MOTHWOMAN - DANNY STAUFFER
I’d gotten off of work at about the same time as I do after any other closing shift. After wiping down all the tables and locking the doors, I found myself standing outside the bar at 4 A.M., the prime loneliness hour, and I was feeling just a little broken. It wasn’t like I felt shattered or in shambles or anything like that, but kind of wounded- like a cracked bowl, still useful but threatening something. I felt like something had to have happened to me, a reason to feel so shitty. I always keep a pair of gloves in my jacket pocket, and I gripped them tight in my fists and thought that I had to be reeling from some great injustice to feel that bad.
In spite of my being all choked up I was still breathing, and my breath made clouds in the air, all silvery thanks to the blinding lights that stood watch over the parking lot. The sky was flatter than cement, pock-marked with a toss of fossils, and all of that above me made me feel like I was about to be crushed at any second. The handful of cars still on the road didn’t seem to notice how fragile it was. They cruised on. So long as there was asphalt ahead of them, they cruised on. Their tail lights and the stars and all the other shit lighting up the night became smeared in my vision.
I knew there wasn’t any thing to feel bad about. It was just cold out and I hadn’t slept in a while, that was all.
I wiped my eyes and the second they opened again I saw it: Waffle House. Never since getting a job at the bar had I thought about it before- not even its sheer existence, let alone about setting foot in the place- but right then, at 4 am on that Saturday, I knew that it was what I needed.
I threw my backpack in my car, locked its doors, and walked across the street. It was empty enough that I didn’t even have to hesitate. There was only one car in the Waffle House lot to begin with, an ugly burgundy SUV, and no patrons inside. The bell rang when I entered and the head of the single waiter present lurched upwards and their eyes met mine.
At first I thought it was some greasy college guy, judging by the dark unwashed hair that fell limp over their forehead, and the way their shirt was rolled up to their shoulders, but when they pushed their thick-rimmed glasses up their nose and their lips pulled taught into what I guess had to have been some kind of smile, I knew better. She said something in a low voice that cracked in the middle, probably the standard Waffle House greeting, if there even is one, I don’t know- but I wasn’t really listening. I blinked and nodded and tore my eyes away and sat at a booth in the corner.
I scanned the menu like I was illiterate. Nothing really sank in. All I could take away from the laminated piece of plastic were the bright colors, and they made my mouth water anyway. I wondered why there wasn’t any music playing. After a couple of moments of watching me stare holes through the menu the greasy waitress stepped out from behind the counter and asked me if I wanted to order anything.
I told her I wanted four waffles, three scrambled eggs, two sausage patties, two hash browns, as much bacon as I was allowed, and whole wheat toast with some jelly on the side, and also some coffee without cream but with a lot of sugar.
She was quiet for a moment, and then asked me if that was all.
I looked up at her, trailing my eyes over her name tag before landing on her face. She looked kind of confused. She looked like she’d been up even longer than I had. She had a smattering of, not really freckles, but large, dark marks across her nose, and she had a grease stain on her uniform collar.
“All on the same plate, thanks,” I told her.
Julie nodded like she had a dumbbell around her neck and walked back to the kitchen. I could see that there was exactly one person back there, a man, and he had been all leaned back and craned so he could see us through the peep window that bridged the dining floor with the kitchenet. He and Julie disappeared into a recess of the little kitchen that I couldn’t see from my booth and really I didn’t care. I still had the menu gripped tight in my hand and I shook it back and forth so it made that wobbly laminate sound.
After a minute Julie reemerged and placed a cup of black coffee in front of me on the paper placemat. It was too full and a few drops ran down the side and turned the bright yellow of the paper dark. The ink of the ads printed on it started to run.
“Sugar’s on the table already,” she said, with a loose gesture. I thanked her. She tucked a little clump of her hair behind her ear and returned to her station behind the register without another word. She wore a little ring on her left hand pinky.
We all hung out like that for a while, swaddled by the stillness and stale air. The man back in the kitchen was muttering to himself now and again, low and punctuated with long stretches of humming that had a shadow of rhythm. Julie the waitress stood with her arms crossed and stance wide, tapping her fingers on her arm and looking down. I stared at her pretty brazenly and she didn’t meet my gaze even once. The grill crackled and hissed and the LEDs buzzed and my spoon clanked against the side of my cup and a cop sped down the road with sirens wailing, and despite it all, the silence of those faint stars still bit into my bones like knives fresh from a deep freeze. I tore open sugar packets and added their contents to my brew until there were a dozen little shredded bodies spread across the table. I brought the coffee to my lips and sucked it down, forcing any roiling thoughts about the horrible taste and how burnt my tongue was out of my mind.
