The Waitress...
by Sarah Hunt
(Goshen, IN)
“Ding, clank, ding!” the rattling of the Dollar Store bells hit the cigarette tar stained windows of the tacky restaurant named “Hot Spot Diner” on N. Diamler St., open for business for twenty three years, and this woman named Diane has been working here since its grand opening. She comes in her bleached and fried blonde hair, pulled loosely into a bun that hangs below the collar of her over-sized burgundy one piece dress. Earl the manager believes that this dress gives the diner its character. Her name, Diane, is embroidered on the left pocket above the button flap which is only half way buttoned, because she was in such a hurry this morning to get dressed and pulled the greased stained dress out of the dirty laundry hamper. She throws her beat up leather purse on the table in the break room, the same purse that she has owned and protected with her life for the last six years. She then rolls her socks down to her ankle bone; they are yellow and have a smell that no one can describe, but being by customers too long is never a good idea and she knows this. Her sneakers are worn down; she has only purchased one new pair in her entire career working at the diner; they are stained with numerous sauces that have dripped off the steaming plates of mystery meat she serves her regular customers. Her nails are short from biting them until they bleed at the nail bed, and the pointer and middle fingers are stained from smoking two packs of Marlboro Reds every day. Her clothes reek of smoke and cat piss; she wears too much mascara and it makes her eyelashes have a spider leg appearance. Her lipstick, a bright pink, always manages to smear on her two front teeth, but the regulars don't mind. She's just the waitress who serves them their daily beers after 300 miles of driving. He smile is forced and accompanied by sever and deep wrinkles between her nose and her upper lip from the smoking habit she has been trying to kick for the thirty three years she has been smoking. She forces her smile because her husband of thirty years left her three weeks ago. Since that day her weight has dropped from a slightly unhealthy one hundred and twenty five pounds to a meager eighty seven pounds. Her leathery and overly tanned skin hangs more than it used to. When she looks into the mirror she doesn't see the woman she used to and it makes her cry. She tries She tries to go about her business and work her sixteen hour double shifts, seven days a week, and come home to her seven cats. When she is alone at home she watches old home movies of her husband and her when they were in love and happy. She wonders what went so wrong that she has become a single, divorced, forty-eight-year-old waitress who has no children to show for her thirty years of a faithful and what seemed to be loving marriage, and that too makes her cry...
