The Last Customer
In a diner that's been open since 1962.
The sign said OPEN. Delia had turned it to CLOSED eleven thousand times before. Tonight, she would turn it from OPEN to CLOSED once more—and never again.
The last customer came in at 10:41. He didn't know he was the last customer. He took the third booth, the one with the crack in the vinyl that pinched you if you sat wrong, and he sat wrong, and he shifted, and he ordered coffee and the meatloaf even though the meatloaf had been off since eight.
"No meatloaf," Delia said. "There's a grilled cheese in it for you."
"Then grilled cheese," he said, like it had been his idea.
She made it on the flat top with the burner that ran hot on the left, which she had compensated for so many years that she no longer thought of it as a flaw, only as the way heat worked. Butter, press, count to ninety. The kitchen smelled the way it had smelled when she was seventeen and her aunt owned the place and the jukebox took real quarters.
He ate slowly. He was maybe sixty, maybe a hard fifty. He had a paperback with the cover folded back and he read four pages and looked out the window at the empty lot for longer than he read.
At 11:20 he asked for the check and she said the register was already counted, so it was free, and he looked at her with the specific suspicion of a man who has been offered something for nothing.
"We close tomorrow," she said. "For good. So."
He nodded. He looked around the room like he was being asked to remember it for someone else. Then he took a napkin from the dispenser, wrote something on it, folded it once, and set it under the sugar shaker.
"For whoever's next," he said.
After he left she wiped the counter, ran the last rack, killed the fryer, and stood in the dark for a minute with the neon buzzing behind her. Then she lifted the sugar shaker.
The napkin said: THANKS FOR KEEPING THE COFFEE HOT ALL THESE YEARS. I'LL MISS HAVING SOMEWHERE TO GO.
She put it in her coat pocket. She turned the sign.
“Closing a place is just a lot of small ordinary tasks arranged in a final order.”
Otherwise Ordinary publishes original fiction and invented reporting. Names, places and businesses in this piece are made up.