My food was out and in front of me at the exact moment I anticipated it. Julie settled one plate stacked with the waffles and eggs in the middle of the scene and a second with the rest off to the side.
“He couldn’t fit it on one plate so there’s two… sorry about that.”
I nodded. “It’s alright, thanks.”
Instead of heel-toeing a line back to her station, Julie hovered over my table.
“Do you work at the bar across the street?” she asked.
“Did you watch me walk over here?” I wiped my mouth on my hand and then propped myself up on the table.
Julie shrugged her shoulders and lolled her head and quickly said “Yeah.”
“I do. Are you gonna sit with me?”
Julie bristled. Her brows furrowed a little and she frowned. “I’m not allowed to do that, I’m working.”
“Who’s gonna tell?” I looked at the man in the kitchen and met his eyes. Julie turned to look, too. The man’s brows raised and he leaned back out of sight. Julie slipped into the booth, elbows up on the table and hands held together.
Julie’s got short dark hair that falls over her forehead like it’s been a while since she washed it. She wears these thick-rimmed glasses that have scotch tape around the part that goes over her ear. She has a couple of weird dark splotches on the bridge of her nose and a scar by the corner of her mouth. Her hands are rugged and she has a bandaid on one of her knuckles. She’s got a ring on her left-hand pinky finger and her nails are either trimmed or bit down very, very short. She made a face at me that I couldn’t read. I drank more of my coffee without looking away from her. She cleared her throat.
“How does that bar pay? Is it a good gig?”
The sound of my setting the mug back down was louder than I thought possible. “It’s alright. Do you want my job?”
She kind of sniffed. “That doesn’t exactly sound good.”
I looked out across the road, at the bar and at the shops and buildings and parking lots and skyline and at the needly little stars. “It’s really not bad, I’m just kind of tired of it. My manager likes blondes too much. He’s friendly but he wouldn’t bug you.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I’ll give you a recommendation if you want, Julie.”
Julie, for the first time since I walked in, smiled in a way that wasn’t obviously forced. It was a hell of a lot sweeter than the coffee, anyway.
Julie asked me more about my job and I answered in between mouthfuls of syrup-soaked food and coffee and eventually orange juice when the coffee got gritty. She told me she’d been working at Waffle House for about six months and it just wore on her too much. She figured she’d rather small-talk people getting boozed up than corral the drunkards that wandered over for fatty food to nurse on afterward. She and the cook, her friend Hubbard who relied on her and her shitty car for transportation, were both sick of always being stuck with the overnight shifts and thought a job with a definite curfew would be preferable, not to mention one with better pay. She called me out for drinking on the job and said she did sometimes, too. She snickered quietly with the corner of her thumb against her teeth when I told her about some of the freaks I’d encountered on the job. She said she preferred to forget her nights at work as soon as she left the building and I said that that was something I could empathize with.
Julie sat with me while I picked through my food and didn’t seem bothered by the quiet. She picked at her short nails and could have mapped the design of the tabletop with how thoroughly she looked it over. When I finished my food and my drinks and felt more full and numb than implosive, she delivered me my check and I fished around in my pockets for the money. After nickle and diming most of the bill I came up a little short and Julie slipped me a bright pink slip for a free waffle. I couldn’t help but grin as I fished a twenty out of my shirt. I told her to keep the change and said I’d give her my good word if she was going to apply for a job at the bar, if they’d even take it after I quit.
Before leaving, I stood to face her at the register. I was stuck to the spot. I kneaded my lip between my teeth.
“Can I-”
The bell rang and a swathe of big old men in high-vis wear stumbled into the quiet little Waffle House and filled the space with slapping on each other and laughing. I could clearly see the last traces of Julie’s soul leave her eyes as she looked past me and at the swath. She hurried to push tables together before they even asked.
I grabbed a pen from a cup by the register and scribbled my number down on the back of my receipt. I slapped it down number-up on the counter and left.
A couple of weeks went by and life was totally unchanged. I didn’t quit my job and I didn’t hear from Julie, or her friend Hubbard for that matter. When I worked closing shifts I minded my own business and pretty soon I forgot about the Waffle House across the street. I drank coffee and Baileys and kept to my apartment most days and worked most nights, and horrible TV shows produced for the well-to-do youth were always my dearest friends no matter what time of day, even if they weren’t for me.
