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, tik, tik. The cone of light gives the wet asphalt the sheen of cured tobacco. 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 and into the soft skin between his fingers, where the sweat holds it. 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, and the neon sign doubles and smears in the condensation. Tar has run down the fascia from the transformer housing. The transformer has been cooking itself for years, and nobody has serviced the sign.

Inside smells like old coffee and bleach, the institutional kind that comes in gallon jugs with yellow caps. It strips the inside of your nose and sits on the back of your tongue long after you leave.

She stands behind the counter under a row of T12 cool whites and grips the coffeepot handle with both hands. 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, ting-ting. 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. The outlet behind the seat is a two-prong with no ground hole, wiring older than he is. 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 driver's seat, one sleeve trailing into the footwell. The driver opened the door and kept moving.

She brings the coffee without being asked and sets it down on a patch of Formica where the pattern has worn away. A wedding band rides her finger, thin, and she keeps turning it with her thumb like a stripped screw. She reaches across and the scratch is right there on her inner forearm. Three parallel lines, raised and darkening.

"Cat?" he says.

She pulls her arm back and turns the wrist up to study 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, and the rancid oils coat 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 over easy. Whatever comes with them."

She writes on the pad without looking at it. Her pen gouges through to the sheet below. She tears the slip off and clips it to the wheel above the pass-through window without spinning it, then walks through the kitchen door. A mop stands in a bucket near the door. The water is pink.

The flat top hisses, and one spatula scrapes at it. Oil pops at the wire basket in the fryer and spatters against nothing.

She comes back and puts the plate down in front of him. 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 slides into the booth across from him.

His fork stops. Her hands press flat on the table. Fingernails scrubbed pink, the cuticles torn back and raw. She lifts her hands and turns the ring. Then she stops, works it over her knuckle with her thumb in one 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 scatter of toast crumbs. 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 and doesn't say his name back.

"You always work this late?"

"Tonight I do."

"Husband doesn't mind?"

Oil snaps at the wire basket in the fryer. She finds a dried spot on the Formica with her thumbnail and starts scraping. She works the nail in a tight circle until the spot lifts and the laminate comes up clean. Her thumb keeps going after it's gone.

"He doesn't mind anything anymore."

He knows this. It's a backstab connection, the kind that holds 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 across from Kelly at a Denny's while a Grand Slam went cold between them and 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 gallon-jug smell of a mopped floor at a vet's office, as if she scrubbed her hands and forearms with it 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?" he says.

"Tonight it is."

He lets that go.

She's looking at the mop bucket by the kitchen door. When she turns back, her shoulders drop to a position they know. It happens in the time a contactor takes to close.

"I should go," he says, and 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. It's her phone number, and she 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 she got her 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. She turns it until the band catches the groove it wore into her skin.

At the door he turns back. She's in his booth, and the ten is still under his mug.

"Take care, Val."

"You too, Lyle."

The bell rings behind him, ting-ting. The cold hits the fiberglass still caught in his collar and his neck prickles. 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, a red light that ought to be blinking at this hour holds him at an empty crossing. He reaches into his jacket pocket for the strip of order-pad paper. The number on the front is pressed deep enough that he can feel the grooves with his thumb.

He turns it over.

On the back, a small thumbprint the color of old rust, already dry.

The light turns green.

Lyle drives.