The Secret Friday Gift at the Diner

I started arriving earlier. Five thirty, then five, then finally I was unlocking the diner in full dark, sitting alone at the counter with the lights off, watching the street through the front window like a woman waiting on a verdict. Nothing. Three Fridays running, nothing, and then on the fourth Friday I gave up at five forty five, went to start the coffee, and there it was under the sugar caddy, like it had been there the whole time laughing at me.

Sylvie’s brother in law had an old trail camera he used for deer season, the kind hunters strap to a tree to catch a buck moving at first light, and one Thursday night we clipped it to the shelf above the register facing the front door and went home feeling clever. What we got the next morning was forty three pictures of moths and one blurry shot of my own arm reaching in to open at six. Whoever this was, they were not coming through the front, and they were not the least bit interested in getting caught by anything so simple as a camera pointed at the obvious place.

That was when I understood I was watching the wrong door.

The Rail Stop still has the old delivery entrance around back, off the alley, left over from when the produce truck used to back in twice a week. We rarely use it anymore except to take out the trash, and the lock on it has been loose for years, the kind of loose where a firm shoulder and a little patience gets you through without a key at all. I told Sylvie, and she said what I had already started to suspect myself, that whoever this was had been coming and going through the back long before I ever thought to look for him there.

So on a Thursday night in September, eleven months into the mystery, Sylvie and I sat in my truck across the alley with the engine off and two cups of gas station coffee going cold in the cupholders, and we waited.