Chapter 9 - Trembling Hands and Warm Coffee
Inside the diner, nobody moved for what felt like five minutes.
The silence that Vincent Morgan left in his wake was different from the silence that had preceded him. It was the stunned, disbelieving quiet of survivors standing on a beach after a tsunami wave had mysteriously crested and receded without washing them out to sea.
Emily stood behind the counter, her right hand still gripping the glass handle of the coffee pot.
And then, like a fuse finally reaching its powder, her body betrayed her.
A massive, violent tremor rippled through her knees. Her knuckles turned white around the plastic handle, and her breath came out in a ragged, shuddering gasp that she couldn't suppress. Her lungs felt as though they had been vacuum-packed for an hour; she drew in a huge, jagged lungful of air that smelled of chicory, old bleach, and adrenaline.
She set the coffee pot down on the burner before her shaking fingers could drop it.
*Clatter.*
Her legs gave way by three inches, and she had to plant both hands on the edge of the sink behind her to keep from collapsing onto the linoleum. Her heart was beating so hard and fast she could feel it throbbing behind her eyes, a frantic, hammering rhythm that made her ears ring.
"Emily!"
The frantic scrape of shoes on tile announced Dana, who came scrambling around the partition on her hands and knees before pulling herself up by the counter edge. Dana’s face was streaked with tears, her uniform disheveled, her hands shaking so violently she could barely reach out to touch Emily’s arm.
"Emily... oh my god, Emily, are you insane?" Dana’s voice was high-pitched, hysterical, cracking with panic. She grabbed Emily’s sleeve, her fingers digging in. "Do you know who that was? Do you know what he could do to you? Do you have any idea what those people do to folks like us?"
"I know, Dana," Emily whispered, her voice rough, hoarse, stripped down to the bone.
"He could have killed you!" Dana was crying now, the terror finally breaking out in hot, messy sobs. "Right here! In front of the milk machine! They wouldn't even have called the cops! The cops wouldn't have come! Why would you say that to him? Why would you talk to him like that?"
Emily didn't answer immediately.
She turned around slowly and looked at the hundred-dollar bill lying on the counter. It sat there, pristine, clean, arrogant—a crisp little monument to Vincent Morgan’s belief that everything in this world, from a broken ceramic cup to human dignity, carried an invoice that could be settled from his breast pocket.
Emily reached down and took a clean cotton bar rag from the sanitizing bucket under the counter. She wrung it out with trembling hands, the cool, chlorine-scented water soothing her raw palms.
She walked out from behind the counter, stepped around the partition, and knelt down among the shards of white porcelain and the puddle of cold coffee.
"Emily, don't touch that," Dana begged, hovering over her like a frantic bird. "Leave it! Let the busboy get it! We need to lock the door! We need to call somebody!"
"There's nobody to call, Dana," Emily said softly.
She began picking up the jagged pieces of ceramic, her fingers remarkably careful despite the tremor in her wrists. One piece, two pieces, three. She tossed them into the tin dustpan with a hollow *clink-clink-clink*.
She pressed the damp rag against the floral wallpaper, scrubbing at the brown, sticky stain Vincent’s coffee had left behind. Her muscles burned. Her mother’s medical bills were still folded in her pocket, stiff against her hip bone.
May you like
She scrubbed the wall until the faded blue flowers emerged from the grime, her face setting back into that familiar, stony mask of endurance. She was not a hero. She was not a revolutionary. She was just a woman who had twelve hours left on her shift, whose mother needed medicine, and who simply did not have the room in her life to be afraid of Vincent Morgan.
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