The Cold Floor

The Denny's off Route 45 in Youngstown, Ohio, was the kind of place where the coffee was always slightly too cold and the menu board had a sticky spot over the word breakfast that nobody had ever bothered to clean. Lisa Kowalski sat in booth three at 10:15 on a Saturday, staring at the sticky spot and thinking about how her only good shoes were pressing a blister into her heel that she knew would ache for the next three days and then probably come back anyway.

Her mother's voice from the night before echoed in her head, slurred and warm with wine: I set you up with someone. Just go. You can't keep living like this.

Lisa had not dated since high school. Her last date had been senior prom, and that was not really a date so much as a shared taxi ride home after everyone had gone home and the DJ had turned off the music and she had sat in the back of a Ford Fusion with a boy whose name she could not remember and smelled like Old Spice and regret.

She put on her best shoes. She took the bus to Route 45. She sat in booth three at the Denny's and ordered black coffee and waited for someone her mother had described as a nice young man to walk through the door.

He walked in at 10:20. Five minutes late. Wearing a flannel shirt that had seen better days and carrying the same expression she saw in the mirror every morning: the expression of someone who has been awake for eight hours and is already tired of being awake.

They looked at each other. They both knew what this was. They also both knew, with the certainty of people who have run out of options, that this was the best thing either of them could do on a Saturday morning in Youngstown.

Ray said: sitting down.

Lisa said:

They ordered coffee. Ray said he knew this was weird. Lisa said she knew. They agreed to be honest: they were both here because someone told them they should be, and neither of them could afford anything else.

Ray drove a ride-share app. He had been a structural engineer until the firm laid him off eighteen months ago. He had a degree from Carnegie Mellon and a USB drive full of unanswered job rejection emails that he could not bring himself to delete. He lived in a basement apartment that flooded every time it rained more than an inch. He had a mother who called him on Sundays and asked when he was going to get back to work and a father who had worked at the steel mill until it closed in 1985 and never recovered and died in 2003 with a pension that covered exactly fourteen months of his retirement.

Lisa worked at a call center making eleven dollars and fifty cents an hour. Her mother had been alcoholic since Lisa was fourteen. Lisa had changed apartments six times in three years. She drew in a sketchbook she kept hidden in a drawer under socks that didn't match -- landscapes of places that no longer existed, because the only places she knew had been torn down and turned into empty lots with coming soon signs that had been coming for five years.

They talked about their jobs. Ray explained ride-share economics -- how the app took twenty percent, how the gas prices made it harder, how some passengers were generous and some were not and you never knew which until they got in the car. Lisa described call center management techniques that made no sense to anyone except call center management -- the way they tracked your bathroom breaks, the way they called your average handling time a performance metric like you were a machine instead of a person who needed to use the bathroom.

They laughed. It was not romantic. It was the laugh of two people who recognized the same joke: life is not what anyone promised them.

Ray drove Lisa home. He dropped her off at her apartment building, which had three working doors out of twelve. She said: thanks. He said: no problem. They did not exchange numbers.

The second time they met, it was not planned. Lisa's mother had been telling everyone at the grocery store about the nice young man she set up with Lisa. Ray's ride-share app had been sending him to Lisa's neighborhood repeatedly because she had accidentally left her address pinned in the app from a ride she had taken three weeks ago.

They ran into each other outside the Kroger on a Tuesday morning. Ray was buying instant coffee. Lisa was buying the cheapest cheese they had. They looked at each other. Ray said: again. Lisa said: again.

They met at the Denny's the next Thursday. Then the Thursday after that. Then Tuesday and Thursday became a routine: booth three, Denny's, ten in the morning. Sometimes they ordered food. Sometimes they just ordered coffee and sat and watched the parking lot.

They did not fall in love. They fell into a pattern. Ray told Lisa about his father, who worked at the steel mill until it closed and never recovered. Lisa told Ray about her mother, who apologized once and then forgot she did. They shared a pancake sometimes. Sometimes they didn't.

One Thursday, Ray said: my dad used to bring me to this Denny's when I was a kid. Before the mill closed. He'd say: if we can eat here, we're doing okay. Even if it's just coffee and toast.

Lisa nodded. My mom used to say the same thing. Except she meant McDonald's.

Ray smiled. It was a small smile. The kind of smile that does not change your life but makes the life you have slightly less heavy.

Eight months passed. The Denny's coffee was still slightly too cold. The sticky spot on the menu board was still there. Booth three still smelled like pancakes and floor cleaner and the particular brand of resignation that comes from sitting in a diner with someone who is not your boyfriend and not your friend and not your enemy but something in between.

Then Lisa got a promotion. Eleven dollars and seventy-five cents an hour. It was not much. It was seventy-five cents more than she had been making, and it felt like nothing and like everything and like the smallest possible step toward something she could not yet see.

Ray got a call on a Thursday. A small engineering firm in Pittsburgh needed someone for a contract position. Three months. Maybe longer. He was going.

The last Tuesday, they sat in booth three and did not order anything. The coffee was cold. The sticky spot was there. The parking lot had two cars and a bird.

Ray said: this was not nothing.

Lisa said: yeah. It wasn't nothing.

They did not hug. They did not exchange numbers for the third time. Lisa watched Ray's car pull away from the Denny's parking lot -- a gray sedan with a dent in the passenger door that he never fixed and a license plate from Pennsylvania that had expired six months ago.

She went back to her apartment. She took out her sketchbook. She opened it to a blank page. She drew the Denny's parking lot -- the cracked asphalt, the flickering neon sign, the empty booth three visible through the window.

It was the first thing she had drawn that did not look like something that used to exist. It looked like something that was happening.

Author Note & Copyright: