Mary's Diner

Luke woke up to one of those cloudless, windless summer days where the air was so thick and heavy that it felt like you were drinking it as much as breathing it. Birds barely flew, and every street, van, and building reflected so much radiant light that those rare pockets of shade looked like sanctuary caves scattered around the city.

People here would say it’s not the heat but the humidity, but, Luke thought, when it’s still not even noon and you’re sweating through your second shirt of the day just six deliveries in, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

The A/C on his beat up Altima was broken when he bought it, but cash was tight and you get what you can afford to pay. The cheap unit in his apartment cost a ton to run, and it barely made a dent on the temperature when circumstances were this miserable, so Luke had a long list of well air conditioned places where he could wait out the heat between pickups and dropoffs until nightfall allowed him to return home.

At the very top of that list was Mary’s Diner. Mary’s wasn’t designed to look like a bootlegger’s shack, but that image didn’t hurt it any, either. From the outside it was all weathered boards around a struggling roof encircled by a concrete lot so cracked and pot holed that you could blow a tire just from trying to park in the wrong spot.

The official occupancy limit had been set at twenty, but Mary could pack in close to double that if everyone sat in the right places. There were a handful of rickety two tops, balanced out by just the right amount of folded cardboard, three battered booths along the back wall with the same duct tape scars as the seats of Luke’s car, and a half dozen bar stools that looked directly into the kitchen where she held court.

What was where was a little hard to discern because Mary’s was very, very cold, but also very dark. The building previously had a couple exterior windows, but while everything else in the place was nearly as old as the owner herself, she had recently installed two of the most powerful window unit air-conditioners on the market blasting a combined 19,600 BTUs of chilled air into a space requiring not even half that amount. They also blotted out all of the natural light, which was kind of a win for everyone given that this wasn’t the sort of place where you wanted to see exactly how your food was cooked.

The kitchen itself was a series of electric hot plates and waffle irons running off of an out of regulation propane generator that sat next to an over-stocked mini-fridge it was powering. A couple skillets which were washed only at the end of the day were used to prepare every dish, and Mary figured that was more feature than bug because it allowed them to season themselves as the dining day went on.

The generator powering all of this gave off a slightly oily smell, but nobody cared, and besides, you couldn’t tell on the grounds of all the cigarette smoke. And if you were enough of a regular you also knew that Mary kept a pint of Canadian Fireball in her apron. Order a coffee extra strong, and she’d hook you up, a liquor license notwithstanding.

So when Luke opened the battered and chipped red paint wooden door to go inside, he was hit with a sensory change of nearly every sort. Cigarette smell overpowered him as he went from oppressive light to velvet dark, the temperature dropping a full thirty degrees in just a couple steps through the threshold. It was glorious and familiar and he loved it.

Mary’s wasn’t just a cooling location; it was his home away from home. The coffee was burnt decent, and everything on the menu was somehow both cheap and overpriced. But it was the people who kept him coming back.

That included Mary herself, but also the half dozen chain-smoking old timers, all men, who set up shop at the bar watching her cook. They didn’t ask Luke a lot of questions, but they were empathetic all the same, and he looked the part. Pull up a stool, I’ve got a story to tell.

“Oh lord, not this one again,” Mary would chirp with a go-ahead smile and a cigarette somehow stuck to her bottom lip in such a way that she could smoke and talk hands free while also scrambling some slightly ashy eggs.

There would be tales of fantastical fish and equally unlikely sexual exploits, and whomever had gathered would laugh and taunt and occasionally even fill in parts of the story the author had forgotten they once invented. And Luke, a good thirty or forty years their junior would just sit there smiling, bathing in the A/C, drinking his coffee extra strong.

Unfortunately, these stories were often pretty racist.

Not violently racist, and to Luke’s ears, not disgustingly racist, either. Just kind of casually racist in a way that Luke didn’t exactly support, but also found himself able to forgive. No outright slurs, but plenty of stereotypes and jokes; the types of things he knew they wouldn’t say in more diverse company.

Luke figured that they didn’t know any better, and after all he was still learning and who was he to judge. He was neither actor nor victim so really what role did he have to play here- he wasn’t doing anything wrong by just listening, and he liked fitting in.

Luke was in luck because this was one of those days that Mary decided to take the mic. This was the rare occasion that only happened when she deemed she had just enough of the right audience present. It felt a privilege to be included.

“So I’m at Pancho’s the other night,” she started, “and I order up one of them frozen margaritas, you know, those ones with the sugar on the rim?”

“They’re good!” someone said.

“I know,” Mary said, appreciating the call and response. “And I liked it so much I ordered up a second. Server asks if I want the same thing, and I said I did not.”

She paused for dramatic effect, and Luke could tell that he wasn’t the only one hooked.

“They asked if I wanted this one on the rocks,” and she paused again.

“And whatchu say?” Everyone could tell the punchline was not far away.

“I said, ‘Close, but I actually want this one on ICE.'”

It took a moment, and Mary drooping her head and looking over her glasses one by one at each of them. But then the laughs came, and they didn’t stop. It wasn’t the pun they appreciated- it was the audaciousness. The boundary pushing and line crossing. The clearly bullshit story contrived just for a we're among friends cruel one liner on a heartless summer day.

And Luka laughed, too. Not as hard as the others, but enough to be passable. Then he pretended to get a delivery notification on his phone, and in a perfect, regionally appropriate American accent honed from three years of overstaying his visa, he paid his tab, thanked them all for their generous company, opened the door, and left the dark, comforting cool, stepping back out once again into aggressive sunlight.