“Red Touch Yellow”

I spend the better half of my morning handling other peoples’ sticky plates and licking my sweet, syrupy fingers clean. Depending on the looks of the customer, I pop unchewed scraps into my mouth en route to the dishwasher. There’s no guideline for assessing what’s edible—it’s a gut feeling, depends on arbitrary factors, like dirt under fingernails or toes too long for sandals.  The latter, especially.

It’s a vulgar act—the scrounging—that leaves me ashamed part of the time; the rest, I spend wondering why they don’t just feed me. I drink all the drip coffee I want, but my stomach still churns. Too much sugar; nothing of sustenance.

Three lights hang over the counter, rocking slowly like pendulums, counting each minute I spend here taking orders, getting shit tips and cheap invitations.

At lunch time, an older woman, gray hair to her knees, delicate like a tattered rag doll, slips a crumbled twenty into my palm and tells me she’s curious. Meanwhile, her husbands’ probably been sitting on the toilet in the Men’s Only for the past twenty minutes, as his benedict gets cold. Maybe he’s abandoned her. The woman clutches her frayed purse like it’s a child wrapped in blankets and I can sense the tension in her spine, the loneliness in her bones. Light coming through the blinds illuminates her glassy eyes and I can’t tell if I’m supposed to feel flattered or offended. I’m neither.

“Don’t have to pay for me to tell you the special, ma’am,” I say. “It’s French Onion soup, 7.99.”

She leans in like I’m interested and whispers relentlessly, “We’re in the Red Roof Inn—just a quarter mile south. It’s a lovely room.”

“Sorry, lady,” I tell her.  “We don’t do delivery, but I can box up your food, if you’d prefer.”  And I’ll spit on it if I do.

She studies my face.  “You seem like a nice girl,” she says.  “A nice young lady.”

“Yes ma’am,” I say. We leave it at that.

These things happen at truck stop diners in nowhere Michigan, where all we see out the cloudy glass is a four-lane road leading to I-94, some dated, neon gas pumps, and a couple freckle-faced kids at a melon stand, who don’t sell melons, but let them rot in the hard sun beneath a crescendo of buzzing flies. It’s the same thing you’ll see off any major highway across America, I suppose. Sometimes, the little one with pigtails holds a sign above her head and shimmies her hips as cars go past. And sometimes, under the sounds of exhaust, I hear them sing and clap their little hands together—Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack—the same songs we sang when I was a kid.

Every day, the dinner shift comes in at four and gets fed a whole banquet thirty minutes after my shift’s up.  Randy, Elwood, Josie, and the rest pull hair out of their faces and throw down stacks of pancakes, bacon, and fried chicken dripping maple syrup—all the stuff that either doesn’t get used in the morning or nears expiration. But I’m not supposed to linger. That’s what Barry-the-bigfat-manager said on the first day, holding a fork in his hand, like a toothpick in ratio, a pile of wet eggs and hash browns soaking on his plate. He’s the asshole who tucks a paper napkin in his neck to cover the dingy blue t-shirt he got at Six Flags circa ’86, stained with bleach spots and his first breakfast of the day. “Can’t afford to feed a damn army,” he boasts. “Night shift works til two am, so they get the food. You gotta go when your shifts’ over, Sweet Pea.”

By early afternoon, with the sun sitting comfortably in the sky, traffic slows.  I lean against the counter nearly dozing off, neglecting to refill coffee for leftover customers. They’ll probably stick around and give my tip to the dinner shift, anyway.

I meant to sleep last night, but didn’t. Instead, I lay in bed and let the ceiling fan take me on a journey, something that always leads me back to the same, unsettling thought: Is Barry’s Diner it for me?

Half-naked and in the dim, yellow light of my kitchenette, I scrub dishes left out from last night. The electrician, Bill, made me dinner—spaghetti that’s now stuck to hard plates.  Bill’s a 34-year-old with dreams as big, or as small as mine, but he says he wants a family. “A what?” I say, sucking a cigarette on the floor. “A family,” he says, from the recliner in the living room, the smell of camphor and pine hanging loosely in the air. Bill dozes off and I let him sleep there. I fall asleep watching “Bill,” the stitched cursive on his uniform, expand and fall with his heavy breaths.

Work starts at six; I clock in at quarter til. I chain my bike up by the dumpsters out back and inhale the scent of rot and last night’s leftovers.  I come in through the kitchen, where Eduardo already has sausages sizzling on the burner. I feel my hunger immediately.

“Buenos dias, bonita,” he says with a smile that looks real.

