I’m the Cherry Pie

It’s a 24/7 diner. It’s a fantasy. It’s a truck stop. I’m a customer. I'm a waitress. I’m the cherry pie.

I’ve been writing at night, every night, at the Lonesome Diner for more years than I can remember. The line cooks know my name. My booth is the one in the far corner. Nobody ever sits there but me. I don't know how that happened exactly. There isn’t a plaque above the salt and pepper. But it’s my booth. Everyone knows that.

On their breaks, or when the flow of the kitchen eases to a dribble, the waitresses sit across from me and tell me stories. They whisper about their boyfriends or their girlfriends or their best friends. They tell me about how they got that scar on their chin or why they cover up their constellation of freckles with foundation and powder or who broke their heart for the very first time.

I write in a notebook by hand, and I take my journal home at dawn and enter the words into the computer. Handwriting is where the magic happens. Hand to pen to page. Or brain to hand to pen to page.

I’ve never had much luck in the publishing world. My rejection folder is thick. But I am not in this for wealth. For fame. For money. For limos to book signings. I write the words as they come to me, and I hold them, tend them, love them. When I sleep, I hear them in my head. When I wake up in the evening, they sing for me.

This has been my routine for a decade. I pay my bills with freelance gigs and ghostwriting. If you’ve ever read a brochure at the doctor’s office—hey, that was probably me. I can be clean, quick, concise. I can write about abnormalities and unusual moles in a style that isn’t even a style. It’s so baldly bland and so infinitely digestible nobody realizes that someone wrote the words. Someone got paid. That someone was me.

I live as close to a bone as any man could. I would have continued like this forever, I think, until one night when Holly, my favorite waitress, sat across from me and stirred sugar into my cup using a wayward spoon with a slight bend to the stem and then blew on my coffee. I didn’t balk. I like camaraderie of any kind. My world is lonely. My nights are long.

Without any preamble, any chit, any chat, she said, “If you could have one wish as a writer, what would it be?”

I settled back and watched as she sipped from my mug. I leaned against the sparkly maroon vinyl of the corner booth, and I said, “I just want to know what it’s like.”

“What what’s like?”

I took a deep breath and jonesed for a cigarette, except I stopped smoking half a dozen years ago, and you can’t smoke in any restaurant in California. But every so often, on nights like this one, I miss the feel of something dangling between my lips. Of smoke and ash and fire. Of how nicotine makes love to your system unlike any other vice I’ve been with.

“I want to be inside of everything, so I can feel what other people are feeling, know how to better describe each character. Live in their bodies. Just for a bit. Just for a few moments.”

It’s a 24/7 diner. It’s a fantasy. It’s a truck stop. I’m a customer. I'm a waitress. I’m the cherry pie.

Holly was a little witchy looking. The uniform of the diner is always the same: navy skirt, navy blouse, knee-high boots for the waitresses. Holly wore her skirt with ripped nylons and nobody said anything. I think because people were a little afraid of her. She had pale skin, dark hair, huge eyes you could stare in for days and never get tired, never get bored. She had tattoos I could see and a few I could imagine from the tiny glimpses I’d won. The emerald tip of a snake’s tail. The point of a golden star.

What I'd noticed, while sitting in my corner booth, drinking my coffee black and savoring my cherry pie, was that she didn’t seem to move as much as the other waitresses. Or move as fast. Yet her tables were always handled with ease and grace, and her customers seemed less inclined to complain than others. If you hang out at diners, you get to know what the complaints are: “I ordered hash browns not home fries.” “I wanted a cherry cola not a root beer.” “Where’s the catsup?” “Where’s the mustard?” “Where’s the happy ending I thought I was supposed to get?” Nobody ever had a problem with Holly. I spied her once outside counting her tips, and she seemed to have a wad larger than the other servers’ billfolds I’d seen.

She said, “Do you really want that? Is that what you truly, deep in your heart want?”

I did. I had thought about this my whole writing life. Which was basically my whole life. I could describe situations reasonably well. If you’re intelligent and something of an empath or eavesdropper, you can describe what you think it might be like to live in someone else’s world, down to the soles of their shoes. But what would it be like if you really, literally, could live in their soul?

It’s a 24/7 diner.

“Yeah,” I said, “not like that’s ever going to happen. Not like I could click my heels together… rub the genie’s lamp… make a wish on a shooting …”

“Magic doesn’t work that way,” she said in a matter-of-fact manner that made me stare at her more seriously. “Only in movies. Real-life magic is totally different.”

She was drinking my coffee aggressively now. Almost draining it. Then she slid the mug my way, and she said, “The rest is yours.” I wouldn’t have, except for the way she said it. Almost demanding me. Commanding me. No way to disobey. I drained the cup, surprised by the depth of the sweetness, wondering why I’d never thought to add sugar before.

