I had a morbid streak, but I felt this tug at my insides to help her.
Then again, she was dead. As a doornail. In winter. What could I do?
My motto since Day One was to keep my head down and my nose clean. It was none of my business. I didn’t want to know how they died. Who they left behind. How lonely they felt. For the most part the departed were like wasps. I didn’t bother them. They didn’t bother me. And that was how I liked it.
But sometimes I felt a tug, a knee-jerk reaction, when I saw a departed. A visceral desire to do what I could for them. It was instinctual and deep-seated and horridly annoying, so I crawled into a cup of coffee and looked the other way.
“Bernard,” she repeated. “Isn’t that the cutest name?” Her gaze landed on me in question.
I gave her the barest hint of a nod as Mr. P said, “I guess I’ll have the usual, Janey.”
He always had the usual for breakfast. Two eggs, bacon, hash browns, and whole-wheat toast.
“You got it, hon.” I took the menu from him and walked back to the server’s station, where I punched in Mr. P’s order even though Sumi, the line cook, was about five feet from me, standing on the other side of the pass-out window, looking slightly annoyed that I didn’t just tell her the order since she was about five feet from me, standing on the other side of the pass-out window, looking slightly annoyed.
But there was a protocol in place. A strict set of guidelines I had to follow. My boss, a sassy redhead named Dixie, was only slightly less procedural than a brigadier general.
The stripper giggled at something Mr. P read on his phone. I finished up the order so I could move on to other vexations.
Vexations like LSD, Slinkys, and capillaries. How was it I could remember words like capillaries and brigadier and, hell, vexations and not remember my own name? It made no sense. I’d been going through the alphabet, wracking my brain for a candidate, but I was running out of letters. After S, I had only seven left.
I sought out my coffee cup and picked up where I left off.
Sheila? No.
Shelby? Nope.
Sherry? Not even close.
Nothing felt right. Nothing fit. I just knew if I heard my name, my real name, I’d recognize it instantly and all of my memories would come flooding back in a shimmering tidal wave of recollection. So far the only tidal wave in my life resided in my stomach. It did flip-flops every time a certain regular walked in. A tall, dark regular with jet black hair and an aura to match.
The sound of my coworker’s voice brought me back to the present.
“Lost in thought again, sweetie?” She walked up to stand beside me and gave my hip a little nudge. She did that.
Cookie had started working at the café two days after I did. She’d taken the morning shift with me. Started at 7:00 a.m. By 7:02, we were friends. Mostly because we had a lot in common. We were both recent transplants. Both friendless. Both new to the restaurant business and unaccustomed to having people yell at us because their food was too hot or their coffee was too cold.
Okay, cold coffee I understood.
I glanced around my section to make sure I hadn’t abandoned any of my customers in their time of need. All two of said customers – three if I included the dead ones – seemed pretty content. Especially the stripper. We were smack dab in the middle of the midmorning lull. It wouldn’t last long, however. The lunch crowd would be arriving soon.
“Sorry,” I said, busying myself with wiping down the counter.
“What did you say?” She glowered playfully before stuffing a bottle of ketchup into her apron and grabbing two plates off the pass-out window. Her thick black hair had been teased and tugged into a spiky masterpiece that only feigned disorder, but her clothes were another matter altogether. Unless she liked colors bright enough to blind her customers. There was no way to tell, really.
“You have nothing to be sorry for,” she said in her stern mommy voice. Which made sense. She was a mother, though I had yet to meet her daughter. She was staying with Cookie’s ex while Cookie and her new husband, Robert, got settled into their new digs. “We talked about this, remember? The whole apology thing?”