Ever since 3 o’clock in the afternoon, she had said she was waiting for someone. She took her seat in her booth in her favorite diner, looking out to the city skyline through her window. She knew in her heart that she was much too early for the likes of her friend, but she simply couldn’t wait. So she ordered a small cup of decaf, took out her book, lowered the volume in her hearing aids, and waited.
It wasn’t every day that she got this excited to see someone. The people at the rec center were too stuffy for her taste and every time she ran into the Trentons, she had a sour taste in her mouth that made her want to punch something with her arms despite her osteoporosis. She could understand why people didn’t like how she cursed whenever someone else yelled “Bingo!” The didn’t mean she had to like the distance between her and everyone else.
Well, at least she had her grandkids.
But this was a special day, she decided after a long pause from her house phone. She would wear her Sunday’s best, a purple pea coat and hat to match. Then she would hail a taxi and wait.
Waiting was something she was best at. “Wait here and I’ll go grab it,” her friend would say back when lipgloss was worth stealing. “Watch and wait, I’ll call you when it’s time,” her friend would say when they would put random rocks in unsuspecting mothers’ strollers in the local park. “Wait for me, please?” her friend asked when she moved away with her husband for his job, leaving her all alone in her home state.
That was twenty-two years ago, she thought, turning a page in her suspense novel. Her coffee burned at her tongue with every sip, steam lifting onto her reading glasses. She remembered her doctor’s words to not drink any more caffeine. She remembered a time when she used to live off of the stuff like it was water.
It was now 5 o’clock and her presence was starting to raise some brows from the staff.
By 6 o’clock, she was on her seventh cup of decaf and fifty pages into her novel.
But it was alright, she thought. She was best at waiting.
Around 6:30, the diner doors opened and a single old woman was greeted by a new staff. She had bouncing gray hair that reminded the former of a bird’s nest, and she was wearing a mismatching purple shirt and green skirt that covered her ankles. Earrings dangled down to her narrow shoulders and a wildflower stuck haphazardly from the side of her head. No matter how much she aged or what kind of body she had, she would always have that goofy, lopsided grin on her face. Despite being apart for twenty-two years, she recognized her immediately.
“My dear, has it been a long time!” they cheered, pulling the other into a gentle hug. The waiter stared at them from afar, glad that the old woman from before could finally order.
The new woman looked her friend up and down, her smile slowly diminishing. “... You got older!” she remarked without shame. “Is that a new wrinkle?”
Her friend huffed. “I look just as old and crabby as you!” she protested, taking her former seat in the booth.
They both laughed. “Yes, I suppose so!”
They ordered their meals and began to chat. They chatted about retirement and dogs and politics and their grandkids and cars and flowers and the weather and their husbands and aliens. One of them paid special attention to the other’s purple lipstick and how it transferred onto her teacup despite her lips being razor thin and not needing much lipstick in the first place. The other twirled her hair as an old habit, dry tongue clicking against her dentures when they had a moment of silence.
“I very much missed this place,” one said, looking out the window. She tapped her cup with her nail. “It has changed quite a lot. I don’t remember that ice cream parlor on the corner.”
The other sipped her coffee. “Yes, when it’s happening before you, you don’t really notice a lot of it until it’s pointed out. Speaking of which…” She set down her mug, fixed her glasses on her nose, and fished for something in her purse. With shaking, arthritis-ridden hands, she extracted something fragile and precious. She held it out for the other to see. “... When you called me yesterday, I went into my attic to dig this out.”
The other woman put on her own glasses and looked at the object. It was a slightly faded polaroid picture dated when they were younger. Two teenage girls stood side-by-side in front of the chain-link fence at the rec center, skinny arms wrapped around each other’s waist. They smiled at the cameraman--one of their other friends at the time--while their sunglasses glinted in the sunlight. Both were probably wasted.
“I remember this picture!” one of the women gasped, carefully taking it with her own shaking hand and adjusting her glasses. “It was us when Binky was still around! Wow, this brings back all sorts of memories.”
The former woman nodded knowingly. “Ah, we looked so great back then.”
“I’ll say! My boobs look great in this picture! Do you think I can use this online to lure in young men?”
“Don’t let your husband know!”
She gave the picture back to its owner and sat back in her own booth. Taking her glasses off of her big nose, she wiped the glass with the fabric of her shirt. She tutted under her breath. “He doesn’t seem to remember anything nowadays,” she sighed. It had been the first moment that evening she had shown a hint of something other than joy. “Our kids have been taking good care of him, but I’m starting to feel a bit lonely.”
Not thinking her words through, the other said, “You can always move back here.”
They shared a look that said more than anything. “... You know I would love nothing more than that,” the former said slowly. She placed a quivering, wrinkled hand on her friend’s from across the table. “It only seems proper that I die where I was born. But I’ve already funneled most of our retirement money into his life support, so I wouldn’t have anything to buy a new home. I shouldn’t even be in this town, only that it was the first place I thought of when my therapist suggested I go to the coast and rest.”
After hearing this, her friend decided to pay the bill. They stepped outside into the chill, hugging their coats closer to their cores. There must be something I can do to give you back some semblance of the old times, she thought to herself while they were trying to hail another taxi. Something to take you away from your husband’s misery, something to bring you back…
“Hey,” she started in a low voice. The wind blowed their thin hair into their faces and they had to pick the strands out of their mouths with freezing fingers. “Would you ever consider dying your hair back to the color it once was?”
Her friend almost laughed. “My grandkids would never recognize me with red hair, are you kidding?”
She shrugged. “It’s not the weirdest look you’d have.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“Nothing…”
They tried to coordinate their outdated flip phones like they saw the kids do, but never really understood how to use the built-in contacts. In the end, they wrote each other’s number down on a piece of paper and kept it in their pockets for later.
“Goodbye, love. Let’s go out for lunch more often while I’m still here.”
I would hardly call this lunch, the other woman thought, looking at her watch which read 8:13. “Yes, I would love to see more of you.” They kissed each other’s cheek, hugged each other tight, and then she walked up her steps to her empty house until she was out of sight.
She received a house call the next morning at 4am.
“You’ll never guess what I just did! I dyed my hair again!”
