59. After Midnight

We walked a mile or so to the place Sam knew. It was after midnight, and had been for two hours. Some of the neon had been switched off. The street lamps puncuated buildings like words in Hemingway’s short lines. Five at a time. Sam sent two panhandlers on their way with a dollar each. The mugger wasn’t so lucky. I didn’t have to lift a finger, and the guy wasn’t going to be able to for a long time.

Naturally, the diner was no Mom & Pop place; more Mom and her special weeknight friend from Buffalo with his rig parked around the corner. It was called ‘The Dinah’. The neon tubes flickered. It could have been a morse message for the moon, but it didn’t answer. The metal shutters were half-way down the windows, keeping the yellow light on the sidewalk and off the macadam. Inside there were some unusual suspects; someone in scrubs in a corner, hands round a jumbo mug of something hot; a blue-suited cop at the counter with her head resting on her folded arms. Oh yeah, and a guy in a clown suit. He was eating corn dogs. Dinah was behind the counter, a short order cook had his back to the diner and was sweating over bacon and hash-browns. Dinah was polishing a glass.

‘What’ll it be?’

‘What’ve you got?’ I answered. Sam nudged me with an elbow.

‘We’ll have the breakfast; sausage and ham, hold the grits. Eggs sunny side up.’

‘I might not have wanted that,’ I said.

Dinah breathed on the glass.

‘'At’s all there is. You kin have with grits 'r without. And it’ll be coffee, we ain’t got no tea.’

The short-order cook slapped the doings on the hot-plate and cracked four eggs one-handed, easy as pie. Only there wasn’t any.

‘Schechem, give ‘em extra hash browns.’ Dinah said. I wondered how Schechem felt about handling the ham.

We sat at a corner booth in back of the diner, as far from the windows as we could. JJ Cale was managing to sound good from a tinny radio. The coffee came and it was doing the job for the medic in the other corner of the diner. I couldn’t put my lips near it. Sam blew on the hot black liquid and then took a sip.

‘Still after FLOTUS? What is going on, Gabe?’

‘I can’t say. It’s just...’

‘Just what? Unbelievable?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘Do you even need me here at all?’

‘I need you until we get FLOTUS, and then I definitely don’t.’

‘Ever again?’ She took another sip but forgot to blow. It must have burned as her eyes teared up.

‘If I tell you everything, it’ll be never again. You’ll have to trust me.’

She nodded over at the woman in the scrubs, ‘That’s the doctor over there.’