I have this fantasy.

It happens in the stock room, when I’m back there by myself, pulling out another industrial-sized canister of our “soup du jour” (which anyone who comes into a diner will tell you is just a fancy name for shit in a can) or lugging the mop out from behind the iceboxes near closing time, when mostly everyone else has gone home. I work a lot of closing shifts; I like to put off going home as long as possible. I like the diner at night, when the lights are dimmed low and the streets are empty outside, and it’s only me and the mop, dancing our way across a linoleum floor that never comes clean no matter how hard I scrub while Brian stands at the counter, counting out the register. Brian cocks his eyebrow at me whenever I get particularly enthusiastic with the mop, like he can’t quite figure me out. I get that look a lot; I’m used to it.

Brian is the owner of the Canyon Diner; he’s married to the place, with no other friends or family. He’s here most nights, and maybe it’s because we often work in such close proximity that I feel this way, but in my fantasy, while I’m back in the stock room, Brian comes in and finds me, all alone. We look at one another, neither of us saying a word – neither of us are talkers anyway, but now of all times there are no words needed.

Everything is conveyed with just a look as we stand there. Maybe I have a can of soup in my hands, but that will fall to the floor, breaking and scattering chicken noodle across three feet of linoleum when Brian crosses over to me and grabs me; neither of us will notice the puddle of soup at our feet. Brian will kiss me hard, desperately, pressing me against the wall. His tongue will taste like sweet iced tea with too much lemon, saccharine with just a hint of bitterness. Mine will taste like black coffee, all bitterness with nothing to cut it, nothing to soften the flavor.

Most days I wear jeans to work, but in my fantasy, I’m always wearing a skirt; a jean skirt under my apron, both of which Brian pushes aside like they are nothing. My skirt slides up around my hips and I’m still pressed against the wall, which is rough and cold behind my back, but I like that – there should be no comfort in this, no laying me down against silky sheets with high thread counts. I’m not the kind of girl who has sex on fancy sheets; I am the kind of girl who wants to be taken in a cold stock room with chicken noodle soup on the floor, my legs wrapped around the waist of my boss while he pushes himself inside of me, hot and frenzied and enough to make me cry out, a sound that would attract attention, if Brian did not smother it with his mouth.

This fantasy gives me chills; it makes me feel hot and cold all at once, goosebumps dancing up my spine as I drift out, and when the door to the stock room opens and it is Brian who is there, I’m so startled that I nearly drop the canister of tomato soup that is in my hands. I’ve been holding it and staring into space for at least five minutes, and there is nothing urgent or yearning in the look Brian shoots me from the door; he is only impatient as he snaps, “I’m not paying you to stand around, Haven; we’ve got customers waiting on that soup.” A moment later and he is gone again, the stock room door swinging empty behind him, and I am standing there, in my jeans, in my loneliness, and during times like these, I want to throw the canister against the wall just for the sake of destroying something, anything.

I think I’d have this fantasy regardless of who owned the diner; I don’t think it’s Brian in particular. I can’t deny that there’s something about Brian that makes a girl want to throw him down and have her way with him, though, and it isn’t that he’s particularly attractive. He’s old, for one, in his thirties at least. He’s too slim, like he lives off of iced tea and saltine crackers and maybe a chicken salad sandwich once in awhile; he has serious brown eyes and straight dark hair which he really ought to get cut when it gets too long, instead of pulling back into a short ponytail tied with pink or green rubber bands that he finds in the cash drawer. He’s decent looking, I guess, but it’s his eyes that get me – he has eyes that look like they’ve either seen too much, or haven’t seen enough. He’s so quiet that it makes you wonder what’s going on inside of his head; he looks like he hasn’t had enough nights of going out and drinking until his body is numb. He looks like he hasn’t done much with his body, period, and that’s what makes me want to jump him, to press him down and fuck him into oblivion, just to see if he’s capable of making a sound. I guess what I really mean is that I’d want to see if I’m capable of making a sound; like if someone simply pressed me down and took what they wanted, would I cry out in pleasure or pain, or would I simply lay there, numb, as if nothing is happening at all? It takes so much to make me feel, and nothing at all to make me feel dead, and I’m not sure what the difference is anymore.

