As you wait on your soup and peck at your pie—you peel off the meringue because you just want the lemon part—you see someone come in, someone on crutches with a walking boot on his leg, someone who disappears behind the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED sign. Because you’re still decent, and you don’t want anyone delaying your soup, you want to yell out that the diner’s almost closed but decide not to. The guy’s looking like he’s as hungry as you are, starving if he walked into a place like this, at this hour, all by himself, with a bad wheel. Unlike you, this man waits like he’s told—decent people would, you know—and when the waitress comes out with your soup and a mountain of crackers, she rolls her eyes just a bit when she sees the man, tells him she’ll be right with him. She places your soup in front of you, tips her tray so that eleven—11!—packets of crackers fall onto the table, twenty-two crackers to hide how old this soup is. You crumple and open every packet then eat the whole mess in four bites. Between the pie and the cracker soup, you should be full, that feeling in your gut gone, but it isn’t, is it? No.
That’s when you look up and see the crutches man in the booth in front of you, facing you, staring at you with deep, dead eyes.
You don’t know why this fucking guy is staring at you, do you, so you look away, toward the hospital across the street, ambulances pulling in and out, then look back and see the guy still staring you down. You want to say What? to the guy, but you don’t, because the guy stands up, sits down across from you. You see a cast on his arm to match the boot on his leg, then you see the sleek, black outfit, ripped—no, check that, cut—off all four limbs.
You recognize him, imagine half his face flat against your windshield.
You, the man says, still staring.
Then you start telling this story, ask him for the first time: How are you?