The Corner Booth (Part 1)

The new restaurant opened on a Tuesday, with an arch of balloons over the door and a man in the parking lot waving cars in with both arms.

Camille counted the cars from the front window of her grandmother's diner. Eleven. Then fourteen. Then she stopped counting.

“They've got a deal on,” she said. “Two dinners for eighteen dollars. It's up on the sign.”

Rosalind didn't look up from the coffee machine. “Then people will eat two dinners for eighteen dollars,” she said. “Wipe the corner booth down, would you.”

Marchand's had stood on Perkins Road for forty-one years, and generally the corner booth was the first table to fill. The man with the newspaper took it at seven every morning and stayed until his coffee went cold. The nurses came in at three, still in their blue hospital clothes. On Thursdays two roofers ate eggs at the counter and argued about football.

That week Camille watched all of it come apart, slowly, the way sugar goes in water.

On Wednesday the nurses didn't come. On Thursday only one roofer came, and he said the other one was trying the new place, just to see. He said it the way people say a thing they have already decided.

On Friday morning the man with the newspaper wasn't in the corner booth.

Camille kept watching the door until eight, and then she stopped pretending she wasn't watching and went to the window instead. Across the street, behind a wall of new glass, he was sitting alone at a table with his newspaper open in front of him and a cup of coffee he hadn't touched.

She watched him for a long time. He never looked up.

Behind her, Rosalind turned on the radio, the way she did every morning, and started the eggs for a dining room with nobody in it.