I carry the canister of tomato soup out through the swinging door, into the wide open diner, which is busy at this time of day – just after five p.m., we get customers coming from both directions, either travelers stopping in for early dinners before continuing their trek across Texas, or the regulars who work in downtown Odessa who often stop in for meals because there’s nowhere else for them to go. We get a lot of regulars in the Canyon Diner, lonely people without families who are willing to cook them a nice, hot meal after a long workday. Those are the kind of people who spent the early evening in the diner, with newspapers and slices of apple pie, until we close and then they move on to a bar or a club, where they can sit at the counter and down a shot or five, just enough to soothe their bleak thoughts without incapacitating them to drive home and get into bed and sleep it off before waking up the next morning to do it all over again. I think I’m going to be one of those people someday; I think I already am. I guess that’s why I like them.

Brian is across the room, taking the order of a young couple sitting by the window. He scratches his pen against the faded order pad which he always carries around in his jeans pocket; he doesn’t look up even though I watch him while I make my way to the soup broiler so that I can pour in the contents of the new canister. Sometimes it baffles me that I even pay attention to Brian. I never would have, in another life. Another time. Another Haven.

Brian isn’t Jesse, and I suppose that’s what makes him safe, what makes him intriguing.

Brian is only sex; I’d never love him. I’ve never had sex without love, and I want to try. Brian is as good as anyone.

         “Miss?” As I’m emptying the soup into the broiler, someone at the counter speaks up. I finish what I’m doing before I turn around; it’s one of our regulars, whom I only know as Jimmy, the seventy-year-old who comes in every day at four p.m. and stays for two hours, drinking cup after cup of strong black coffee. The caffeine is going to give him a heart attack one of these days, hopefully not in the diner while I’m working. I wouldn’t know how to handle that. I hope he at least has the decency to die while I’m not around.

         “What can I do for you, Jimmy?” I ask him when he has my full attention; I lean against the counter, propped up on my elbows, and give him the smile that I’m told would be pretty, if I allowed it to reach my eyes.

         “A refill, please,” he says politely, adjusting the worn blue hat that I’ve never seen him without. He pushes his mug across the counter at me, the ceramic still warm from his hands although the coffee that settles in the bottom is cold by now. “Up to the brim, sweetheart.”

         “Sure thing.” I take the ceramic mug and rinse it out before filling it with fresh coffee from the pot. When I return the cup to him, Jimmy slides a quarter toward me, and I grin at him as I slip it into my pocket. Jimmy always tips in shiny, clean quarters, at least one for every cup of coffee. Considering the number of cups he drinks, it’s not a bad tip at all. I always save Jimmy’s quarters. I keep them in an empty box of Whitman’s Sampler’s. I’ll cash them in if I ever need to. I have another fantasy, the kind that involves me gathering up all the money that I have and using it to buy a ticket on a Greyhound bus, which will take me all the way out to California, although God knows what I’d do once I got there. I think I’d get another job at another diner, and do the exact same thing I’m doing in Odessa.

         “About time,” Brian says, circling back around the counter and tossing the notepad on top of it, in front of me. He’s in a mood today. He’s always more verbose when he’s grumpy. I don’t know why. “Get that order in, will you?”          “Sure thing,” I say again, as if his tone does not bother me. I guess it doesn’t. I scoop the pad from the counter and skim it – two grilled cheese sandwiches with the soup of the day; two large Cokes, a side salad. I look up at the couple sitting by the window – they’re my age or a bit older, holding hands across the table. The guy is smiling. He has a sweet smile, like Jesse, and I have to look away before it hurts. But I’m not fast enough; it hurts anyway.

