The Furnace

The diner was exceptionally quiet, but the heat coursing through me was deafening.

The lack of patrons was understandable, as it was less than an hour until close, and the night had swept in fast, herding weary folk into their houses like some great shepherd upon its flock. The kind of people that remained after dark could be best described as stragglers. There were those here for a pick-me-up before their night shift began, or those that wanted to avoid whatever awaited them at home and eked out every drop of solace this place could offer them. And there were likely some homeless too, bunkered in to prolong the time before they were inevitably cast out into the cold like unwelcome pests.

The thing we stragglers shared in the diner that night was how we were all in the midst of changing. Like water turning to ice, we were each of us at the precipice of becoming something else, moving into another mode of being - another state of matter. I imagined most were either happy or apathetic to their oncoming circumstance; knowing what was to come. As far as I knew, I was the only patron who didn't welcome what was to come - no matter what I chose.

My phone lit up, another message from Mom. That made a total of fifteen now - her seven and Meg’s eight. I flipped the phone over and swallowed back the growing lump in my throat. The heat was beginning to become unbearable.

I was alone, sat in the corner booth furthest from the door. I hadn’t any idea of how long I’d been there. A couple of hours, maybe. My car, full of everything I owned (or rather, everything of mine that could be hastily thrown in the boot during the small window between when I’d received Meg’s text message and when my parents returned home) was out in front. I could make out the vehicle through the skewed, golden hue the lamps cast on the diner window. The fog concealed all beyond it except for the distant neon signs that called out with a damp glimmer - a tapestry of scattered lighthouses in an ocean of gloom. The ding of the doorbell as it opened managed to rise above the thumping heartbeat in my ears as a sign our group was disbanding, and I watched my fellow stragglers exit out into the fog, their silhouettes shimmering under street lights until phasing like ghosts into the belly of the grey. I turned to see who was left, and quickly realised I was the last remaining patron in the establishment. The heat wrenched through my throat and ears. Was it really time to go? Was this it?

 “Don’t fancy heading out there, huh?” she called out from behind the counter. Of course, a patron is never alone when the waitress is on hand, and this one had seemed to pay special attention to me since I’d arrived. Her badge declared her name was Jules, and as she rounded the counter and headed towards me, I saw her badge also stated she’d given seven years of service to the diner. The age in her face said seven years served. Though I couldn’t muster an answer, she slid herself into the booth seat opposite me and leaned forward.

“You okay kid?” she asked. At first, I assumed this was an indirect way to get me out so she could head home, but the way she leaned into the question, and the way she didn’t fake a smile, told me it was genuine. In the light, I could see the bags under her eyes, the lack of make-up to hide that she was well into her fifties and probably worked this shift most days. I assumed she encountered guys with my look most nights.

“Oh, I’m okay.” I said, “I’m sorry to keep you, I’ll head out.”

“Where you headed?”

The question rocked me a little. I was not used to women taking the initiative of enquiry in a conversation, certainly not for the four years I’d been with Meg now, and certainly not with women of her age. The question was also one I really didn’t want to give an answer to.

I nodded into the fog outside as I replied. “Just out of town, I needed a change of scenery.” There it was again, the heat in my ears. Why did I answer like that? Like I was hoping for a follow-up. Jules leaned back, reached into her apron pocket and pulled out tobacco and rolling papers. Her hands set to work, spurned by muscle memory. Her eyes barely glanced down as she spoke. “I hear you. Everyone needs that, to get away once in a while. Although, I’m not sure everyone packs their car with their entire wardrobe one evening for a little change of scenery.”

I couldn’t help but frown at her observation. Overbearing as it was, she was probably right. I looked out and saw one of my shoes contorted against the glass of the back window, crammed under the mountain of clothes that had been haphazardly piled on top of it. Even so, my baggage wasn’t her business. I turned back and replied, “That’s a bit of an assumption.”

She smiled wide, “I’ve got an inquisitive mind, it’s a habit.”

“You ask everyone who walks in here where they’re going?”

“No. But I see people with that look on their faces several times a week. I don’t usually get to ask them where they’re going or why, but on the off chance I get to sit with my last patron of the day, I ask. I consider it a little bonus for a job well done.”

She maintained the smile as she stuck out her tongue to wet the rolling paper, afterwards setting down the newly formed cigarette on the table and folding her arms. I had no idea what to say. The chances of someone enquiring about why I was leaving town weren’t even enough to consider, and yet here I was. Here she was. I opened my mouth to speak and my jaw quivered, a small, pathetic sound escaping in place of any real response. This was all meant to be simple. Just leave town and don’t look back. I only stopped at this diner for one last look at the place I was sure I was leaving behind. The heat poured into my head, making it heavy, and I turned away to take a breath. When I turned back, her head was at an angle, and the smile had faded - replaced by a demeanour of sympathy. She looked as if she could see right through me into the pit of anxiety nestled within, this furnace roaring and burning away all self-assurance. She spoke softer now, “I know the look of someone running from something.”

The diner was silent, the ding of the door or the whizzing of the coffee pot long forgotten now. It was just the last straggler and the inquisitive waitress caught in the nucleus of a great fog. We were a lonely island in the ocean of the night, with no one else to hear the confession of a scared young man. If anyone was going to share the weight I carried, just for a while, it was her.

