Demonized: Short Stories by Christopher Fowler

Author:Christopher Fowler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473540149
Publisher: Transworld

AMERICAN WAITRESS

The woman on Table 4 has a laugh like a hen getting sucked into a jet engine. She’s been sitting there for hours fooling around with a tuna melt that’s gone grey on her. Clearly she has nothing better to do than sit there taking up a whole booth, filling in time between the carwash and the nail bar, yakking with her friends about what one woman said to another, and how the husband is fooling around on both of them. It never ceases to amaze Molly how small the talk can get toward the tail-end of the afternoon, when the orange light is low and fierce behind the restaurant blinds.

She’s managed to keep the four ’til twelve shift at the restaurant so she can work with Sal, who has more years on her and won’t work after midnight, because she has a little girl with a twisted spine who won’t let anyone else put her to bed. Sal lives in an EconoLodge near Junction 17N which is filled with frat boys throwing parties and looking to get laid, but it’s safe enough for the kid, who feels safer where there’s noise. Sal is a classic; she washes her hair in bleach and keeps it filled with pins and pencils in case any guy has a mind to run his fingers through it. Molly likes her; no Ps and Qs but no airs and graces either, so they help each other in the two hours that their shifts overlap.

Molly likes her job, and she’s good at it. Her mother was a waitress in those chrome-fitted fifties roadside diners that have mostly been demolished now, except in states like Missouri and Florida, where they’ve been preserved with a kind of airquote-irony she doesn’t take to. As a kid, Molly passed her life in diners and family restaurants waiting for her mother to come off duty. She never got bored. She read the books diners left behind, or watched the cook orbiting elliptically between the counter and the grill. Her mother yelled the old diner slang – Adam ‘n’ Eve on a raft, murphy in the alley, shingles with a shimmy, burn the British, hounds on an island – nobody uses that stuff anymore.

Now her mother is gone, and Molly has been a waitress long enough to type any customer within seconds of him coming through the door. That’s how she knows the guy on Table 7 is going to be trouble. True, he doesn’t have any of the usual telltale signs, he doesn’t look angry or drunk or both, but there’s something about him she doesn’t want to get too close to. For a start he looks like he has too much money to be eating in a place like this, forget that crap about family restaurants being great social levellers, you don’t eat here unless you’re watching the pennies more than the carbs. He’s in a blazer, tie and cotton twill slacks, high-top boots and some kind of fancy silver watch peeking out from his sleeve, and it just doesn’t feel right.

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