She was still uncertain how long she had been at the diner. Had she said good-bye to Josh? Did he know where she was? She would text him.
Before leaving, she scanned the diner for Troy. She couldn’t see him.
Jackie waved at her from the counter. They exchanged pleasantries. There was something odd about the way Jackie considered her. Thoughtful and suspicious. Diane tried to seem completely at ease. They exchanged some words that didn’t mean much. Then things turned. Diane said, “What?” and Jackie shook her head impatiently.
“Never mind. What do you got there?”
She nodded at the paper in Diane’s hand. Diane realized that Jackie was holding an identical paper, but couldn’t get her mind to rest on that fact long enough to become curious about it.
“Nothing,” said Diane, and stuffed the paper into her purse. It stayed in her purse.
“Lucky,” said Jackie, and turned back to her coffee, tapping the edge of her paper against the counter.
Diane still didn’t understand, but Jackie seemed grumpy, and so Diane let the conversation end there. She said some sort of casual good-bye, and Jackie threw it back in her face as a sarcastic joke, which Diane thought was unnecessary and rude.
As she walked to her car, she reached into her bag for her keys.
Her hand came across some crumpled paper. She pulled it out. “KING CITY,” it said. Why did she have that? Where would this piece of paper have come from? She tossed it on the ground and then, feeling guilty, picked it up to carry around to the dumpster. Before she could toss it in, there was a crashing sound next to her, which made her jump.
Troy was there, throwing big bags of trash into the dumpster.
“Oh, hey,” he said, and ducked quickly through the back door.
She seemed to be holding a piece of paper. She did not know what it was or where it could have come from or how much she would later regret keeping it. She put it in her purse.
Chapter 22
Jackie was at a dead end, investigation-wise. In terms of tacos, she was doing fine. Judged on her ability to never be able to let go of a slip of paper with her left hand, it was all going great. But trying to figure out what the hell was going on was not going well at all.
She had spent the night with open eyes, trying to will her mind to be just as open. There had to be something she had missed, some connection to be made in the events and individuals moving about in the memory of her day. But if there was, she couldn’t see it. Maybe she wasn’t smart enough. Or maybe the world wasn’t. Maybe the world wasn’t smart enough to put together a story that made sense. Maybe it could only stick together random elements randomly, forming, as Shakespeare had famously written, “a show of senseless movement and circumstance that ultimately doesn’t amount to much at all.”
The next morning found her with only one lead left. She had seen that blond man at her mother’s house. And she had seen him outside of the mayor’s office. And she had seen him at the Moonlite All-Nite Diner. It was time to talk to that man and to find out how he was involved in whatever it was this whatever was.
She drove to the Moonlite All-Nite. It was the same crowd as always, which is to say that there were many of the regulars, and also to say that certain people were always in the Moonlite All-Nite, always at the same booths, always working on plates of food that never seemed to go away. It’s a sign of a good diner to have customers who are stuck in time. A well-known rule of eating is that if there are no time-loop customers, the place probably isn’t worth even ordering a plate of fries.
Jackie sat in her regular spot at the counter.
“Hiya, Jackie,” said Laura, moving with difficulty behind the counter, her thick, woody branches scraping against it. “You hungry?” She bent a fruit-laden branch toward her invitingly.
“Thanks, Laura, but just a coffee.”
Laura pushed her way toward the coffee machine, her branches knocking over tubs of ketchup and mayonnaise and stacks of empty water glasses as she went.
Jackie watched the kitchen. There was no blond man.
She turned to survey the room. Diane Crayton was getting out of her booth. It seemed like there was probably someone with her, but Jackie couldn’t remember who. She looked back at Diane’s table, and her heart began to pound, and then she looked at the kitchen again and couldn’t understand why her heart was pounding.
Diane walked by her. Jackie decided to stop her, talk a little, make it seem casual. She needed to know if Diane actually was involved somehow.
“Hey! Diane!” Jackie said with a casual half salute.
Diane jumped and gasped.
“Easy,” Jackie said, bringing her saluting hand down to pat the air with a “Whoa.” “Just saying hi.”
“Sure. I was…” Diane took a breath. “I was all caught up in my thoughts.”
She waved her hand to indicate where her thoughts were. She laughed to indicate that she was fine and unbothered. The combination of hands and laughter indicated she was startled and uncomfortable.
“Totally get it. Cool.”
“I am sorry. I have to go. I hope the tear I gave you is working out okay.”
“Yeah. The tear. It’s great. I’m sure it’ll fly off the shelf real soon. Always a demand for tears.”
“How’s your mother?”
Jackie gave her a hard look.
“What do you know about my mother?”
Diane frowned with her whole face.
“What?” she said.
The conversation went wrong from there. Jackie felt Diane hiding something from her. It felt like everyone was hiding something from Jackie, the whole world a game of hide-and-seek she had never consented to play. She gave up on the conversation and turned back to the coffee.
Diane smiled, but only with her mouth.
“I’ll be seeing you, Jackie.”
“I’m completely visible.” Jackie thought this was a pretty good joke, but Diane didn’t laugh.
Jackie’s coffee had arrived in a mug with the logo of a strangely proportioned giant of a man leering out at the world. Underneath it was a phrase that had been vandalized by some sharp object, chipping most of it away and leaving only
CALL 4 6 TO M E.
The mug had a smudge where blood had been incompletely wiped off.
She sipped and she waited. She waited and she sipped. The act of sipping was an act of waiting. Sometimes she didn’t even put the coffee in her mouth, only held her lips to the rim and then put the mug back down.
The woman with the clipboard was there as usual, and each time that Jackie took a sip the woman would write something down. She appeared to be working with a woman with an earpiece standing outside, as she would occasionally wave wildly to her, and the other woman would wave wildly back, and then they would quickly and nonchalantly look away, loudly whistling and saying, “I don’t know that person. If you asked me to define a stranger, I’d say that lady. Couldn’t know her less.”
Jackie looked back at the kitchen, and there was the man again: blond, handsome in all of the expected ways (and in this way not handsome), staring at her and flipping endless amounts of burgers into the air, a fountain of burgers with a meat-splash pattern in a five-foot radius around him.
She hopped up from the stool. The woman with the clipboard started writing frantically on the clipboard, and Laura said, “Hey, Jackie, where you going?” but couldn’t get up because her branches were caught in the ice cream freezer door.
Jackie ran to the back, where the steel swinging doors of the kitchen were. She slammed through them into a kitchen with no one in it. All the burgers were still there, evidence of the man’s recent existence.