The scene: A restaurant. Small, dingy, weathered around the edges, some mold here, some missing shingles there, and a large neon sign dangling from the roof that reads Frank and Martha’s Diner. Not the original name, but close enough. The walls are lined with clapboard shingling browning with age, peeling blue paint more grey than blue, and the occasional patch of yellow-beige that was never painted over. The ceiling is flat white stucco pulled down in those pointy swirls so popular in the seventies, the peaks broken and yellowing where the valleys are filled with dust and mold. A real allergy fest, this place. Some old nautical decor lines the walls; a net here, an anchor there, a throwable flotation device on the floor in the corner. The original owners tried, but not nearly hard enough, and those who came after didn’t care to try any harder. Most of the sparkly pearl-and-teal vinyl booths are cracked with age and held together with silver duct tape that matches the color scheme about as well as they do. The building has only a few rooms: the front entrance, the main dining area, a deck-and-dock combo so worrisome in appearance that nobody uses it anymore, and the kitchen. Very few people are inside the building, and the ones that are only occupy the dining area. The handful of humans are sitting in twos, or by themselves near the large, dirty windows lining the waterside. Those windows are the only natural source of light, and the lights on the brass fans adorning the ceiling are long since broken.

 

The people: A girl and her father, faces not often seen around those parts, sit in the dead center of the seats lining the windows. In the back corner of the room, in one of the nicer booths—the booth they always sit at—is an old couple. They wear matching tracksuits most of the time, though on Sundays he wears a shirt with a tie and she wears a dress. They come every Friday and Sunday for fish fry and brunch, always at five on Fridays and at ten on Sundays. A few seats over from them, also in the back corner, are two men. They usually come and argue loudly over dinner every evening, yelling about everything and nothing all the time. The other patrons, if there are any other patrons, often wonder why they are still together if all they do is argue. Sometimes they wonder this themselves. Lastly, but not the least, is the solitary woman who orders one single Bloody Mary and takes all night to drink it. None of the regulars know her name, not even the server, because she always pays her bill with cash. Though they don’t know her name, they all know her story, and her schedule, since neither one ever changes, sadly for her. And dear old Frank and Martha, of course, who aren’t to be overlooked. The server and the cook, owners and partners for longer than anyone there can remember. They’ve been there almost as long as the building, maybe longer, and eventually have come to own and run the business more out of respect for the last owners than necessity. It doesn’t matter to them that nobody remembers the people who first ran the building save for them.

 

The father: He was born in this town in the fifties, down three blocks and over four, in a small post-war home crammed between the dollar store and the library. He was one of many post-war kids, too young to know the horrors of Nazi concentration camps and too young to take part in the wars and revolutionary movements of the sixties. He always had an easy life, so he couldn’t relate to the young people he saw struggling today. Though, being who he was, he hardly saw those ‘issues’ as struggling. He was a teen during the sixties who moved to a town closer to the capital when his father went off to war. He was part of a detached generation: too young to fight, too old to know the horrors of the previous wars. He was a drifter, like they all were, and even though he tried to stay away from home after graduating, he ended up right back where he started by the time he turned twenty, and stayed, like they all did. He has numerous memories of this place in particular, though a good deal of them are tainted with the fictitious happiness stemming from childhood misconceptions. He distinctly remembers when he was eleven, and he and his friends would come to the restaurant, order some grenadines and sit on the porch to fish. Sometimes the owner would cook up their fish—but only when they caught good ones—and let them eat free of charge. That owner, the original owner, long since passed away, but the father highly doubts he would remember that little boy forty, fifty years later. That little boy can’t even remember the man’s name himself, though he would never forget that face. The father realizes he’s stalled enough by telling his daughter these things when he really brought her here for another reason. He wanted to share a little bit of his past with her, especially since they have never been very close, but also because needs to tell her something important, and he’s not quite ready. For now, he settles for the reminiscing. Ever since she moved out for college not long ago, he felt an ache he couldn't place, and he finally figured out that the feeling was nostalgia and lost opportunity. Most people tell him he is having a midlife crisis, not too uncommon for someone in his fifties, but he knows it has more to do with the changes he sees in her each time she comes home to visit. The wide-eyed, wonder-filled child that she was when he dropped her off at her dorm is now a young woman, world-weary, who makes decisions for herself and no longer asks her dear old dad why the grass is green because she already knows. Her smile is heavier, darker, somehow, than he remembered, and it seems to suck the joy out of a room rather than add to it. But she is still a good listener, as she’d always been, so as they sit by the window, a plate of cooling lobster between them, he finds himself doing more talking than she is, though not about the topic he brought her here to discuss. As an offhand thought, he remembers that, as a child, she didn’t much like lobster, but like many other things, that too has changed. 

