This is the 69th installment of a 100-day challenge to write a new vignette every morning.
Tom got a small piece of pie. Keeping an eye on the door, he extracted each cherry and placed them, one by one, in a Ziploc bag. The painstaking effort yielded fourteen cherries, and he stashed them in a canvas satchel at his side. He left the tattered crust on his plate and took a sip of coffee.
The waitress paused whenever she passed his barstool, but he didn’t acknowledge her, so she moved on to the only other customer in the diner: a young woman in a booth on the other side of the room. She’d retreated so deeply into her maroon hoodie that Tom couldn’t really see her face, but he knew she was the one he was looking for. He recognized himself in the drumming of her fingertips and the glancing at the door. The waitress had refilled the young woman’s coffee five times.
Every few minutes, the young woman glanced down at something partially concealed by her hoodie pocket. Tom dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter beside his plate, stood, and sidled up to the young woman’s table. As he approached, she shrunk back and shoved both of her hands in the pocket of her hoodie.
“That won’t be invented for another few decades,” Tom said, gesturing to the cellphone in her pocket. “So it’s not going to work here. Now.” He slid into the booth across from her and took a sip of her coffee.
Wincing, he inhaled through gritted teeth. “Goddamn. They really do make terrible coffee.”
“I don’t have any money,” she told him.
“I’m not here for your money. I’m here to help you get home.”
Miles Away 