At the age of sixteen, the year before the war began, he got a job working in an owl diner from six to midnight. This was the diner owned by Roscoe Dooley, a man of unsuspected sensitivity and compassion. He felt that he had lost his way in life, and this had created in him a kind of gentle resignation instead of the bitterness that often comes to people who feel that way. He didn’t have much of anything to do in the evenings after Emerson relieved him in the diner, and so he often stayed on until nine or ten o’clock, sitting in a canvas lawn chair behind the counter and reading the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson. Sometimes, when there were no customers on the little stools on the other side, he read some of the poetry aloud to Emerson. Emerson thought the poetry was very beautiful, especially the way Roscoe read it, but he couldn’t understand why anyone should feel as bad about everything as this Robinson did...
Emerson liked his job in the diner, and he began to think about having a diner of his own. He was very good with food, and after a while Roscoe began to let him make a few changes in a menu that hadn’t changed in ten years, except that the chili was omitted when the weather got hot. He began to save a little money, though not much, and he had it all planned how he would buy an old coach from the railroad and fix it up with booths and have it moved onto a spot of ground where the trade would be good. But all this was spoiled by the war. While he was in the army, his mother died and he came home briefly on leave to see her buried beside the father he could hardly remember, and there was no time, as there never was in those days, for more than a gesture of mourning, the slightest concession to grief. To tell tie truth, his mother had been a tired, morose woman for many years, and he had admired her courage and respected her position, but had never loved her greatly.
Two years later, on the island of Leyte, he was hit in the right leg by a machinegun bullet while he was going up the slope of a ridge one wet, gray dawn. The bone was broken, and while he lay patiently in the rain until a medic could get to him, the mortar platoon that was supporting the attack from the rear dropped half a dozen short rounds on their own men, which was something that happened more often than is generally admitted, and he picked up a couple pieces of shrapnel in addition to the bullet, one of which broke the same leg in another place. He was left with a bad limp, but in compensation for this he was released early from the army and received a small pension.
Back in Corinth, he sold the house his mother had left and got much more for it than he had expected because of the inflated value of real estate. With the money from the house to invest and the pension to help carry him through the hard time of getting started, he was able to do a little better than an old railway coach. He rented a narrow building next door to a bowling alley and opened a diner. He served only short-orders, but the food was good, and maybe he got some breaks besides, but for whatever reasons there were, he did well and made some money. And all the time he kept thinking about the kind of place he really wanted to own, a small restaurant and bar of distinction where good people came for good food and good drinks. A place of integrity, he called it in his mind.
It was not long before there was more work than he could do by himself in the diner next door to the bowling alley. He had a boy who washed dishes, but he needed someone to help him with the short-orders behind the counter and to serve the four booths along the opposite wall, and he decided that it would be good for business to have a pretty girl. He put an ad in The Reporter, and half a dozen girls answered it, but the last two were wasting their time, because the fourth was Edwina, and she was just what he wanted. As a waitress, of course. That was what he kept telling himself, anyhow, and he honestly tried to convince himself that it was true. But after a while, in spite of his efforts, he had to admit that he also wanted her another way, and a little while after that he had her. It happened in the diner one night after the dishwasher was gone and the door was locked, and it was a thoroughly co-operative and satisfactory performance.
After it was over, he drew two cups of coffee and handed her one. He was pleasantly surprised to see that she looked as good to him now as she had before, which was something that had never been true with anyone else at any other time. She took the cup of coffee and set it down and combed fingers through dark hair that was thick and almost straight, curling only a little at the ends. She wore it pretty long then, almost to the shoulders, which was the fashion. Her white uniform, re-donned, fitted her slender body snugly.
“I’ll get the cream out of the refrigerator,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot you use cream.”
She got the cream and put some in her coffee. She used a lot of it. The color of the coffee after the cream was in it, he noticed, was almost exactly the same color as her skin.
“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.
“Done what?”
“You know. What I just got through doing.”
“It wasn’t you. It was us.”
“It was my fault, though. I started it.”
“Did you? That’s what men always think.”
“I’ve been trying not to do it. The trouble is, you’re so damn pretty.”
“Thank you. Have you really wanted to before?”
“Lots of times.”
“Why haven’t you, then?”
“Because you’re a good girl. Does that sound corny? Because I can’t get married or anything for quite a while yet.”
“Don’t be silly. I don’t expect you to marry me.”
“I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”
“Do you think a fellow ought to marry the first girl he makes love to?”
“Well, not necessarily. This isn’t my first time. I’ll admit that.”
“If a fellow married the first girl, I’d already be married. Would you like that?”
“No, I wouldn’t. I never thought about it like that. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even think about its having happened to you before.”
“Well, you’re pretty green for a fellow who talks so big, I must say. Couldn’t you tell?”
“I guess I could have told if I’d thought about it.”
“All right. Now you can quit thinking about it.”
“I don’t think I want to quit. You’re the prettiest gill I’ve ever seen.”
“Being pretty isn’t enough. A girl has to be smart to keep a man interested.”
“You’re smart enough.”
“No, I’m not. I’m not smart at all. I’m ignorant. I didn’t even finish high school.”
“Finishing high school doesn’t make you smart. Lots of dumb kids finish high school.”
“Just the same, anyone ought to finish high school, at least. I’ll bet you finished.”
“Well, I just did. I never went to college or anything. I went into the army instead.”
“You could have gone after you got out. On the GI Bill.”
“I didn’t want to go.”
“Don’t you ever wish you had?”
“No. There’s something else I want to do.”
“What?”
“I want to have a restaurant and bar downtown. A nice place people will come to and talk about and come back to.”
“That would be fun. Someday you’ll have a place like that, too. Sooner than you think, maybe. May I come and work there?”
“Probably you won’t even want to. Probably you’ll be married to a millionaire by that time.”
He drank some coffee. It had got cold, so he went over and poured it down the drain beneath the water tap and drew some hot from the urn.
“More coffee?” he said.