​

The girl: She grew up near this town, in the same county, far enough away from her school that she couldn’t walk in the mornings, yet not far enough away to go somewhere else. She never understood why the nearest schools had to be in this town; the place she grew up in was all fancy apartment buildings in a wannabe big city, and all this place had was farms and tiny, squat houses barely big enough for two people, much less a whole family. Thankfully, she traveled often with her mother for work, often enough that she never really got a good sense of home, which was fine by her. She was a drifter, through and through, and always eager to start her next adventure. Her earliest childhood memories were all made in different places. Spain. Rome. Burma. A few of them in California. Fewer here. As a child, she only remembered coming to this diner once. She was seven when she and her parents visited her grandparents, who have now long since passed away, and the five of them went to this diner—which was a much happier, livelier place back then—and ate lobster. Back then, she still didn't like lobster, but didn’t know how to politely hide it like she does now. Recently, she started college a few states over, going on a partial scholarship with the rest of the money coming from loans and out of pocket. It almost decimated her savings account, paying for the plane ticket here. She is living paycheck to paycheck, she supposes, but she is equal parts happy and regretful of her choice to come home. She has something important she wants to tell her father, and something she needs to ask him. But as she looks at him, prattling on about everything that has happened since she left, she figures she won’t, in the end. Her father has changed a lot since she last saw him. He looks older, much older, than he did when she left. His skin sags more than she remembered, and his hair is farther back on his now liver-spotted scalp than it was a year ago. Though they have never really been close, she doesn’t want to worry him more than necessary, so she decided she isn’t going to tell him. She’ll simply find a way to get the money herself. As she watches on, silently, she wonders if he can see the change in her, too. 

 

The server, Martha: Martha has worked at the diner for a long time. Forty years? Fifty years? She can’t be sure. Every day blurs into the others, and she slowly stopped counting sometime around her fifth year here, the year she realized she’d never have good enough grades to go to college anywhere. But that doesn’t matter to her, because she loves the work, loves meeting and greeting people both old and new. Though she doesn’t remember things too far in the past, she does remember the man sitting with his daughter. He was but a mere boy when she first started working here as a teen. She remembers taking the fish he and his friends caught back to the chef and paying for him to cook their catches with her own money. It brought her joy, seeing how happy the boys were, especially him, the one who oftentimes caught the biggest fish. She also remembers how close he was with one of the girls who often hung around, and how he sometimes tried to impress her when he caught something good. Martha doesn’t remember if they were siblings or just friends, but if friends, she hopes they stayed together later in life. The innocent love between those two was so sweet compared to the reality of the world they lived in. But it isn’t her place to pry, so she will say nothing about remembering him. He likely won’t remember her, anyway, so what’s the point? And besides, it seemed like he and his daughter were sharing a deep heart-to-heart, and she was loath to interrupt. She turns back to the counter she is wiping down, sending a quick glance their way. A vaguely sad look mars his face as he talks to his daughter. His daughter also wears an expression of vague sadness, but her sadness looks more like an act she is putting on to hide being disgusted. Martha would know. Over the years, she’s seen a lot of that same look. The two of them continue to talk quietly, slowly, taking their time and savoring over the words as the food before them slowly grows cold. Martha wonders if she will need to reheat their plate or not, or if they will just simply eat it at room temperature, if they eat at all. 

