The moment I stepped into the diner, I had to take off my shades. Not because it was dark, but because I felt like a jackass wearing dark glasses inside. I never liked wearing dark glasses in the first place, and always felt that people who wear them indoors look silly.

A quick look around told me that there were no tables — I mean, no free-standing tables. There were only booths and the counter. Three solo men perched on the stools at the counter. The waitress cleared the dishes from a recently vacated spot.

One of the smaller booths in back held a young couple. They were so immersed in each other that they didn't give me a second look. I doubt they even heard the tinkling of the bell as I opened and closed the door. On the other hand, a group of five women, who shared a big booth, stopped talking and openly stared at me. One of them scanned me from the soles of my sneakers to the top of my beanie. Her face registered a conditional initial disapproval. Once their visual inspection of me was complete, they went back to their conversation.

I had wanted to sit at a booth in the back so I could see the whole place and watch the comings and goings, but that would put me next to the lovey-dovey couple. I'm no prude; I just wasn't in the mood for all that mush. So I let go of my surveillance goals for the evening, and slid into one of the window booths.

The menu was typical diner fare, although it boasted that their soups were "homemade."

Apropos of soup, the five women were in mild disagreement over whose turn it was to "bring the soup." While they all agreed about who had gone last time, they argued over who was *supposed* to have gone, who never goes, who went three times in the past week in someone else's place, and so on. At last, a woman named Desiree declared that she would go, but the others would "owe her." This extended the discussion for another five minutes, and in the end Desiree grudgingly agreed that she wasn't doing anyone a favor; she was only doing what she was supposed to do, and "there are no prizes for that."

Their deliberations and negotiations lasted so long, that by the time Desiree exited the diner, carrying a 32-ounce plastic container full of chicken soup, I was being served my dinner. I'd ordered a Greek salad and a side of onion rings. Weird combination, I know, but what the heck. I am eighteen years old, after all.

The food was pretty good. I mean, you could eat it. It wasn't bad. There wasn't anything wrong with it. Sure, no one would come here for the cuisine: it was nothing to write home about, but it was nothing to complain about, either.

While I ate, I studied the menu, and my days as a short-order cook started coming back to me. Funny isn't it? I mean, the way we can entirely forget huge portions of our lives until some trigger brings it all back. I hadn't given a thought to any of it for at least 25 years, but now the memories came flowing and flashing back in bits, pieces, and big chunks. I knew how to make all the dishes on the menu, how to work the kitchen, how to stage the orders, and so on. I could see myself as a young Fred, not much older than I am now, wiping the sweat from my forehead, flipping pancakes, flipping burgers, chopping salads, watching the deep fryer... I laughed as I recalled the difficulty I had learning how to cook eggs over easy. Once the yolk broke, it was over. And for a long time, the yolk always broke. The first time someone ordered "over easy" I wasted a dozen eggs, and finally had to admit defeat. Luckily the customer understood, and settled for sunnyside up.

A few times during my meal, I head the cook growling about something or other. I couldn't make out the words, but each time he started up, the waitress went back to quiet him down. He'd shout and tell her to get out, but the grousing would stop for a bit.

He must do that a lot, I figured, because the customers studiously ignored it.

The waitress, whose name was Clara, grabbed a pot of coffee and made the rounds of the tables. The group of women wanted to know what was up. One threw out the opening, "That one's gonna blow a blood vessel if he keeps on that way! He needs to chill out!"

"Yeah," another put in, "He's been awful grouchy lately. What's up with him?"

"It's the hours," Clara confided. "He's been here from five in the morning to one in the morning every day—"

The women expressed their surprise and indignation, struggled to calculate exactly how much time that amounted to, and wondered how he could get home in time to get any sleep.

"He doesn't go home," Clara replied. "He's been sleeping on some boxes in the storeroom."

Where does he wash? I wondered, but I didn't dare say it aloud.

One of the women asked, "Why doesn't Jeff hire another cook?"

"He says he will — or that he *is* hiring someone," Clara answered. "But I haven't seen anybody come in, and there's no HELP WANTED sign in the window..." She trailed off and everyone in the place turned to look at the front window. Sure enough, there was no sign to be seen.

"Andy says he wasn't being paid enough before he started working all day long. He says he's being taken advantage of, and he's right: he's doing the work of two or three people and getting paid for one..."

The women made noises of disapproval and all of them began speaking all at once. Clara filled their coffee cups as they chatted away.

I looked at Clara's face. She turned and our eyes met for an instant. We had one of those sudden moments... you know, when you glance at someone and in that momentary glance a flood of information is exchanged. I realized that Clara was in the same situation as the cook, working virtually all day long and not getting paid enough.

Clara gestured toward me with her coffee pot and made her escape from the women.

I didn't want to continue with the same subject, so as she filled my cup I asked her something that I honestly wondered: "Are the soups really homemade?"

