Over Easy

A dock light, the sodium kind they bolt above loading bays, catches Lyle's truck and a Dodge Neon with the engine still ticking, heat lifting off the hood in a visible shiver. The cone of light gives the wet asphalt the sheen of cured tobacco, darkening where the pavement dips. Past the dumpster, the lot goes dark.

Lyle crosses the pavement with his hands in his jacket pockets. He's been pulling wire through a warehouse ceiling since before dark and the fiberglass insulation has worked its way under his collar, into the creases of his knuckles, into the soft skin between his fingers where sweat holds it like glue. Pink fibers, fine as hair. The itch lives in his wrists, his neck, the hollows behind his ears. His whole body feels furred with it. The diner's front window fogs from inside, the neon sign doubled and smeared in the condensation. He's pulled enough bad ballasts to know the sign hasn't been serviced in years. The transformer cooks itself in the housing, leaks tar onto the fascia.

Inside smells like old coffee and bleach. The institutional kind, the gallon jugs with the yellow caps. The kind that strips the inside of your nose and sits on the back of your tongue for an hour.

She stands behind the counter under a row of T12 cool whites, both hands wrapped around the coffeepot handle, knuckles lined up like they're load-bearing. The tubes wash the color out of everything. Name tag pinned crooked on her chest: Val. Hair pulled back tight enough to smooth the skin at her temples. She doesn't look up when the bell rings. Coffee fills a mug she's already set on the counter, her eyes fixed on the pour the way eyes fix on a faucet when the hands have run out of work.

"Sit anywhere."

He takes the booth by the window. He's been pulling wire long enough that he inventories every room he walks into. The outlet behind the seat is a three-prong, no ground fault, which means the building predates the '96 code. The vinyl bench grabs the back of his forearm when he leans on it, pulls at the skin with a sound like medical tape peeling off. He drags his sleeve across the window glass and the condensation smears into a clean patch.

The Neon sits under the dock light. A fast food bag on the passenger seat, grease stain spreading through the bottom. A jacket wadded on the floor, one sleeve trailing into the footwell. The driver opened the door and kept moving.

She brings the coffee without being asked. Sets it down in a groove worn into the Formica where the pattern has rubbed clean. A wedding band rides her finger, thin, and she keeps turning it with her thumb the way he works a stripped screw. She reaches across and the scratch is right there on her inner forearm. Three parallel lines, raised and darkening, scabbed at the edges where it caught on itself healing.

"Cat?" he says.

She pulls her arm back. Turns her wrist. Studies the marks the way you'd study someone else's handwriting.

"Something like that."

"Got one at home. Orange tabby. Meanest animal alive." He wraps both hands around the mug. The coffee is burnt, the oils gone rancid so it coats the roof of his mouth like motor varnish. It's hot enough to hurt, which is all he wants from it. "Love him to death."

"You want food?"

"Eggs. Whatever you've got."

She writes on the pad without looking at it. Her pen gouges through to the sheet below. The ballpoint carves trenches in the paper. She tears the slip off and clips it to the wheel above the pass-through window. Doesn't spin it. Walks through the kitchen door. Near the door, a mop in a bucket. The water is pink.

The flat top hisses. The pilot light in the gas range, its faint blue whine. No radio. No second set of hands scraping a spatula, no shells cracking on the rim of a bowl. She's back there alone. Oil pops at the wire basket in the fryer, spatters against nothing.

She comes back with the plate. Eggs overdone, yolks cracked and gone chalky. Bacon folded back on itself like a dog ear in a book nobody's reading. Toast that crumbles when he picks it up. She puts the plate down and slides into the booth across from him.

His fork stops. Her hands press flat on the table, the bones visible through the skin, every knuckle a separate ridge. Fingernails scrubbed pink, the cuticles torn back and raw. She's still turning the ring. Then she stops. Works it over her knuckle with her thumb, a slow rotation, and sets it on the Formica between them. The band tinks against the surface and wobbles once before it settles. A small gold loop in a water stain. Neither of them looks at it.

