After Midnight

by Lacy Hart

  “Your doctor… or Arnold could probably prescribe something for you to help you sleep,” Linda said, trying not to sound too overprotective.

  “Linda, I don’t want any drugs or medicines,” I said, trying to control my temper. “I think I just need to get some type of routine in my life again. Maybe I’ll start running again in the mornings. I need more exercise.”

  “Good idea,” Linda said as she finished making coffee in her coffee maker. “I think that will be a big help to you. Exercise, burn off some energy, stay in good shape, and maybe you’ll feel more tired at night.”

  Running sounded like a great idea to me. Even though the activity still left me alone in my head for a while, I needed to get my blood pumping and my body moving again. I missed the activity that I got every day in the Army, even if it was an activity I wasn’t always anxious to do. It always kept me razor sharp mentally and physically, and getting back to that would be a big help.

  Coming to that resolution made me feel good about things for the first time in weeks. I could even feel a small smile creep across my face, and my body felt less tense and anxious.

  Linda poured out her cup of coffee and stood next to me. “I need to go to my office upstairs to work.”

  “Sure, no problem,” I said to her, standing up and giving her a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll go back to the apartment.”

  “You can stay in here you know, Caleb,” Linda said to me. “This is your home now too. You can hang out in the living room, watch TV, go down to the basement and do some laundry if you need to, go upstairs and talk to your son…”

  “He’s got stuff to do, and you have stuff to do,” I told her waving my hand as I walked towards the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Go do your work.”

  I walked out the back door and into the darkness of the backyard. The motion light flipped on as soon as I moved on the back steps to light my way back to the apartment over the garage. The night air was noticeably cooler now, and you could hear the signs of the springtime nightlife starting to come forward, with frogs, insects, and birds all making their noises.

  I made my way up the steps and went back to my apartment. I casually went through the bit of mail that I had picked up from the house and didn’t see anything of interest or note there. I opened up the laptop I had sitting on the counter and logged in to check my email. I have had the laptop for a while but rarely take the time to use it for anything. While everyone else seems to spend hours playing games and using social media, I just never bothered with it, even though I had the time and ability to do it now.

  Email proved to be less than interesting for me as well. There was just the usual junk mail and spam and not much else. I rarely heard from the people I worked with in the Army beyond the occasional hello. The lack of communication from the world I once knew so well distanced me even more and left me feeling like I was caught between two realms without really fitting into either one.

  I decided to bring the laptop over to the couch with me in front of the TV and do a double-dip of being a vegetable. I turned on one of the movie channels and just left on whatever happened to be there, whether it was some screwball comedy or action movie. I then also did a little bit of surfing the web, checking out some websites of all kinds, just looking to kill time until I started to feel tired. The problem was I wasn’t feeling tired at all.

  I ended up working to clean the computer up a little bit, getting rid of old files and consolidating things down. I wandered over to the Pictures folder, not thinking there would be anything on there, but I saw hundreds and hundreds of files there. I clicked on some and saw that the pictures were all family pictures, things Ella must have transferred over to my laptop at one point.

  I wasn’t in a lot of the pictures since many were taken while I was away from home, but there were some that have the three of us in there, including many from when Adam was pretty young. Pictures of us having fun at the beach, at a party at Ella’s parents, of one Halloween where I was home on leave, and even a few of an early Christmas. The pictures were a mixed blessing for me. I loved seeing them, remembering those happy times, and seeing Ella there, whether it was dressed in her favorite Christmas dress, in her t-shirt and jeans at the park with Adam, or in her bikini on our trip to the Outer Banks one year.

  It was also incredibly painful for me to see the pictures. It made me realize how much I missed Ella, and how much of her life and Adam’s life that I had missed out on while I was away. Finally, after looking through many folders and files, I had to slam the computer closed because my heart and my head couldn’t take it anymore. I rubbed my eyes, which were red from sadness and from a bit of exhaustion.

  I looked down at my watch and saw it was 2 AM. All that time had passed quickly, and here I was still awake, with my emotions all churned up. I should have been tired at this point, but I wasn’t, and staying here in the apartment like this was not going to benefit me at all.

  I put my sneakers on, grabbed a sweatshirt, and walked outside. The late evening/early morning was quieter than I had expected. I thought about heading over to the house, but I didn’t want to disturb Adam or Linda and have them worry. Instead, I decided that a walk might clear my head some.

  I made my way down Carson Court and over to Oak Street, the main street here in Swanson. Naturally, most everything was quiet. Even the bars in town were already closed or just shutting down for the night, with just a few stragglers on the streets trying to figure out how to get home. I paced up the street, just letting the cool air hit my face and hoping to clear my head.