She gazed at me with those intriguing eyes, and she bit her lip, and in a blink I saw what she had looked like when she’d left home. Not quite 19. Scared even if she didn't want to admit that. Tough exterior. Kitten inside. Needing to go because it hadn’t been safe to stay. Not any longer. And then I saw what she looked like when she got up in the morning before she did her goth make-up, oddly naked. A blank canvas.

And then I felt her heart beating like my heart was beating, and I heard her thoughts in my mind. She was thinking a blend of things—I could hear the words and see images. It wasn’t at all like my own style, my internal monologue, which is sort of darkness with words.

It’s a fantasy.

She slipped out of the booth saying she had better move quick before the night manager caught her sloughing off, although he was in the walk-in with one of the other waitresses and what they were getting up to… well, she believed she had at least another few moments. “I’ll fill that up, luv?” she asked, and that’s when Jameson, the manager, came through the swinging doors reminiscing about how sweet Celine’s kisses were, but also thinking about his girlfriend at home and how he’d have to shower quick before getting into bed or she’d find out, and how the last time she’d caught him was the last time she said she’d ever forgive him.

It’s a truck stop.

I blinked and shook my head and did the things people do when they are trying to wake themselves from a sticky dream that won’t let go.

Holly, filing my coffee, said, “You’ll get used to the skill, hun, once you learn how to control it. But don’t abuse it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

I’m a customer.

She said, “Relax. It’s just like riding a bicycle.” Except this wasn’t anything like riding a bicycle. Nothing is ever like riding a bicycle except riding a bicycle. Nobody tries to make purses from a sow’s ear.

I looked at the customer sitting solo by counter. He had on a black-and-red Buffalo plaid shirt, old jeans, and the rims of his shoes were crusted with dried mud. Suddenly, I was in this stranger’s head, feeling tired and thinking about money. Whether he had enough to cover a burger and a Coke. Maybe just do a burger and water. Water’s free. It was as if I was thinking the thoughts with him. Not hearing so much as enveloping, embracing. Or as if they were on a billboard, and I was reading as I drove by like those old Burma-Shave ads my grandfather told me about and Tom Waits sings about.

I thought about my own bills at home, how much I had in my wallet, how long my savings had to stretch me before my most recent gig paid up. Then I pulled out a rumpled twenty and brought it to Holly and said, “Don’t tell him why or who, but please pay that man’s bill and bring him a Coke.”

She said, “You can’t solve all of their problems.” But she didn’t refuse the money.

Walking back to my booth, I looked out the window, and in the slow dawning light I saw a group of college-aged kids heading towards a well-used van. Without effort, I was able to dive in and out of each one’s thoughts, cleanly, neatly. Paper due. Gotta get some deodorant. Left my chem textbook at Charlie’s house. Nothing. Nothing. Wonder if Bonnie will be at choir tomorrow?

Anything I looked at, I was inside. The neon high up in the parking lot. I flickered. I pulsed. I was hot, and I was cold. I’d been made in a factory 40 years ago, and I was still glowing strong. There was an early bird on the wire, thinking wordlessly about worms and a nest and several eggs with unhatched babes.

I sat back at my booth. My gaze moved to the pies on the counter. Holly was freshening them up with squirts of whipped cream from a canister…

I’m the waitress.

…and she was thinking about… she was thinking about me. Was she? Thinking… she was thinking that how bad would it be if she came to my house one night, or one morning? If she accepted the ride I often offered when I was at the end of my night and she was at the end of her shift.

She was looking over at me and then looking down, blushing, and it was as if we both knew what might happen if we let it. What we could get up to if we both decided to let down our guard.

“Relax,” she’d said. “You can’t solve all of their problems,” she’d said. But maybe I could solve my loneliness. Maybe I could solve hers. Maybe there was space in my closet for her uniform. Maybe there was a place in her lonely heart for my own.

While I watched, she cut a fresh piece of pie and slid it onto a small pink plate. She added an extra dollop of whipped cream before bringing it over and setting the dish on the table in front of me. I looked down at the plate and saw the sun beating down on a cherry tree in a field in Oregon. I could feel the rain and hear the birds. I knew the farmer who picked each ripe fruit, almost as if he were a friend.

“Do you want to come over to my place after you get off?” I asked.

Holly looked at me, and I could hear the “yes” in her head before her lips mouthed the word, and I could see what she was seeing, and then I gazed down at my plate again.

It’s a 24/7 diner. It’s a truck stop.

Holly lifted my fork from the table, and she took a bite.

I’m a customer. I’m a waitress.

I’m the ...