1
JOY
He held the dart like he didn’t want to wake it up.
I’d been inside The Soda Jerk for maybe ten seconds and hadn’t made it past the doormat. Yet there he was at the back wall with his arm coming up slowly, three fingers pinched light around the dart, a man in a dark T-shirt and faded jeans and a posture that took up all the air in the back corner of the diner.
I did not move.
I’d come in for a burger. I spent the last four hours setting up my campsite next to Laurel Creek, and the last forty minutes I’d been telling myself I was hungry enough to drive into town instead of cooking on my camp stove. The neonOPENsign out front had flickered twice while I sat in my car deciding.
The exterior looked like a roadside dive bar that hadn’t been painted since the seventies. The interior looked like someone had built a 1950s diner inside a barn. Black and white checkered floor. Red vinyl booths along one wall. A long counter with hot pink barstools, the counter itself rising on a silver corrugated base. A row of dart boards mounted on the back wall, and a knot of people standing in front of them, drinks in hand, watching.
Watchinghim.
I watched him too.
He brought the dart up to eye level. He paused. He released. He didn’t watch it land. He just lowered his arm and stepped back from the line, and someone behind him whooped, and someone else clapped one time.
The man in the dark T-shirt didn’t react. He plucked another dart from his other hand and flipped it once.
I had no idea what I was looking at. I didn’t know if he’d hit well or badly. I didn’t know what the round was, what the score was, what the rules were. I’d never thrown a dart in my life. I just knew that the entire back wall of the diner was paying attention to him, and he was paying attention to a piece of cork twelve feet away. Nothing else in the room existed for him.
My phone was in my hand.
I was holding it like I’d been about to lift it. I hadn’t lifted it. I’d been standing just inside the door of a diner I’d never set foot in, looking at a man I had never seen, and my hand had stayed at my side.
I looked down at the phone. I turned it face-down against my thigh and walked to the counter.
A man in a clean white apron looked up and said, “Evening. Sit anywhere.”
I picked the stool nearest the wall and the farthest from the dart boards. Facing away. I set my phone face-down, picked up the laminated menu propped against the napkin holder, and didn’t read a single word on it because I could still hear the soft thud of darts hitting cork behind me.
“Can I get you something?”
The man behind the counter was watching me with patient eyes. Late thirties, short hair cut military-tight. The name stitched above the apron pocket readWest.
“Pepper jack cheeseburger,” I said. “And whatever flavored seltzer you have.”
“Got grapefruit and got blackberry.”
“Blackberry.”
“Coming up.”
He turned to the kitchen window, called the order back, and pulled a can out of the cooler under the counter. He popped the tab and set it in front of me on a paper napkin. Quick, easy, no fuss. I liked him already.
I sat holding the can. I didn’t turn around.
I could feel the dart corner behind me. Voices low, mostly men, the occasional laugh. Thethud, thud, thud. Three darts, a pause, the soft sound of someone walking up to the board and pulling them out, footsteps back to the line.
Another thud.
I made it about ninety seconds before I looked.
I told myself I was checking on my burger. I told myself I was reading the room. I told myself a lot of things in a very short period of time.
What I actually did was turn my head and look over my left shoulder at the back wall. The man in the dark T-shirt was staring at me.