“Today, Haven,” Brian says. I glare at him, but I get the sandwich order into Mel, the cook, while I go off to ladle out tomato soup into big ceramic bowls. Sometimes I want to hate this job, but that would require more emotion than I have the capacity for, and so I don’t hate it; I simply do as I’m told, and when I bring the two bowls of soup over to the couple’s table, I smile at them as if they have not broken my heart simply by coming into the diner and lacing their fingers together like they’ll be together for the rest of their lives. Perhaps I shouldn’t envy them; after all, the rest of your life can be a very short time, if you’re unlucky.

Or lucky.

It depends on how you look at it.

**

I still hate the sound of sirens. There’s an ambulance screaming past as I step outside of the diner after my shift is over, flashing bright red and white lights, and all I can think is that there is something inherently hopeless in the way the desperate, mechanical wails cut through the night. No matter how loudly they cry, it may not be enough to save whoever is inside; sirens cannot save anybody, least of all the ones left behind.

         “I need a light,” I say to Claire, the other waitress working tonight. Claire’s forty-seven; I know because I asked her once. We don’t get many people beyond their twenties working in the diner. Brian’s an exception because he owns the place; Claire just can’t find anything better. I probably wouldn’t hire her, either. She’s surly and gruff, and she’s not attractive enough to get away with it.

Claire reaches into her purse and pulls out a red Bic lighter, which she hands to me wordlessly. Behind us, Brian, who is locking up the doors, comments, “Smoking is bad for you,” and in response I light my cigarette and exhale the smoke in his direction. Brian looks at me; I look back at him. He has that expression on his face again, like he doesn’t know what to make of me, but it doesn’t make me want to kiss him. There is no desire in me to press him back against the doors he’s just locked and devour him; I feel nothing at all except mild contempt. I exhale another stream of smoke and then break the gaze; I turn away, fold my arms.

I don’t understand myself.

         “You’ll be okay, sweetheart?” asks Claire, who is now digging around in her purse for her car keys. She asks me this every night, and I’d like to believe that it’s because she has a soft spot, somewhere in that hard heart of hers, reserved just for me because we are the same. One day I’ll be Claire, a crotchety forty-seven-year old waitress with a bad dye job and turquoise eyeliner.

         “Yes,” I tell her, fiddling with my shoulder bag as I tap my cigarette, letting the ashes scatter to the ground. “My sister is on her way.” I always say this with absolute certainty, so that Claire will not feel guilty enough to wait in the dark with me for Hayden to arrive, but the truth is that I’m never certain at all. Hayden owes me nothing, least of all a ride home from work, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t show up.

Brian never offers to wait with me. All he says is, “See you tomorrow,” before he moves past us, his shoulder just barely grazing mine. I wonder if it is intentional, but before I can decide, his form is already disappearing into the parking lot, toward the ’86 Chevy pickup that waits at the far end of the pavement.

Claire and I look at one another.

         “You call me if you need anything,” she finally says, having unearthed her keys from the depths of her purse. She always says this, too, but I have yet to figure out what it means. If I were to get attacked outside of the Canyon Diner, I’m sure I wouldn’t be able to whip out my cell phone and call her. I’m even more sure that she wouldn’t come back if I did.

         “Sure thing,” I respond anyway. It’s the easiest thing to say.

I watch until she has disappeared, until I can only see the red taillights of her Dodge as it pulls out toward the highway. Then I sit down on the pavement and pull out another cigarette, lighting it with Claire’s lighter. The sound of the ambulance is still ringing in my ears, giving me that kind of chill that you can feel inside your bones. Even though it’s a hot Texas night, at least seventy degrees, I still feel cold. I pull my jacket a bit closer to my body, and then I inhale on my new cigarette, as if the tiny embers that flare in the filter will do anything to warm me up.

It’s the quiet times when I think of Jesse the most. During the day, while I am at work or while I am tinkering with chrysanthemums and Queen Anne’s lace in my garden in the backyard, I don’t think on it so much. It’s easier to distract myself with the concrete things, to place Jesse in a pocket in the back of my mind. He is still there, that way, but he is out of sight, and does not press at me so much.