"Oh, yes!" she said. "They certainly are! If you want to eat healthy here, you'll have the soup. The salads are fine, but all the nutrition is in the soups. Onion rings are fine if you want to get fat, but..." She smiled and winked and gave me a nudge. It was so good-natured that I laughed in response, and as I did, she walked back behind the counter and picked up a partly-completed crossword.

Nothing else happened while I was there. The women nattered on about their jobs, gossiped about people they knew, but they never mentioned the names Benevolence or Lizzie or The Ark. They seemed like perfectly normal people, and I couldn't imagine them as members of a cult. They certainly didn't seem like women who were sexually available in the way that Lane had described.

When I finished my meal and declined Clara's offers of dessert, I paid my bill and returned to the hotel. There didn't seem to be anyplace else of interest in the neighborhood, at least at this hour.

Because the evening was cool and the air was fresh, I turned off the air conditioning and opened the window. It was very quiet outside, and for a while I lay on the bed, listening to soft sounds of Spokane at night.

While I stared at the ceiling, I had an odd sensation. I suppose that everything I'd experienced in the past week and a half finally caught up with me. Have you ever been in a plane, flying over the ocean, and suddenly realized I'm in a little metal box flying through the air? It was a moment like that, when you feel small, insignificant, alone... a helpless speck on the cosmic landscape. Here I was, in such an unlikely situation that just had to be impossible... impossible that any of this could even exist, and for that reason, extremely likely to break apart... to explode cataclysmically. It was as though I saw myself from above, far above, so high and distant that I was barely a black dot on an infinitesimally tiny white bed. The Universe is not thinking about me, I told myself. A sinkhole could swallow me up; a landslide, an avalanche, an earthquake could bury me alive and Nature would never know that I was under all that mess.

I don't know how long I lay there, paralyzed with fear, until at last the coffee worked its way through my system and I had to go the bathroom. I sat on the toilet, nearly shaking from adrenaline and fear. After I washed my hands and face, I stared at myself in the mirror. "Myself," ha! I looked at Dexie's face. I looked into Dexie's eyes, deep into her eyes, but all I saw was eyes. I didn't see a window to someone inside me. I didn't see my soul, or Dexie's soul, or anyone else's soul for that matter.

What if I'd imagined everything? I mean, really. The whole thing was crazy from beginning to end.

Let's recap: some aliens chased my car, and Dexie, frightened, crashed into a tree. She died, and I was so banged up that they put my soul or whatever is me into her body. Here I was, now, eighteen years old, female, with curly red hair, spying on a cult in Spokane.

Did any of that make sense?

What if I was hallucinating? What if all of this was happening in my imagination? What if I was really Fred, and not Dexie at all? That could happen, and it was a lot more likely than an alien intervention. What if I was still Fred, old Fred, and when I looked in the mirror I really saw Fred, but because of a psychotic break I believed I saw Dexie?

Okay... if that were so, then everyone else would see me as an old man who was acting like a young girl.

Then I thought about Arrow... about the sex we'd had. I suppose I could have hallucinated that as well.

And the ring? I could have bought that myself and imagined he'd given it to me.

Then again, the ring might not be real after all. It could just be part of my hallucination.

So could the hotel room, the diner... all of it. Not real.

Right now, in fact, I could be lying in a bed in a psych ward somewhere, sedated out of my head and living this implausible dream.

How could I know?

I thought about it. I tried to think of a way to verify. I could call someone: I could call Kristy or Arrow. I could even ask Clara, or the clerk at the front desk how I looked to them.

But then... if I was nuts, I would hear them say what I wanted to hear, not what they actually, truly said.

I took a towel from the rack, wrapped it around me, and sat down on the bathroom floor.

I didn't sit there long. I began to notice that the room wasn't cleaned all that well. There was dirt and hair in every corner, and behind the toilet was all sorts of debris.

If I was crazy, I wasn't crazy enough to imagine all that dust, hair, and disgusting junk away, so I got up, changed into my pajamas, and gave my clothes a good shaking out. Then I crawled into bed and turned on the TV.

There wasn't much on, so I settled for Dude, Where's My Car? which somehow seemed quite appropriate, given my situation. Except that in the movie the aliens returned and fixed everything. In real life, of course, the aliens don't come back. You have to fix it all yourself.
 

I don't know what time I finally became exhausted enough to fall asleep, but I know what time I woke up: 5:05 AM. There was some kind of noise filtering from the real world into my dream. Groggy and disoriented, I turned to the obvious source: the old-style radio/alarm clock. I've been tripped up in this way many times when I used to travel for work: you have to remember to make sure the alarm is OFF before you go to bed, and I hadn't done that.

I tapped the top, trying to find the SNOOZE button. The angry red numbers stared at me: 5:05 AM. That how's I knew what time it was.

But what on earth was the radio playing? It sounded like people arguing.

