Page 5 of Shatter

Underneath the helmet, a single word on a bottom rocker.

Prospect.

On the Seattle waterfront, some of the men who worked my father's docks wore patches like his.

My father made sure I never got close enough to read them.

"Anything else?" I tuck the pen behind my ear.

"No, ma'am." His voice is low, and his vowels are flatter than a Southern boy's, almost cautious, like each word has been sanded down before it leaves his mouth. "Thank you."

He always says thank you.

He always tips too much.

Harmless, I decided around the second week.

Mostly harmless.

I drop his ticket in the window, and Dale snatches it off the rail with a grunt.

"Your boyfriend's back," he says, slapping two circles of batter onto the flat-top.

"He's not my boyfriend." I bump the swinging door with my hip and grab a rack of clean mugs. "He's a customer with a strange relationship with pork scraps."

"Man's got taste." Dale points his spatula at me through the pass. "Only one in this sorry town."

The Night Owl Diner sits at the end of a strip of dead storefronts off Tennessee Street, close enough to campus to catch drunk kids at a bar close and far enough out that nobody important ever wanders in.

Twelve booths, a counter with nine stools, a jukebox nobody's fed a quarter in years, and a pie case with a crack in the glass Dale keeps meaning to fix.

Vinyl seats the color of old ketchup.

A neon owl in the front window with one wing burned out, so from the parking lot it looks like it's winking at whoever pulls in.

I've worked here for seven months.

Before the diner, I cleaned rooms at a motel off I-10 for six weeks and paid cash for a room at the same motel, until the manager started asking questions about my social security number.

Before the motel, I was somebody else.

Tonight, there are four customers, counting the prospect in the corner.

A trucker at the counter in a faded Peterbilt cap, working his way through a slice of pecan pie like it owes him money.

Two FSU kids in a booth by the window, splitting a basket of fries and leaning so far across the table their foreheads almost touch.

I refill the trucker's coffee and ask him if he wants more pie, and he says he shouldn't.

I tell him nobody here's counting, and he laughs and says he'll take the chocolate cream.

Katie smiles with her mouth closed and never, ever talks about herself, because she doesn't have a past to talk about.

She has a name tag, a black polo two sizes too big, non-slip shoes from Walmart, and an apron with a pocket deep enough to hold her car keys, which she keeps laced between her fingers every time she walks to the dumpster out back.

When someone calls her name across the diner now, I turn around without the half-second lag I had the first month.

The FSU boy reaches across the table, spreads his fingers over the back of his girlfriend's neck, and pulls her in for a kiss.