Lone River

Some people say home is where you come from. But I think it’s a place you need to find, like it’s scattered and you pick pieces of it up along the way.

                                                                                                     ~Katie Kacvinsky

 



Floyd hung the 'Now Hiring' sign inside the diner window and gave a muffled grunt. "ya can't count on kids these days. Just a bunch of damn snowflakes" he thought to himself. His last decent waitress, Nora, had given birth the night before. She was 17. The small-town beauty whose life just hit the crapper was what Floyd was thinking.

Barton River Diner was a hapless hole-in-the-wall come bagel shop that sat alongside the Barton River, also called 'Lone River' because nobody was too sure where the slow-flowing river actually ended up with all of its cut-offs.
Floyd was 55 but looked a decade or so older. Due primarily to a former life of dirty hard living in a motorcycle gang and now as a prolific smoker of cigarettes. He'd always prided himself that what he lacked in good looks was made up instead with unfailing optimism.

As he was replacing the stale pots of coffee with fresh ones, a tall thin young woman walked in with wide-set eyes and a beautiful head of black hair. Like a hiker in the woods during hunting season--he knew she wasn't local and she didn't belong here. It was then he also noticed she held the 'now hiring' sign in her hand.

"Hello, my name is Rita---I'd like to fill out an application?" she said with a wide movie star- like  grin. She wore ripped jeans, a white t-shirt and a man's button-down oxford on her almost too slender frame. Something like a movie star who had seen a rough patch or two but still had some life left to burn.

Floyd chuckled and gave her the job on the spot.

Even if it didn't work out, Floyd knew he would be amused for a little while anyway.



                                                              ( one year later.....)


Rita turned out to be a writer and divorcee whose real name was Bliss. She was a bit of a wounded bird but you never knew that unless you got close up like Floyd did. Floyd swore his business seemed to double with her around and the place whistled and hummed like a happy tune. Bliss was, in a way, like a daughter he never had even though she wasn't quite as young as a daughter of his might be.

Often after closing, Floyd would sit and talk with her over cups of coffee. She seemed to forgive him for his chain-smoking and slight lack of hygiene in favor of his simple straight forward manner. He was plain-spoken. Wise.
They shared battle scars and the daily fight to stay sober. Floyd always thought she looked too small to carry burdens so big but the more he got to know her--he realized his little sparrow was a stealthy hawk with an acute sense of survival. In turn, Bliss saw Floyd as a man who seemed unlucky. The kind of man that when faced with a fork in the road, unwittingly took the wrong one. What should have made him bitter instead made him mellow and knowing?


Floyd knew she was just 'passing through' but he was thankful every time he spotted her walking with her big tote full of books coming up the road towards the diner.

On the road that ran parallel to the Lone River.