The dust had not yet settled on the dirt lot when my Mustang’s door thumped shut. Sagebrush sat heavy in the still Nevada morning air, bitter in my throat, as I stretched away my overnight drive.
The diner was right where I’d remembered it and looked exactly the same, despite the decades. My stomach growled. My appetite had been warring with my anxiety all night, but standing with my hand on the door, my trepidation fell away, and my victorious appetite pulled me inside.
The proprietor whom I’d remembered as old was now positively geriatric. He nodded in greeting and approached me with a steaming mug of black coffee, flesh hanging from his skeletal frame as if afraid to fall off.
“Took a chance you’d be wanting some of that,” he said.
I welcomed the rich aroma and sipped. “Good guess.”
“Where ya headed?”
Where indeed? It was a pertinent question, given the establishment’s remote location. I’d wager every one of its patrons had been passing through, on their way somewhere else. But not me. “Here, actually,” I said. “At least for now.”
The old man raised an eyebrow. “You don’t say. Well you didn’t come here for the fine dining, I hope.”
“As hungry as I am, you might as well have a Michelin star.”
A chuckle burbled in the man’s chest. “I guess that makes me your chef. What’ll it be?”
I ordered sunny side up eggs, bacon, and toast. Then, after a pause, I added, “And one pancake.” My host gave me an amused look, then tottered off behind a swinging door.
The sounds and smells of the kitchen transported me back. Back to the day I met her. I was sitting on this very stool when she came in out of the rain, soaked to the bone.
“Do you have a phone I can use?” she asked at the counter.
The proprietor sighed. “Phone’s been out for a week, I’m afraid.” His eyes went up and down her body, and he licked his lips.
Even through her obvious misery, she was alluring. Dripping blonde curls framed her cheeks, rosy from the cold. Disappointment just barely managed to darken her wide-set, icy-blue eyes. Her shoulders slumped with exhaustion on her slender frame.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Is there something I can do to help?”
Her eyes turned to mine, and in an instant the world became more colorful. “It’s my car,” she said. “It broke down a couple miles up the road. I remembered passing by this place so I hoofed it back here.”
“I’d be happy to give you a lift to the next town. Should be a garage somewhere that can give you a tow.” I looked at my wristwatch. “’Course they won’t be open for a while, I reckon. Why don’t you have a seat, and we can have breakfast first? My treat.”
She swallowed. I could see her pride fighting with her hunger, but then she gave me a charming smile with crooked teeth before plopping onto the stool next to mine. “Thanks,” she said. “I could kill for a pancake.”
That stool was empty now. I ran my finger over the crumbling vinyl where she once sat. Where she fell into my life. I could almost see her there next to me. The space where she belonged felt like a vacuum, pulling out my breath.
“Name’s Carl,” said the old man as he topped off my coffee.
I shook off the memory and shook his hand. “Mark. Pleasure. Actually I met you once before. I’m sure you wouldn’t remember. It was back in ‘63. I sat right here, as a matter of fact.”
Carl grunted. “Yeah, I’m lucky if I can remember my phone number these days. Food’ll be out in a sec.” He headed back to the kitchen.
When Carl came back out with an armful of plates, I said, “Speaking of phones, your phone was actually how I met the love of my life.” I looked down at the meal in front of me, my heart aching with nostalgia. I slid the pancake over in front of the neighboring stool, then pierced one of my yolks with a wedge of buttery toast.
“My phone?” Carl prodded.
“It was out of order. Her car had broken down, so I offered her a ride,” I said through a mouthful. “It’s how we met.”
Carl leaned one elbow on the counter and rested his chin on his hand. “You know, it’s the damnedest thing, but I think I kinda remember that. Blonde girl? Pretty little thing? Looking like a drowned rat?”
Smiling, I nodded and washed my toast down with a slurp of coffee. “Beverly.”
“I’ll be damned,” Carl said. “The love of your life, you say?”
“Never met anyone like her, before or since.”
Beverly and I pulled into Garner Auto a little past ten. I offered to go in and talk to the mechanic, but Beverly wasn’t having it. She said, “You’ve been more than kind, Mark, but I can handle this. I’ve imposed on you quite enough.”
I told her it was my pleasure, and it was indeed a bittersweet pleasure to watch her backside as she pushed through the door of the shop. But something made me wait it out and make sure she got the help she needed. Sure enough, a few minutes later there was this huge commotion inside. Things were crashing, and people were shouting, so I went in to check on her.
I pushed open the door. Inside, next to an overturned desk, a man in greasy overalls crouched with his hands over his head. Beverly loomed over him waving with a crowbar with menace.
“What’s going on here?” I asked.