  It was then I saw the lights up ahead for the diner in town – the Moonlight Diner. It was a place I had not been to in many years, perhaps since Ella and I first lived in Swanson and would go with Adam for breakfast on the occasions I was home. It was one of the few 24-hour diners left that you might find, taking advantage of having a college nearby that always had hungry young people.

  The diner was as good a place as any for me to kill some time, get away from home, and maybe get out of my head for a little bit. I walked up the steps, pulled the door open and headed inside, not quite knowing what to expect in there, but not really expecting all that much.

  4

  Sarah

  For some people, starting your workday at 10 PM might feel like torture. For me, it was the ideal solution. I have always been something of a night owl and loved to be up late at night. The evenings held much more for me, gave me the time to enjoy the quiet, and let my imagination and thoughts run wild for a change. Daytime jobs just seemed to put me in the same rut that everyone else was caught up in. I was miserable along with them, dreading going to school, to work, or doing much of anything. At night, it was all different, and I came alive.

  Walking through the door at the Moonlight Diner to start my shift at work always brought different feelings and adventures. You never quite knew what to expect from the graveyard shift, who was going to come along, and what might happen. Some people feared working this late at night because of the potential dangers that might be there. It’s true that you never knew who would walk through that door and what they might try to do, but I always felt the same was true during the daylight hours.

  As I walked in to start work, there wasn’t much going on at the diner. It was typical for Wednesday night, not one of the busier nights of the week, and working Wednesday through Sunday gave me the chance to work the days where it was usually busiest here late in the evenings and early in the mornings. I avoided the dreaded Mondays and Tuesdays when the place would be dead aside from a couple of regulars. Working the busier nights made it so that the work went by pretty quickly.

  The Moonlight had been around for many years and has long been one of the staples here in Swanson. The current owner, Doug Robinson, has owned the place for about ten years now. He had worked at the diner from the time he was going to college at Swanson College and kept right on working through school and beyond until he bought the place from the Devlin family, who had owned the diner
for about sixty years before that.

  The diner itself looked like many of the diners you might see all over the country. We had the classic counter with stainless steel stools topped with red vinyl cushions, the usual booths of wood and red vinyl, and tables scattered throughout the three rooms. Doug always made sure that everything shined and looked its best day and night so no matter what time someone came in they could expect the place to look its best.

  To keep things looking as good as they do meant having a larger crew on at night than many other places that were open twenty-four hours. There were only two of us here to wait tables and the counter, myself and Francesca lately, and Justin was the graveyard cook in the kitchen. But, we typically had a couple of busboys working the night with us as well, helping to keep everything at its best. I’ve been in some late-night places where it was just one waitress and the cook all night, and it seemed to me that it would be hard to make it work well that way.

  Working graveyard at the diner means more than just waiting tables though when you are on the wait staff. There is never much downtime if you want the place to look nice, and very often when things were slow I would find myself washing down tables, filling salt, pepper and ketchup bottles, vacuuming one of the rooms we close off when things are slow, or anything else that might help out so that the diner is ready to go when it gets busier come breakfast time, and the daytime crew shows up.

  On the rare occasions where I’ve even done all those extra jobs, , I get the chance to work with Justin in the kitchen and pick up some extra cooking skills. Justin has been cooking for years and cooked in the Army when he was in the military. While he may not have gone to a fancy culinary school, his ambition to learn and real-life cooking experience made him a better cook than what you would find at many other diners. Some of the dishes he put together look amazing, and how he remembers how to cook and prepare fifteen or twenty pages of items on our menu astounds me.

  Tonight didn’t look like it was going to be a busy night. When I got there at 10 there were only a few tables and booths occupied, and it looked like they were all students from the college. Doug knew the diner was a gold mine because it was so close to the college and college kids with free time that are looking for food that is better than the cafeteria or what they can cook up in their dorm room, the Moonlight is the ideal answer. Doug purposely kept the prices on the menu low, knowing most college kids may not have a ton of money to spend on food, so they knew they would always have a place to go to get something when they wanted it.

  I worked my way back behind the counter, and through the kitchen, to the small staff area we had with a few lockers, a beat-up couch many people used for napping, and an old coffee table one of the staff had salvaged and brought in so we could keep magazines and stuff in the back for breaks. I slipped my purse into one of the lockers, grabbed my black apron and tied it around my waist, and then clocked in to begin my work.

  I walked out to the front, saying hi to Justin in the kitchen before I went. Justin just nodded and smiled as he worked over the flattop grill, getting a burger going on one end while heating up some onions on the other. He also had a grilled cheese going on the stove, stock and soup simmering, and probably ten other things I didn’t notice him doing all at once.

  I went behind the counter and surveyed the room. Francesca, the waitress who had been working with me for most of this year, was out in the dining room already taking an order from some guests. She gave me a quick smile before she darted over to the computer to enter the order she just took into the system.

