her motions.
I always order the exact same thing. Tuna melt. Cheddar cheese. One pickle, dill. A glass of caffeine-free diet Coke. I think they stock the soda just for me, although they’ve never said anything about it. Caffeine makes me shaky and I don’t like the taste of water.
The comforting smell of the bread cooking rises to me and my shoulders relax. In two minutes and thirty-five seconds –
The door swings open.
I glance over in surprise. Usually the place is fairly quiet this late at night. It’s why I come in around now. If I waited until later, the drunks kicked out of the nearby restaurants and bars would come over for some coffee and food. I don’t like to be around them. Trial and error have found this to be the perfect time for my occasional outings.
Four men come single-file into the diner. The man in front is the leader of the group. He is tall – it almost seems like his curly hair sweeps the curved, wooden roof of the diner, although I know that is a trick of perspective. He is maybe five years older than me and wears a leather jacket over black jeans.
Behind him is a portly, middle-aged Chinese man in all black.
The third man is a red-head about my father’s age in a gray t-shirt and jeans.
And the fourth is white-haired and wrinkle-faced, with the most stunning blue eyes I’ve ever seen. He is wearing a tan jacket peppered with pockets and neatly pressed pants.
They look consideringly at one of the booths and I shake my head. The booths are sized for a couple – not for four grown men. Apparently the men come to the same conclusion. They fill in four stools between me and the two regulars.
The cook puts my tuna melt before me along with the soda. Her voice is calm and even; I find it quite soothing. “Anything else, hun?”
I shake my head, as I always do.
She nods and turns to the newcomers. There is a flurry of requests. Burgers, chili, drinks. She hears them all without writing anything down. I appreciate that in her. She has a good brain. One for details.
The orders in, she turns to begin her operations.
I don’t mean to eavesdrop, but the diner is, after all, a closed metal box. Maybe eighty feet long. There is barely enough room to walk down the aisle between
the wooden booths and the stools. The newcomers’ voices are loud in the space.
Tall boss-man shakes his head in resignation. “I wish I hadn’t had to fire Jimmy like that. But we cooks are a team back there. We have to support each other. And with him stealing from the restaurant, even if it was just summer black truffles and not equipment, well, we couldn’t have that. He had to go.”
Chinese man nods. “You did right. He’d only been with us for a month, in any case. We were fine before he joined us and we’ll be fine now.”
Red-head pulls out some napkins from the holder. “It’s a shame, though. He was a quick learner. And he could cook a steak just about perfectly. Like he had x-ray vision or something.”
Blue-eyes shrugs. His voice is steady and sure. “Experience, is all. He’d grown up cooking. You cook long enough, you get so’s you know when something’s done.”
I wonder if blue-eyes thinks of himself as old. As wrinkled. In his mind is he still young? Still fit? Does he sometimes get surprised when he sees himself in the mirror and realizes what time has done to him?
My father says that, sometimes. That he carries a mental image of himself that doesn’t match what is happening to his body.
He isn’t actually my father, of course. My real father left us when I was six. My father is my step-father. And not quite that, either, because he and my mother have never married. My biological father has never divorced my mother. Just walked out one