The bearded man glanced up at me, terror on his face. “You know this broad?”
Beverly whacked the overturned desk with the crowbar. The sound reverberated off the walls. “Call me ‘broad’ one more time!”
The man shrunk closer to the ground. “Sorry! Sorry. Just … leave. Get out. OK?”
She pointed the crowbar at the mechanic. “Someone still needs to tow my car.”
Somehow I coaxed the crowbar out of Beverly’s white knuckles and led her back outside while the mechanic arranged for his son to go pick up Beverly’s car. As the tow truck crunched down the gravel drive, I asked, “Want to tell me what that was all about?”
Beverly turned and pointed to her rear end. The canary floral print dress was now adorned with a large, clear handprint of black grease. I couldn’t suppress a grin, while she fumed. Then I started to chuckle, while she huffed. She fought back her laughter as best she could, but soon we both doubled over in laughter until tears were in our eyes. I knew at that moment that I was hopelessly in love.
“She was an absolute whip,” I said, “and I adored that about her.”
“I’ll bet,” said Carl.
“I think a strong woman is quite a thing.” I fished a cigarette from my breast pocket and found Carl holding a lit match. “Thanks,” I said, taking a deep pull and exhaling a large cloud of smoke. “It makes you want to be worthy of her, you know?”
Carl nodded in agreement.
“She sure made that mechanic rise to the occasion. He ended up fixing her fan belt free of charge. But then there we were, both with our cars, both heading in separate directions, and I just couldn’t bear for that to be the end.”
“So, what’d you do?” Carl stole a glance at the cold pancake on the counter.
“I told her, ‘I’ll buy you another pancake tomorrow morning, if you’ll spend the day with me.’”
Carl scoffed. “Smooth.”
“That’s not the half of it,” I said. “Without missing a beat, she countered with, ‘That would mean I’d have to spend the night with you, too.’ And then she winked, and I thought my legs would give out.”
“To think, it was all because my phone wasn’t working.”
“I owe it all to you, Carl.” I stamped out my cigarette and bit off a piece of crispy, smoky bacon. “We ended up spending the whole day together. The rain had stopped by then, and it was a cool day, so we took a walk in the desert. The rain had made everything alive and bursting with color. It was the kind of thing that turns ordinary people into poets inside their heads. I told her that I felt like I was the desert, and she was the rain that made me come to life.”
Carl groaned and rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, I’m no Yeats. But you know what? She said she felt the same way. Then I pulled her up against me and planted a kiss. That was it for me, you know? Whoever I was before was gone. There was me up to that point, and then there was me, reborn. You ever have someone do that to you before?”
Carl nodded. “My wife, Edna.” Then his face fell, “God rest her soul.”
We shared a solemn moment of silence.
“So what happened next? Did you spend the night with her?”
“Sure enough. After dinner, we posed as a married couple and got a room at the Motel 6.”
Beverly excused herself to go take a shower, and I flipped on the TV. Not two minutes later, Beverly called out to me from the bathroom, so I hightailed it in after her. Steam was rolling out from the shower curtain. I found myself struggling to breathe, partly from the humidity and partly from my anticipation. Then the shower curtain screeched open, and she poked her head out.
“You just gonna stand there, or do you want to join me?”
I probably set a world record for ditching my clothes and hopped right in. There she was, in all her glory. That image will be burned in my eyes until my last breath. I watched the hot water cascade over all her curves, while she just stood there with an enigmatic grin, like the Mona Lisa. Then she held her hand out to me and I took it, and we fell into each other, looking to remove every pocket of space between us.
“Mark,” she breathed, “how can this be? I’ve only just met you.”
“When you know, you know,” I said. It felt like we were in a storybook. One of the ones where love-at-first-sight is a real thing. So I said it. Not twelve hours after we met, I told her I loved her. And she told me she loved me, too.
We dried each other off with the cheap towels and spent all night in each other’s arms. By the time dawn peeked around the curtains, we’d loved each other a hundred different ways, cursing the approach of checkout time.
Carl whistled, then mopped his brow with a hand towel.
“Yeah,” I said, lighting another cigarette.
“Spare one of those?” Carl asked.
I obliged and flicked my lighter, then slumped back on the creaky stool. “It was the best day and night of my life.”
“I believe it. So, how’s she doin’ these days?”
“I wish I knew.” I sighed. “When I woke up, she was gone.”
Carl staggered a bit. “She left?”
I nodded. “Her clothes were gone. Her car was gone. No goodbye. Not even a note. And just like that my new storybook life had turned into a nightmare worthy of the Grimm brothers.”
“You have no idea where she went?” Carl wiped his brow again.