  “Pretty slow tonight so far?” I asked her as she tapped away at the screen with one of her long red fingernails.

  “Yeah, I don’t think we are going to see too much tonight,” she told me in her New York accent. Francesca had come down to Swanson to go to school a few years ago and, through fits and spurts, was still working on her degree here. Her family stopped paying for her schooling about a year ago, telling her at twenty-five she should be done by now, so she took a job here at the Moonlight to help pay her way for what she hopes is her last year.

  Francesca is like a lot of the women and men I have seen come through the Moonlight in the last few years that I have worked here. Many of them were students at the college looking for part-time work to help them get through school. They thought that working graveyard would be an easy way to make some cash because they didn’t think they would have to work hard. Once they saw how much we needed to do at night, many fell by the wayside. Francesca had stuck it out for a while now, and I was glad she had. She is one of the few people I could call a friend here in Swanson.

  Francesca was working the one dining room that would be open for the night, which meant I would work the counter area and the few booths we had over near the entrance. I liked nights like this since it usually was the diner regulars that I would deal with primarily, making it more comfortable for me. It also would mean more time doing chored work, making sure the counter was stocked, that the cases were filled, and all the other tasks I would have to take care of for the night.

  Right now, no one was sitting in my area, so I went about pulling items out of the dessert display to see what needed replacing. Every once in a while, Francesca would come over and ask me to get her a soda or other beverage from the fountain area or mix up a milkshake for her. We did have a small liquor area and some beer in one of the lower coolers, but we didn’t get too many requests for things like this. It was usually only kids under twenty-one hoping they could score an alcoholic drink late at night that might try, but once we would ask for ID, they would get shot down and go back to drinking Coke or iced tea.

  I watched Francesca as she flirted with a couple of truck drivers sitting at a booth just outside of my area. Francesca had the dark hair, dark eyes, and curves that would get attention, and she had no problem flaunting and flirting a bit if she thought it might get her better tips. She always made sure to wear the black skirt as her uniform instead of the pants I wore each day so she could show off her legs, and she often wore stockings, tights, or pantyhose with eye-catching designs or patterns to them.

  She sauntered back over towards me as she was ringing up the truckers and printing out their check.

  “Did they watch me walk away?” she said to me casually as she punched in the ticket number into the computer.

  “Of course they did,” I told her with a smile.

  “Oh, good. They’ll be good tippers then. I keep telling you that you should start wearing the skirts, Sarah. You’ve got the long legs that guys like. Your tips would skyrocket.”

  “No thanks,” I answered. “I don’t want to invite any more attention than needed.”

  “Suit yourself,” Francesca replied. She started to walk back towards the truckers’ table, adding some extra wiggle to her walk as she went over, gently bent down to place the check holder on the table, and made sure to give the truckers just a quick peek at the cleavage she was showing.

  Francesca was right – they did tip her well, giving her a ten dollar tip on a twenty-five dollar check. I handled the register as part of working the front, something I had gotten used to over my time here. When I first started, we used to have an assistant manager here overnight, or Doug would be here himself. Since I have been here a few years now, and have earned his trust, Doug only comes in on Friday and Saturday nights since those are the days we are busiest. Other than that, I take care of the register, keeping the receipts and everything that needs to be done before the morning crew arrives.

  The hours can go by pretty quickly when you occupy yourself with things to do. Once midnight rolled around, the guests in the diner became fewer, giving us the time to do prep work that made things easier for the day crew. A big part of what we do overnight is to support the people that work during the day when it is the busiest, something many of the people I have worked with at night fail to understand or grow to resent. They would feel like we did all the hard work to make things easier for them, but the truth is work
ing the day is much more taxing than at night. When I first started , I worked day shifts to train and get used to everything, and I hated it. I was constantly on the go, the rush is more hectic at lunch and dinner, and, to be honest, I found the guests were ruder and tougher to deal with. You get more of the “I am entitled” type of guest that demand everything instead of asking. They are unkind towards the staff, and don’t appreciate the hard work that goes on beyond the scenes. I was happy to jump to nights and dove into the atmosphere with more energy and gusto, and it has paid off for me. I am one of the few full-time employees Doug has, and other than Justin, I am the only full-timer on the graveyard. It means I get benefits like insurance and vacation and a lot more stability with hours.

  It was a little past two when things really started to slow down. There was just a couple in the one corner booth, nursing coffees and cheesecake, and that was it. Francesca had vacuumed and cleaned the closed dining area, so it was ready for the next day. Justin was hard at work getting things prepped for the morning rush, and the busboys were lending a hand in the back with the late night deliveries that came in with supplies. I polished down the counter one more time, checked to see if the coffee was old and needed to be refreshed, and then gazed out the front windows into the night, wondering what was going on in the world beyond Swanson.