Repose

Who: Eddie & Juliet
What: Breakfast and reacquaintances
When: Fuzzy recent
Where: (Bad) Diner.

The town had two diners, three bars and a goddamn carnival parked outside, at Juliet's count. If it had a three-ring circus, she wouldn't be surprised anymore. She woke from the couch in the mostly empty living room, in the bluish light of the early morning and with a headache throbbing over her left eye and a hollow, unsatisfied feel to being awake that came with dreaming all the way through sleep to the end. Two diners meant she had crammed the hat down over thick, unkempt black hair and was inside the syrup-sweetened heat of someone else's place before she had time for the headache to pound through to nausea.

She sat, black coffee in front of her and fiddled with the paper end of the sugar, her back to the room, her face toward the door. A three-ring circus wasn't so bad. She couldn't remember the carnival. It was maybe the kind of thing parents took kids to see. She'd dug through memory often enough to know the limits, like rummaging a box of childhood detritus, and feeling the cardboard sides. Memory was limited. Imagining, she had that. Maybe there was a carnival, when Repose was home. Maybe they had gone together, before. Juliet slid her chin into the palm of her hand, studied the door without seeing it.

The three-ring circus didn't bother her. The lack of noise did. Woke her, which was the stupidest damn thing she'd ever heard but traffic, noise was a lullaby. It meant nothing had gone so wrong that all that living out loud got interrupted, and the pause in the hubbub still read 'wrong' loud and clear, even to her subconscious.

The door jangled. Juliet startled, and her fist came down on the table hard enough to leave a (slight) dent. She looked toward the door, sharply black gaze - which softened on the man in the frame.

"As I live and fucking breathe," all long slow drawl. "Come'ere. Sit down."

[Older residents of Repose, the ones that sit on rockers in summer and gum teeth as their grandchildren play in the yard, they tell stories of the last winter train ride. It's a tradition, you see, if traditions can be things that happen once in a generation, once in a lifetime. The tales they tell are marvelous. The train, they say, was opulent, like a thing from a fairy tale. No one shies away at the memory of it, and no dark expressions cross features at remembering. Old women remember being young and wearing their mother's pearls, and old men remember a night spent romancing in tails and snowy white.

The following morning, as if by chance or holiday wonder, the invitations arrive.]

Saturday, December 26th
HOLIDAY TRAIN RIDE
THE ABANDONED TRAIN STATION, REPOSE
ADMIT TWO
DRESS ATTIRE REQUIRED

Wainright Industries

Who: Max and Gwen
What: Really bad food (there's a trend, here)
When: Recent
Where: Good diner

The thing about the diner off Main was, people were gradually getting to know that the man now running it was no longer the man who had been running the diner off Main for thirty years. The food then had been consistent; it had not been good, exactly, but it had been convenient. The menu hadn't changed in at least fifteen years and the short-order cook had been short-tempered, which meant if the waitstaff got the order wrong, you ate whatever it was the short-order cook had made, because otherwise, you didn't eat at all. Now the diner (known only as 'the diner', partly because Max didn't think to give it a name, and partly because the locals couldn't remember the name it had had before, given it had always been called 'the diner') was renowned for being convenient, and not very good, but at least cheerful. This was due to the obliviousness of Max setting wages (a good two dollars an hour more than they had been previously) and to Max's own inability to lose his temper, as well as the sense that a diner meal was no longer quick and easy, but required of you enough time that you unwound by sheer necessity, rather than by choice.

Max had given in and hired a short-order cook out of sheer necessity. Not because he was so very bad at cooking - which he was, and while he enjoyed it immensely and was happily oblivious to his own ineptitude - but because the volume of custom had ticked up as it had gotten colder and colder and Christmas shopping had drawn people out and left them hungry and without the desire to go home and make food for themselves.

The short-order cook was finishing up now, and all the wait-staff were gone, save Max. He was sat behind the counter, with a folded newspaper and a pencil, and a cup of the ever-present black coffee, a pot simmering on the burner behind him. The air smelled like cheese and eggs, and beneath that coffee and apple pie: there was a great slab of it behind Max, under a plastic cover. The pie was made by someone enterprising in the neighborhood, rather than Max, so it sold very quickly.

The radio was crackling and static, but beneath the static, there were carols: the old and extremely traditional kind rather than the sort that would come on a pop station in between hit numbers. Max was tapping and humming, and when the bell over the door jangled, he looked up startled, and the glasses slid from being propped on his forehead to onto his nose.