“We never said where we were from. All I knew is she had been heading north, and I had been heading south, before we crossed paths that day. She had said she was going home, so I started north myself. I asked about her in practically every town across the entire state of Nevada before I had to admit defeat.”
Carl reached for my plate, “You all done with that?”
“I’m done with the eggs,” I said, “but leave the pancake.”
“It’s stone cold by now.”
“Please leave it.”
Carl swallowed, and then took my plate of food back into the kitchen. When he came back out, he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the lone, cold pancake. “What did you do next? When you couldn’t find her?”
“I had a rough ride for a while,” I said. “Everyone said she must have been looking for a one night stand, but I couldn’t bring myself to believe that. It was too real, our love. As quick as it was, no one could convince me that she had just been blowing smoke. I drifted from one place to the next, took a few women to bed with me here and there, but I was walled off. A big part of me was still in that cheap motel. I’ve lived my whole life in that motel. That one night defined me. It owned me. To this day, it owns me.”
Carl tisked. “Such a tragedy.”
“I owe it all to you, Carl.”
“Beg your pardon?”
“It took me twenty years, but I finally figured it out.”
Carl’s forehead drew together in a frown.
“Her car,” I said. “I remembered she’d had it towed that day. So a couple months ago, I went back to Garner Auto. Old Man Garner was dead and buried by then, but his son followed in his footsteps. He remembered that ‘crazy lady’ who nearly beat his pop with the crowbar. So I asked him if he had any paperwork about the tow. He dug around in his cellar for hours looking for it, and—wouldn’t you know—he found it?”
Carl’s face reddened. He fidgeted with a dishtowel.
“I got the license plate from that, and then my buddy at the DMV pulled the records for it, which got me the VIN. For the next part, I hired a PI. He was able to take that VIN and find out that the car had been sold. You’ll never guess who sold it, Carl.”
“Look, Mark, I don’t know what you’re thinking but—”
“It was you, Carl. You sold the car. Now how do you suppose that happened?”
“Mark, it’s not what you think.”
“How do you know what I think? How do you know what I’ve been through these past twenty years? How do you have the faintest idea?”
“Look, I … I found it. Yeah, I found that car on the side of the road one day, and I—”
“Save it. I finally pieced it together. She didn’t leave me in that hotel room. She went to get pancakes! I’d promised her a pancake for breakfast, but she wanted to surprise me. She came back here to get us pancakes.”
Carl’s mouth flapped like a fish out of water.
“Yeah, I saw the way you looked at her that morning, when she came in from the rain. You wanted her. So when she walked back in here the next day to get pancakes to-go, that’s when you took her. You took her, didn’t you, Carl?”
“You’re crazy!”
“You’re God damned right I’m crazy! And I owe it all to you, Carl. You made me into this.” At that moment, I reached under the hem of my jacket and pulled a revolver that had been tucked into my belt.
“Mark,” Carl raised his hands, “think about what you’re doing.”
“I’ve had enough of thinking. Of wondering. Where’s Beverly, Carl?”
“Mark, please, you have to understand, I—”
“Where. Is. Beverly?” I raised the gun and leveled it at Carl’s chest.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Carl said. “I don’t know where she is!”
I pulled back the hammer, and the cylinder rolled a .44 caliber bullet into place.
“Mark, please! You gotta believe me.”
I pointed the revolver at Carl’s shoulder and pulled the trigger. The sound was deafening, and my ears started to ring. The force of the bullet knocked Carl against the soda machine behind him. He cried out in pain.
“You son of a bitch, you shot me!”
I pulled back the hammer a second time. “Where’s Beverly, Carl?”
Carl struggled to catch his breath as a large red stain spread across the front of his apron. With a quiet, resigned voice, he said, “OK, you win. She’s … she’s in my basement.”
“Take me there.” I waved with the pistol. “Right now.”
Picking up Carl’s phone, I dialed 9-1-1 and left it off the hook. Carl limped from the dining area, the barrel of my gun between his shoulderblades.
Beverly and I huddled under a blanket on the diner porch, holding each other with all our strength, as if we were terrified of ever letting go. Deputies milled about. Blue and red lights strobed across the landscape. Radios hissed and squelched.
The paramedics wheeled Carl out on a stretcher, groaning in pain. He wasn’t mortally wounded, but I hoped it would hurt for however much longer the old bastard had left in this world. Beverly would need some major therapy, having been locked away in a basement for two decades, but we were finally together, and nothing would ever tear us apart again.
“Mark, what are we going to do now?” Beverly asked as she leaned against my shoulder.
“Well, it’s about twenty years too late,” I said, “but I still owe you a pancake.”