“Hola, buenas, amigo,” I say.  “How’s the baby today? Bigger?”

He shakes his head side to side. “No words, bonita, no words.” He drops his spatula onto the metal surface and raises both arms into the air, rejoicing,  “I thank the good Lord every day.  I’m a papa.”  He picks up the spatula again, giddy and laughing at his own excitement.

Inside the dining room it smells like grease and tires, flannel and smoke.  Old, discolored truckers sit at the counter, hunched over with fatigue, their elbows pointed outwards like children do when they eat; faces so low to their plates, they’re nearly touching their food. They watch me as I walk, a removed but engrossed gaze that falls short of my face. I would bet they’re all thinking the same thing: how they’d like to bend me over the counter. They gnaw on juicy strips of bacon, showing teeth, or lack of, and I think of crocodiles with empty eyes, chomping their prey like they do on the Discovery channel. One stops to suck on his fingers and pops them out of his mouth, crumbs tumbling from a thick, gray mustache. For a moment, I see Bill looking back at me, but Bill is probably still in my living room.

There’s no rush here, just coming and going, a steady in and out marked by the chime of the bell on the door. Aren’t any regulars, either. Only people on the road, going from one place to the next, maybe ending up somewhere better. Maybe not. Sometimes I try to make conversation asking, “Where ya headed?” when I drop the tab, but I’m always left feeling left behind.

I kill time learning Espanol from Mario, the dishwasher who hates his job but teaches me from behind a rack of foggy glasses to say salga de aquí, get out of here, perro estúpido, stupid dog. He’s encouraging me to leave.

I used to do the crosswords on the easy days but Barry gets pissed.  “Think I’m payin’ you to play games?” he says. “Who’s paying you to eat?” I want to ask.

It’s almost 3:30 and not a single customer has come through the doors for the past hour. I’ve got ten minutes till I’m off, so I count coins to get myself a hot dog across the street at the Shell on my way home. I like the way the meats glisten in their own grease, spinning on a Ferris wheel. Reminds me of being a kid.

In the back room, I undo my apron and begin rolling thin, water-stained silverware into napkins. I dump economy-sized containers of ketchup and mustard into squeeze bottles that never completely empty out, never get washed.

“Whadaya think you’re doin’?” Barry roars, sticking his monster-of-a-head around the corner. “I didn’t cut you yet.  You gotta customer.” I put my apron back over my head,  wiping sticky hands on front.

In the dining room is a lady in heels, clicking against cold tile. She’s got cleavage down to her thighs and a fluorescent peacock feather sticking out of bird’s nest hair.

“I’ve somewhere to be,” she tells me, plopping down at a booth table. The circus, I wonder?

“How are you today?” I ask because Barry’s watching and I’ve been told to greet the customer.

“I’m in a hurry is how I am,” she says with a bent smile, a smudge of fluorescent red lipstick smeared on a large, yellow front tooth. I think immediately of a Coral snake.

Growing up on the farm, bare feet caked in dirt, my mother always warned me against them. “Red touch black, friend of Jack; red touch yellow, kill a fellow,” she chanted.” Then she’d lower her sunglasses and say something like: “All you got to do is look at ’em to know if they’re good or evil. That’s the difference between snakes and the bastards that turn a million different colors on you. People’ll change on a dime.”

This was a reference to my father.

I did see some snakes, but mostly just the green garden snakes that slithered their way into the shed to find a home under a back tire or a tractor. As I grew older, I came to realize she wasn’t really talking about snakes at all. She spoke of man’s venom and man’s poisonous snake. I started to think of myself as a mistake.

This lady with the peacock feather was red touch yellow; venomous and hungry, and I never felt such an itch to get away.

“In a hurry is what you are, you mean,” I correct her. “Not how.”

“Pardon?” she says, the face of a poor kid on Christmas morning. I repeat myself.  She runs her eyes over me and readjusts herself in her seat, the squeaking sound of flesh on vinyl. Staring past the menu she spews, “I’ll take some coffee, two eggs over easy, side a’ ham, and your manager, you little twat.”

Barry is sitting at the bar eating an ice cream Sundae.

“Hey, Barry,” I call across the room, untying my apron for the last time. “This lady wants something to eat.” I set the order I’ve scribbled down next to his plate and he drops his spoon, but I’m gone before he can swallow.

Sophie Leigh lives in the Logan Square neighborhood of Chicago. She works for an independent book publisher and is in the band Videotape. She is currently writing her first novel. Her fiction has appeared in Threshold, Blinking Cursor, & Black Heart magazine.