When I’m alone, however, and it’s dark and there’s nothing else to occupy my thoughts, they stray right to Jesse. I suppose I’d be surprised if they didn’t. He always lingers in the background, waiting until I am willing to devote my attention to him, and then he sweeps in with unapologetic fervor, reminding me of all the things that I wish I could forget. I wish I could forget the shade of his eyes, how they never looked quite blue, nor quite green, but somewhere in the middle. I wish I could forget the way that he’d sigh at me, whenever I was being particularly stubborn about something – anything. Cheerios. I liked the plain kind, but I’d smother them with sugar, and Jesse would ask why. You’re supposed to eat them plain, he’d say, they’re better that way.

I don’t like them plain. I like them sweet, I’d say, and dump another spoonful of crystal white sugar into my bowl.

Why don’t you just buy the frosted kind? he’d ask, swiping the milk away from me as I reached for it. He’d grin at me, pouring it over his cereal.

I don’t like them. There’s too much sugar, I’d say, as if it were obvious. He’d look at me, give that sigh, and then we’d both start laughing. He’d kiss me – not on the lips, but on the cheek, just pressing his lips briefly against my skin, and I’d smile the kind of private smile that nobody else ever saw.

You’re a nut, he’d say.

I know, I’d reply.

Stupid conversations.

It’s funny how the little things stick with you – when a person is gone, you don’t remember the big arguments or the big gestures. I mean, you do, but it’s the little, every day things that hurt the most, because they’re so much more obvious when they’re not there anymore. Like in the morning, when I’m pouring sugar over my Cheerios, and I remember that Jesse is no longer there to make fun of me for it. The absence of his teasing, of his kiss against my cheek, is so much more glaring; it’s like a wide open hole that stings every time the wind blows through.

Sometimes I’m not sure which are worse: the memories of Jesse, or the memories of the last time I saw him, when he was not Jesse at all but a stranger, whose face was bone-white and slack with pain. His eyes were neither blue nor green; they were gray, and they looked right through me without recognition. I knew he was going to die when he did not see me.

I still feel cold, and the ambulance is long gone. There is nothing but the normal sounds of a quiet Odessa evening: cars passing on the highway, crickets chirping from the field that rests behind the diner. Across the street, a Sonic is bright and alive with teenagers, out for a burger after spending their evenings at the movies or the mall; it’s such normality, and I am not a part of it.

I try to think of something else. I start to conjure up a new fantasy – I imagine that Brian will return, that he will have been thinking about me waiting alone in the dark for my sister to arrive. He’ll pull up alongside the front of the diner, in that beat-up old truck of his, and lean his head out the window. “Need a ride?” he’d ask.

         “Depends on the ride,” I’d respond. We’d lock gazes; I wouldn’t look away as I got to my feet, striding over to the window like I knew all along that he’d come back for me. I’d lean in and kiss him, long and hungry and deep, and then I would circle around to the passenger side and get in. We wouldn’t have sex, even though Brian’s hand would rest on my thigh and we’d sneak each other glances as we drove straight west, toward California.

I almost convince myself that it’s what I want.

A pair of headlights turns into the parking lot, and I look up, wishing for the accompanying rumble of the Chevy, but the car that glides up to the front of the diner is silent; the window goes down automatically, and my sister’s face appears. “Sorry I’m late,” Hayden greets me.

I look back at her, expressionless. My cigarette has been forgotten; it dangles from between my fingers, ashes dropping to the ground as the paper slowly burns toward the end. I frown, and drop it, and then I step on it with the heel of my boot and brush my hand against my jeans. I get to my feet.

“It’s okay,” I say.

I circle around to the passenger side of the car, sliding inside wordlessly. Hayden flashes me a grin, shifts gears, steps on the gas; we fly out of the diner’s parking lot, racing toward nowhere. I rest my head against the glass of the passenger side window, and I think about Brian, and I don’t think about Jesse.

I have this fantasy. In it, I am happy.