Closing Time
The mysteries of the universe unfold inside an old restaurant
The worn vinyl booth groans as I shift my weight. A gap opens up, threatening to pinch a chunk of flesh from my thigh. Still, I lean to my left, trying to glimpse the glass doors. The sunlight catches on the dirty panes, marred by a thousand fingerprints. I wonder if they have ever been cleaned.
The sound of a bell tinkling heralds the arrival of a stranger. He steps inside, and for an instant, I think I recognize him as a face from another lifetime–a life I lived before I arrived in middle age, some wiser and definitely wearier. The shadows clear and I see him for what he is, just a man, one I can’t quite place. Maybe he’s a local of this place I knew once upon a time.
My attention shifts back to my mother. She silently lifts a fork to her lips. Fluffy biscuits with white gravy. I can’t remember the last time I had them, but it was a time before counting calories and cataloging the pounds that come with age. She says nothing, a nuance I’ve just noticed, strange for all the many millions of words we’ve uttered between us since I spoke my first mama. Beyond her head, the worn red chairs and plastic-covered tables seem bathed in a hazy fog. Cigarette smoke, I think and smile. How many packs of smokes did I devour here between shifts?
The sunlight through smudged glass creates a strange strobe effect. The room appears to spin, but I am standing still.
“Welcome,” says the owner, a young man who looks vaguely familiar. I try to place his face, but there’s no way I can know him. I’ve been gone almost 35 years and he looks mid-twenties with long brown hair and a middle-eastern complexion.
“Thanks,” I say, my voice softened with a touch of wonder as I gaze around the old restaurant. For all the ways it has changed, the place looks the same as it did when I was 15. The same vinyl cracks interrupt fake leather booths worn smooth with age. The remnants of secondhand smoke cling in a sticky film to a faux brick veneer and yellowed pine siding where the daily special signs once hung. Time stands still in a memorial to my youth.
My mother still has not spoken, and though there is a murmur of conversation, no one’s lips are moving. I frown, a thought forming in the back of my mind, interrupted as the front door swings open again. An older couple enters and sparks instant recognition. I suddenly understand where we are now. It’s not just an old eatery, we’ve reached the end of the line, the last stop before home.
The older man wears a gray suit, topped with a black fedora with a single duck feather. His partner clutches a handbag that smartly matches her shoes, with clip-on earrings dangling beneath tight curls. He smells of aftershave and a vague whiff of pipe smoke; she of rose perfume and caked powder. My heart quakes to see them again, exactly as they look in the best of my memories.
I feel something warm against my hand and turn to gaze up at the woman who raised me, her hand atop mine.
“It’s different for everyone, dear,” she whispers, nodding her head at the couple. “Some see it as a station–be it train or bus or even airport. Some, as a party thrown by their closest friends.” She waves a hand across the room. “For you, a restaurant where you sit watching to see who comes and goes. They are not how they are, but rather how you see them, how you imagine them most often. Here, there is no age or time.”
I nod in silence. The strange mix of people old and young exist together though their lives never intersected in reality.
“And you?” I query, really noticing the slight differences in her face for the first time.
“I’m here for you, as you need me, for the questions you must have. I am what you chose, the face to guide you. I’ve been by your side as far back as your memories reach.”
My mother. Of course, it is my mother. But this is the mother of my youth, the mother of the girl who worked here as a teenager. She is mid-forties, her face sans the glasses she wore in later years as her eyesight failed. The redness of her cheeks has faded and her skin is plump and unlined.
The bell jingles and another man enters, capturing my gaze. He smiles and waves. I had his dimples once upon a time, something I’d forgotten over the years as my face thinned and changed.
“He is here, dear,” Mother says, “but he won’t see you the same way as you see him. In his version, there are different faces, different views.”
“What does he see?” I wonder aloud, but she doesn’t answer. My father, still grinning, engages the older couple, my beloved grandparents. The three of them, roughly all the same age here in this magical layover, stand laughing and chatting animatedly. I long to be with them, but something holds me back.
“So, which version is real?” I ask quietly, afraid of the truth.
“All of them,” she answers to my surprise.
“How is that possible, Mom? How can you all exist at the same time but in many places?”
She smiles that smile that tells me something profound is coming. “Do you remember what you said to Taylor when he asked you Grandpa after his death?”
I strain to remember. The booster seat in the back of the old Ford Sedan. A cemetery just before the railroad bridge. Tombstones rising up like concrete tree trunks.
“Mama,” the tiny voice had spoken up from the backseat, “can I ask you a question?”
“Of course,” I’d answered him, “What is it, baby?”
“Grandpa died?”
I’d blinked back surprise, watching him in the rearview mirror. My heart had hammered loudly as I anticipated what was coming. “Yes,” I replied tentatively.
“If he went to heaven, why did we bury him in the cemetery?” my three-year-old inquired.
Large round eyes, so like my own, had stared up at me in askance. I had pondered my answer for a long moment before replying. Explaining existentialism to a toddler hadn’t been covered in the mother’s handbook.
“Both,” I had managed to reply. “He can be both.” I had given my words a minute to soak into his forming gray matter before continuing. “In death, Grandpa is everywhere, anywhere. He is every time, every person to everyone who loved him. That’s the cool part. Grandpa’s never really gone, none of us are, as long as someone loves us and we exist in their mind.”
His frown had called for me to continue, offering an example. “Okay, do you remember that time he took you fishing? You just wanted to let the minnows go, but he showed you how to bait them to catch a fish.”
Taylor had nodded, eyes fixed on mine after I pulled over to give him my full attention.