"Cook call in sick?"

"Something like that."

He forks the eggs. Wet rubber. The kind of eggs that happen when a person stares at the wall while the flat top does whatever it wants. He eats them because she's watching.

"You got a name besides Val?"

"Val's enough."

"I'm Lyle."

She nods. Doesn't say his name back.

"You always work this late?"

"Tonight I do."

"Husband doesn't mind?"

Nobody speaks. Oil snaps at the wire basket in the fryer. She finds a spot on the Formica with her thumbnail and starts scraping. Dried something. She works the nail in a tight circle until the spot lifts and the laminate shows clean underneath. Her thumb keeps going after it's gone.

"He doesn't mind anything anymore."

He knows this. Backstab connections. The kind that hold for years and then one morning the outlet goes dead and you pull it from the wall and the wire falls out of the back. There was never enough contact. He signed his own papers at a Denny's, a Grand Slam getting cold between them while the lawyer explained what he got to keep. Kelly took the cat. The next week he got an orange tom that drew blood the first night. He kept it.

"I'm sorry," he says.

"Don't be."

She smells like bleach. The coffee, the flat-top grease, whatever shampoo caught in her hair when she pulled it back, all of it rides on top of that gallon-jug smell. The smell of a mopped floor at a vet's office. Like she scrubbed her hands and forearms with it, scrubbed until the skin went white and tight as a latex glove.

"Rough night?" he says.

"All nights are the same. Some of them just end."

He pushes the eggs around. The toast has gone cold. He eats the bacon. It's the only thing on the plate that tastes like what it is.

Her eyes move past him, to the parking lot, to the Neon under the dock light. Her nostrils widen for a breath and then narrow.

"That your car out there?"

"Tonight it is."

He lets that go. Everything about her answers runs the same architecture. Tonight. Something like that. Temporary wiring. Connections rated for a single use.

She's looking at the mop bucket by the kitchen door. When she turns back, the tightness around her eyes is gone. Her mouth has loosened. Her shoulders drop to a position they know. It happens in the time a contactor takes to close, that quarter-second click between open circuit and live current. She made it without him in the room.

"I should go," he says. Reaches for his wallet.

"On the house."

"You don't have to."

"No," she says. "I don't."

She tears a strip from the bottom of her order pad, writes on it without looking up, and slides it across the Formica. Her phone number. The pen pressed hard enough that the paper curls at the edges. He folds the strip once and tucks it into his jacket pocket.

He slides a ten under the mug. His ex-wife waited tables before the real estate license, and he hasn't walked out of a restaurant without leaving cash since.

He pushes out of the booth. The vinyl releases his forearm with that same medical-tape pull. Val picks the ring up off the table and works it back onto her finger. Turns it until the band catches the groove it wore into her skin. One motion, practiced. Like resetting a breaker after you've killed the circuit.

At the door he turns back. She's in his booth, the Formica still holding the ring of moisture from his coffee.

"Take care, Val."

"You too, Lyle."

The bell rings behind him. The cold hits the fiberglass still caught in his collar and his neck prickles, every pink fiber standing on end. The dock light has shifted on its mount, tilted by wind or age, and the cone now reaches past the dumpster to the back corner of the lot where the dark was. A Pontiac Grand Am. The driver's door hanging open. No interior light, which means the bulb is dead or the battery gave up. Nobody inside.

He gets in his truck. The engine catches on the first try. Good battery, clean terminals, solid connection. He backs out and pulls onto the two-lane heading east and the diner shrinks in his mirror until the neon goes dark against the sky.

Down the road, he stops for a red light that blinks at this hour but holds him anyway. He reaches into his jacket pocket. The strip of order-pad paper, folded once, warm from his body. Her phone number on the front, written in that same hard hand, the ink pressed deep enough he can feel the grooves with his thumb.

He turns it over.

On the back, a thumbprint. Small. The color of old rust. Already dry.

The light turns green.

Lyle drives.