“She’s five weeks along,” I said, barely getting it out before my throat closed abruptly. It was news regurgitated from the call Meg had surprised me with this afternoon, except I’d left out the awful waver to her voice as she told me, the way I could detect the desperation and the shock pulling at her chest as she spluttered and cried down the phone. Repeating it now, I could almost taste the fear that must have consumed her, the writhing mass of anxiety that had fanned the furnace’s flames and had driven me, literally, away from her. The words thrashed in the air, but Jules didn’t wince or recoil. She seemed to catch them with a nod.

“A father-to-be, huh?”

“A deadbeat dad-to-be.”

“That’s no one’s destiny.”

“It’s mine,” I said. “I never wanted kids. I never wanted to be a dad. She knew that.”

Jules’ demeanour didn’t waver, “What’s her name?”

“Meg.”

 “And does she know where you are?”

“No.”

She leant back, breathing in long and hard through her nose before exhaling, the cigarette spinning in between her fingers the whole time.

“Hell of a thing to leave a girl to raise a baby on her own.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t,” she replied. “Us single moms, we don’t have the luxury of time to sit and stir in our anger at the men that walked out on us, we bury it and pray that it never rears its ugly head at us again. But it does. Weeks, months, years later. It always comes back, and you end up asking yourself what the hell you did to deserve to not get just a little bit of help raising a child.”

Her words were laced with rage, but the way she spoke them it was as if she’d said it a million times over, and the repetition had dulled the blade that once used them to cut. She looked into the ether, at nothing. I could tell she was somewhere else.

“Moms like me, we become experts at reading the faces of those who are running,” she continued. “You boys can’t hide what’s written all over your face, I learned that a long time ago.”

I caught on, “You have first-hand experience then?”

“Oh, better than most I reckon. My son’s father wore that look just like you are now, the day before I never saw or heard from him again. If I’d have known at the time, I might’ve been able to change that.”

Her eyes met mine again. I knew now that she wasn’t some nosey waitress bored and looking for a story to hear. She’d spent all day running around serving the various patrons who came through her door, overhearing their troubles, playing whim to their demands, and doing everything she could to improve their day. She made their problems her problems. She wasn’t passing time at the end of her shift; she was doing her job.

I saw the glow of the downturned phone screen against the table. How many messages was it now? Jules had seen too.

“That her?” she asked.

“Probably.”

“So there’s hope still.”

“Is there?”

“Always,” she smiled. “Wherever hurt is, there’s hope. You just have to acknowledge one to get the other. The fact you’ve been sitting in this place for three hours now and aren’t a few hundred miles away says something is keeping you here. I don’t think you want to leave, but you can’t stand the thought of staying either.”

I looked at her and her visage had become many. I don’t know when the tears had started but I could feel them slide down my cheeks and onto my lap. Maybe I was mourning the dream of passing quietly out of town and into the night like those who had left the diner already. Maybe I’d finally realised that’s all it was ever going to be. A dream. In the dim light, I saw her reach a hand out across the divide that was the table and hold it out to me. After a moment of feigned pause, I reached to meet it.

“What are you carrying?” she asked.

The question stabbed at me, and I squeezed my eyes shut as if that would keep out its inquest. In the dark, I saw a pair of hands, my father’s. I was waist height again, and my head was level with them as they rested at his side. I reached up to hold one, but they were drawn away like a snake reeling back in suddenly when threatened. Like they always had. Yet I kept reaching, kept insisting; a child not understanding that each attempt meant more provocation. I wanted them to reach back, to offer like Jules’ had, but instead, the hands had become lessons, each lasting bruise a new kindling for the furnace that would burn for years, even after one day his hands had never come back. Now, tiny hands reach for me in the gloom, just as mine did, and in the infinite chasm of time between I hesitate, the furnace quietly smouldering in some distant plane, yet the heat incandescent right behind my ears, as if fire would take everything if I dared reach to take those hands. When I open my eyes again, Jules is smiling just as before.

“Hurt and hope. They’re practically twins, you’ve just got to trust they come together” she said.

I bit my lip before replying, “I won’t know what the hell I’m doing.”

“Neither will she.”

And in front of a hallowed audience of table napkins, condiments, and utensils, she clutched my hand like I was the man she’d loved all that time ago, the phantom that had withdrawn from her in the night and had never returned. I saw Meg, and I felt the hand that needed me most. And I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight other than back the way I came. I pulled my hand out from Jules’, slowly, and looked out at the car.

“That’s going to be a hell of a job to unpack,” I said, and Jules laughed, harder than the joke probably deserved, but I giggled in response and we both sat with our shoulders bouncing like lunatics in the night. When we stopped, Jules picked up her cigarette and leaned forward so that she was as close to me as she had been all night, saying, “Now I’m going to go smoke this out back, and I don’t want to see you when I return.”

I nodded, “You got it.”

She rose, sliding out of the booth. She walked to the counter and didn’t look back, not until she reached the kitchen passage. With her frame illuminated in the pale glow, the rest of her was darkened and I couldn’t see her features. The shadow of Jules’ likeness uttered “Good luck” and without anything else, turned and disappeared into the back.

Then it was just me. The night beckoned, and the car awaited me like it had the entire evening. But as I sat still, I noticed the heat had subsided. The furnace murmured, but it was quieter now. Uncomfortably quiet, in fact, without Jules. I figured it was time to leave this place and go home, to faces that would keep the furnace subdued - as they had for many years. I slid out of the booth and took one look back before the exit bell played out my leaving, and I joined all of the other stragglers in the night.