“As long as that memory remains, he is with you. Every minnow you see, he is with you. Every boat ride we take, he’s along for the ride. That is how he exists everywhere now, through us. It doesn’t matter where his body is, that part of him is gone now, in the cemetery. But his essence, who he was inside, can be in heaven and with us, even right now.”
My attention returns to the present, focusing on my mother. She sits patiently with a cup of coffee in her pale hands. I notice the soft brown age spots are gone, along with the gnarled mass of arthritis decorating her knuckles. I always loved her hands, soft and kind.
“I see now,” I mumble. “They exist where and how I need them to appear.”
She bobs her head and smiles. “Yes. Exactly. And we each have the same experience here, where we wait, just different optics.”
The traffic picks up, people filing through the door and sitting in groups. When I was 17, it was my regulars who left big tips for Christmas and my birthday, friends from high school, and a boyfriend who would become a husband. Today, they are faces I recognize from a lifetime of memories. Some, like my father, are obvious. Others leave me with a passing feeling of deja vu, nothing more, nothing less.
“They are the ones whose lives you touched, even briefly or indirectly,” Mom notes, pointing at a young man in a red windbreaker and a ball cap. “He was saved when a young nurse noted an error in his medication while in the hospital. He was healed, grew up to study medicine, and pioneered groundbreaking treatments.”
I tilt my head, studying him. “Jade?” I ask.
My mother nods in affirmation. “Yes, dear. Jade. Though you never met him, your daughter changed his life and those of everyone he touched in return.”
“Like ripples in a pond,” I add, to which she smiles with pride.
“All of them are here for me?” I ask though I knew the answer.
The procession continues. I look over each new patron, remembering things both happy and bittersweet. The boy who took my hand for my first dance. An old boss who taught me how others’ perception of me was as important as how I perceived myself. An aunt and uncle who showed me that family was more than invisible ties when they saved me from an undetected gas leak. My best friends from childhood once again reunited across the years and distance. Each face carries a memory and a lesson that changed me as a person.
A waiter, who closely resembles the sixth-grade teacher who passed along a love of writing to me, clears our plates and sets a paper down between us. The bill is nothing more than a list of dates and dashes between them. The balance is marked “due.”
“What or who are we waiting for, Mom?” I wonder aloud.
My mother turns to face me again, her eyes sad. “Only you know that, my child.” Her dark eyes shift toward the door and she rises. “If all the world’s a crowd, who will come through it to lead you home?”
“You! I mean, isn’t that point, that you are here to take me to this home you keep mentioning?”
She shakes her head, the once graying hair dark again. Her gaze is sharp, clear, and full of love. “I led you here, dear, but like them,” she gestures towards my father, my stepfather, and my grandparents, “I’m just a piece of who you are. He is the one who will lead you home.”
With that, she joins the ghosts of my memory. In a far corner, I see the booth where I told my boyfriend I was first expecting our child. Another one down the row is filled with the young family I once raised, our eyes smiling and the laughter binding us for an eternity that has almost passed. My parents stand together waiting, and my heart is filled with some sort of hopeful expectation.
I stand and walk to the doors, gazing out where First Street should run between the restaurant and the rundown neighborhood. I see them then, my children. She has gray hairs curling at her temples, and her brother has a slight limp in his walk much like the one that plagued the generations before him. They look toward the restaurant but don’t see me waving. I suppose it isn’t yet their time, and this isn’t their place. One day, they too, will wait for a train to come or a party to commence. Today, we must remain apart.
With a sigh, I turn back to survey the room. A lifetime of love and memories floods over me like a tsunami of emotion. In its aftermath, I stand a little straighter, my heart feels a little lighter. Every person turns and gazes at me in unison. Their smiles are bright, their faces friendly and expectant as if I’m about to win some award. Behind me, the small bell on the door tinkles as someone walks inside.
I turn slowly and he takes the final steps to stand before me.
“Sorry, I’m late,” he says with a grin. “But you always said I would be.”
I reach for his hand and he closes it around mine. A sigh escapes and I know he is the one I was waiting on all along. “Better late than never, I suppose.”
“The kids send their love. They said ‘Give Mom a hug for me.’”
My eyes grow moist. I remember now. The end of my life. The hospital with the noisy monitors and shoes squeaking in the halls. The kids, tears in their eyes, as I fought for those final breaths.
“Tell Nana hi,” Taylor had said, gently embracing me one last time.
“Give her a hug for us,” Jade had managed between sobs. “We love you, Mom.”
And his hand, warm in mine. “I’ll see you soon, Gypsy. I love you always. Save the last dance for me, okay?”
The jukebox in the corner powers up. An old familiar song issues from the speakers, a crack and pop as the record plays. His hand pulls me close, the other moving to my lower back. “I believe you owe me a dance.”
As we begin to move, the life we lived together swirls around us. The good times, the bad. The first dance to Otis Redding, the last one in a house built with love but stairs that grew harder to climb with age. The kids growing up and leaving home, the kids coming home to say goodbye. Our love story was a lifetime in the making; not even death can separate us for long. It is him on whom I was waiting, him who makes me finally understand.
The restaurant owner, the young man of Eastern descent who looks strangely like the drawing in my childhood bible, steps to the door, flipping the open sign to closed. The ghosts file out into a bright light, disappearing from view. It is my husband and I, alone again.
“Ready, my love?” he asks, gesturing toward the door. “Looks like closing time.”
I nod, taking one last look around the restaurant. The chairs have been upended and stacked upon the tables, covered in cobwebs. The lights overhead grow dim and the place takes on a waning gray glow. “It’s been one hell of a ride, babe,” I manage. We stand hand-in-hand in the shadows of a lifetime for a short forever, and then the glass door opens. Beyond it, a halo of light awaits, brighter than a thousand suns. The bell tinkles as we step through together, finally on our way home.