​

The woman drinking the Bloody Mary: Two tables down from her, she saw a man and a young woman, presumably—hopefully—his daughter. They sat and they ordered and they talked in hushed tones over a plate of perfectly good lobster she presumes will go to waste. She has been here a long time. The last twenty years, or so. It’s her favorite place to be, since nothing ever changes, or if it does, it is minor and infrequent (save for the time they repainted the whole building a strange bluish gray. The yellow beige color it was before was much nicer). The man and the girl were seemingly talking about something important, something that takes them a long time to think about and an even longer time to say aloud. When they did speak, they take turns talking, and she calculates the time between each of their short, stunted sentences is consistent at about seventeen seconds. She scoffs and sips at her Bloody Mary. What a waste of her math degree.

​

The Lobster: The people beside me are sad, I can tell. The girl has scars she hides from the world, and the father has hopes long since neglected and forgotten. While her dreams are still fresh and young, his are nearly invisible against the backdrop of long, boring days and long, lonely nights. Years of neglect have left his dreams in shambles, and the few things propping them up are his meager successes and his idea that the older you are, the wiser you are. That last bit is a definite lie, but I won’t tell him this. His dreams are still there, weak as they are, and it’s not my job to bring them crashing down. That job belongs to time and debt. A pause in the conversation brings me back. Looking at him, I feel I can safely say that his wife will die soon. He loved her, I can tell, but not as much as he loved his first wife, the one who died of lung cancer over two decades ago. Quite sad, but only for him. His daughter never knew her, since his second wife, the one I told you will die, is her mother. I can also tell that something’s eating at him: the fact that he hasn't told his daughter yet. But I don't think he will, though that was the sole reason he brought her here, to the place where he and the girl’s mother first met. He met his first wife here, too, though that was many years earlier, after the original owners had moved on and Frank and Martha hadn’t yet taken over. T’was a sad place, in those days. Anyway, the girl doesn’t know much about why she’s here, nor, do I think, she cares. She’s too focused on the things she’s missing or the people she wants to get back to, though she does make a halfhearted effort to connect with dear old dad. But a halfhearted effort won’t be enough to get what she wants here, even though a halfhearted effort is enough to get her by in the big city. She misses her city a lot more than she knows, too, and for a good reason. The city is a bustling place, compared to here, and she misses the sound of the life all around her. She misses other people’s conversations and blubbering babies and car crashes one block over and barking dogs and the wailing sirens she can use to explain why she’s so absent minded all the time. When she was a kid, she should have been diagnosed with ADHD, but nobody bothered to diagnose her, not even the school health assessments that existed for that very purpose. Public school, I suppose. She was one in a class of 500. Anyway, she recently learned that she has somewhat severe depression on top of now-diagnosed ADHD, both treatable by the meds she can't afford, which is partly why she’s here. The other part is that her dad asked to see her, but regardless the reason, I don’t think she’ll say anything, just like I don’t think he’ll say anything about her mother’s cancer. Instead, they’ll sit, and exchange simple pleasantries for a few hours. They won’t ask anything deeper than How’s school? or How’s mom? and won't answer anything other than Good, I suppose, or Good, I suppose. And eventually, they’ll leave, still without saying anything they meant to say. They’re scared, I know, but I don’t know why. Maybe they’re afraid to say things that remind them how life is so fleeting that any change can skew the future. Maybe they’re afraid the other will be angry for not telling them, coming to them sooner. Though I highly doubt that last one. They’ve never been very close. But regardless of why or why not, maybe it’s best that they won’t say anything. Because I know that, if he stays quiet, she won’t miss her finals next week in favor of visiting her mother at her sickbed, and will stay in school. If she failed those finals, she’d drop out, and in few years or so, be a single mother with a husband who died in Iraq and two small kids she has no way of supporting on her own. And maybe it’s best that she stays quiet too, because instead of her father forking over the money to help her and therefore dipping into his retirement funds, he’ll then spend that money to take a vacation to Australia where he’ll meet his third wife, a wealthy widow with two kids around his own daughter’s age and he’ll be happy for the rest of his life. This is all theorized, though. I can’t really be sure what will happen if they don’t overcome their fears. Fear is a useful thing, sometimes. It can help shape people's futures in ways they don't know or expect. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it hinders, but I wouldn’t know. I’m not scared. I’m merely getting cold. 

​

P.S. If you want to know what’s going to happen to the Bloody Mary woman, who’s name is Fran, she’s going to die in five years either way, so don’t be too worried. Sometimes people without fear are the most unfortunate of us all.