On some otherwise forgettable Wednesday, I got a call a bit before closing. Some regulars jabbered and sulked in their usual barstools but their pockets were dry, so I slunk into the back for a moment. A strained but familiar voice greeted me.
“Hey, uh- this is Julie, from Waffle House.” A pause. “You gave me your number but you didn’t- you never told me your name or anything, and you didn’t write it down?”
“So I didn’t. What’s up?”
She asked if I was working that night and I told her I was.
“Is there any way you can give me and Hubb a ride when you close? We kind of quit our jobs in the middle of a shift but also I locked my keys in the car and nobody we know is up so we’re kind of stranded right now, at Waffle House…” She dragged the sounds of the words out a bit and her voice was full of apology. “I know this is weird, but I still had your number in my wallet, so I thought it was worth a shot.”
So she had kept it after all.
I paused for long enough that she started the first syllable of a question, but I cut her off.
“Sure, I can help you out. It’ll be about 45 minutes, though.”
Julie sighed a deep sigh that rolled out into thanks and pardons and said that that would be “just, just fine”, “thank you again”, and “see you soon.”
When the regulars left and I’d wiped everything down, I stepped out of the bar to see Julie and Hubbard leaned up against my car, the only one left in the lot. I locked up behind me and went to meet them.
Hubbard lived in town, just a while’s walk away from my apartment, actually. I’d done photoshoots for a friend-of-a-friend against the crumbling brickwork of an abandoned building in the area and had been to the nearby park a couple of times. He thanked me much more stoically than Julie and was on his way with a nod. Julie had sat with him in the back and seemed content there even after he left. I looked up at her in the rear view and we locked eyes for a moment before she fixed her gaze out the window.
Julie lived much, much farther out than I expected. I’d imagined she’d live in a run down apartment like mine that she shared with a couple of friends and a cat or two and their many potted plants. Instead, I was riding main street out of town for nearly twenty minutes before she told me to turn off onto a dirt road between two wide empty fields framed by trees. She offered me money for the trouble but I declined. She shrugged off my offer to drive her back to her car the next day. She said that she’s been living out there for the last year or so, after her grandmother died and left the house to her. I thought it was creepy and told her so and she said it’d been an adjustment, but it was better than trying to live with either of her parents. She told me living alone was nice and I agreed, but I asked if it was lonely anyway while I studied her in the mirror, and she said “Never.”
I kept my mouth shut and my eyes on the road after that. The leafless trees looked like inky branching tendrils reaching into the sky. They branched over the car like grasping hands and the emptiness above didn’t help the road feel any more welcoming. The gravel made horrible sounds under my tires and my single functional headlight caught the reflective eyes of animals more than once.
“Not sure how I haven’t been ticketed yet.”
“Turn in here,” she said as we rolled up on a crooked mailbox.
The house was a stark and aged white, with dark shingles and trim and a door that was obviously recently redone, being the only painted surface without canyons streaking it. The roof of the porch sagged over the doorway. The house was totally dark inside, beyond what my headlight illuminated. Curtains fluttered in the second story window.
Julie touched my shoulder from the back seat, startling me. I met her gaze in the mirror again.
“Thank you for this. Really,” she said. She reached up with a piece of paper in her other hand. “Here’s my number. If you ever need a favor that isn’t Waffle House related,” she said with a little lilt of humor, “please, let me know. I owe you one.”
“No problem,” I muttered, a little short on breath. I took the paper. She let go of my shoulder and stepped out of the car to go, before turning and leaning back in.
“Wait, what is your name?”
“It’s Dorothy.”
“...Dorothy?”
“Dorothy. My mom really likes that movie. I had really dark hair when I was born and it lightened out. Friends call me Doe.”
“...Thanks, Doe… Dorothy. See you later.”
I nodded.
Julie shut the door of my car and jogged up the steps of the porch of her two-story rickety-ass dead grandma house. I “tsk”ed and put my car in reverse. I tried to keep my thoughts on the road on the drive back to my apartment to make sure I didn’t miss my turn or hit a stray deer, but I couldn’t keep my mind on the present. All I could think of was the Mediterranean blue of Julie’s eyes and the scar by her lip, her limp wave from the porch, and the two red orbs that had lit the second story window as I had backed onto the road.
Beautifully written and very haunting. Keep writing. You've got talent. ✌️
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