Slowly the gears in my brain got moving, and slowly I surfaced into something resembling waking consciousness. As I came to myself, I realized that it wasn't the radio at all: there were two real, live people arguing in the street.

Groaning softly, I did a slow roll out of the bed. "Oh, jeez, I feel like an old man," I complained to myself, and rested my head against the cool wall as I gazed at the street below. I wasn't surprised by what I saw.

The Happy Place cook, Andy, had finally had enough. He hadn't blown a blood vessel, but he'd blown his top. He was shouting a list of grievances at Clara, the Happy Place waitress. She was trying — just as she had tried last night — to calm him down. "At least stop yelling," she told him, "You don't need to yell. I can hear you."

When she said that, it was like she'd thrown gasoline on a fire. Andy erupted into paroxysms of fury. He did stop yelling, though. Now, instead, he was full-on screaming.

My adrenals kicked in like a fire alarm. Before I even knew what I was doing, I pulled on my jeans and shirt, and shoved my feet into sneakers. I had to get down there. Andy had lost control, and I was afraid he was going to hit her, hurt her, and I couldn't let that happen.

Even if he didn't lay a hand on her, I couldn't let her stand there alone and take his abuse.

What a hero, huh? Maybe as Fred I could of stood a chance of stopping him. At least I'd be good at standing in the way.

But now... what could I do? Shout Hey, you! Stop that! and shake my finger at him? All I could really hope was that the presence of another person, an outsider, might bring him back to himself. Maybe if he saw a willing witness, it would keep him from doing anything seriously bad.

And sure, yeah, I'd jump on his back and pound him with my little fists, if it came to that. Whatever I could do, I would do.

As it turned out, though, there was no need for heroics. By the time I burst out of the hotel's front door, Andy was nowhere to be seen. Clara stood there, alone.

"Where did he go?" I asked.

"Gone," she said. Then, looking at my face, she said, "Oh, you're the girl from last night. Greek salad and onion rings."

"Yeah, that's me."

"Well," she said after a pause, "Looks like there won't be any diner today. Cook's gone."

"I figured." Then, I had to ask her: "What are you doing here?"

"Hmmph," she said, with a weary chuckle. "Jeff, the owner, is my boyfriend." Then, "Was my boyfriend. He never was much of a boyfriend, and he's not much of a manager, either."

"Let me guess," I said. "He leaves it all up to you."

"Right."

"He takes the profit, and you and Andy do all the work."

"Right."

"He was never going to hire another cook."

She shook her head No.

"Or another waitress."

She sighed. "He always has a reason, an explanation." She turned and looked through the window, inside. "Andy was right all along. Now he's had enough. I've had enough, too."

I stood there with her in silence, watching her look into the diner. I knew what she felt. I'd been there. I've been the burnt-out employee, although there was no way I could tell her that. I knew what she was looking at. She was looking through the diner's window into its soul. She was looking at her memories, the people, the feeling of being at a focal point of people's need: their need for food, their need for a place to be, their need for coffee and a smile.

"You know what I'm going to do?" she said. "I'm going to open this place up and make some coffee. Then I'm going to round up all the pies and muffins and breads and cakes and whatnot, and today, just today, it's all free." She laughed. "Then once it's gone, I'm going to lock the door and throw the key down that sewer grate over there and then..." here she paused and, smiling, savored an idea... "THEN I'm going to decide whether to tell Jeff or just move on and let him find out by himself."

I laughed. We smiled at each other for a moment, and then she sniffed. Oh, no — I knew that kind of warning sniff. I knew what was coming. She gave another, harder sniff, and then she gulped. Her face twisted up and big tears came rolling down her cheeks. She grabbed me and hugged me and held me.

How do I always end up here? I asked myself. I gave her a squeeze, and then just held her, keeping one arm around her and the other hand flat on her back. I didn't say anything (because talking was where I always went wrong). I just waited for her to stop sobbing. I could feel my shoulder getting soggy.

When she was through, she untangled herself from me, and embarrassed, she apologized.

"No need," I said. "It's fine."

"You know what?" she asked as she wiped her nose on a tiny scrappy ball of tissue.

"What?"

"I can't do that. I can't give it all away. That would be stealing."

"Okay," I said.

"I guess I should just go home, take a shower and have a nap, and then go talk to Jeff."

"That sounds like a good idea," I agreed.

Then she turned and looked again into the dark diner and sighed. "But then, I'd be letting everybody else down. All the people who really matter. They'll come down here and... and then... and then what will they do?"

I shrugged. "They'll find someplace else to go," I told her.

"No," she said, shaking her head. "There is no place else. At least, not in this neighborhood." And she sighed again, a deep, long sigh.

In my head I could hear Al Pacino's voice: Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in!

Still, I had to say it. There was no way that I couldn't step up. "Clara," I began... then my voice caught and I had to clear my throat. "Uh, Clara... I have an idea. Or an offer. Anyway, here it is..."