You wouldn’t call Mary the easiest child in the world to raise, either. She always was a crazy, mixed-up kid full of get-rich-quick ideas and let’s pretend. She’s a little heart-breaker too... likes to get the boys “croony and swoony” (that’s her damfool lingo, not mine I)... then she gives ’em the air. Last summer I played Cupid... tried to get her interested in Stan Clark, the Greyhound bus driver. Stan has the Detroit-New York run and makes pretty fair money. They had a few dates. Most likely held hands in the movies. But Stan was poor second to her ambition. Mary Ellen called him a “square bear” and an old “stale and steady.”
“Say, Pop, how’s about that cup of joe?”
Silly darned thing. I’d held the cup under the urn spout and forgot to turn the handle! Daydreaming! Like Mary Ellen. Or maybe I’m just getting old. No one called me Pop ten years ago...
I snapped the handle so hard I whacked my knuckles against the hot urn and burned them. I cussed, under my breath, then hustled the cup over to “Snake Eyes.” I gave him the royal treatment to spite myself... napkin and water with only a cup of coffee. But that didn’t impress him, and he didn’t order anything else. He tossed a dime on the counter and I rang it up. Then I picked up the emery block and started scraping the grill. Dirty looking grill, chipped, rusty legs. But after twelve years there’s nothing you can do. Grills wear out like people. Like me.
“Cute little trick, old timer. She related to you or just a professional hash jockey?”
Funny voice. Not low and straight out like Stan Clark’s, but side-of-the-mouth with a tenor rasp. A New York accent. He tossed the question at me the way you throw a nickel to a bum. Casual and disinterested. Those funny eyes were glued on Mary Ellen who was standing at the end of the counter pushing the set-ups crooked and straightening them again. Pulling the busy act and being so godawful good about it.
“Relative,” I said. That’s all. I wasn’t going to tell him anything. None of his business anyway.
“Cute as a butterfly’s ear!” he said with a dirty purr. I went on scraping the grill, saying nothing. A fresh guy. That’s what he was. A fresh guy!
“What’s her name, Pop?”
I put more muscle on the emery and ignored him, but Mary answered for me. “Miss Mary Ellen McCrae.”
I knew what she looked like then without even looking at her. Sticky sweet with a dab of mischief in that halfway smile of hers. Looking wide-eyed and ready for anything. I’d have to speak to Mary Ellen again. This was no rock-and-roll school kid or the village Casanova.
His age I reckoned between thirty-five and forty. His face was bone-thin, with sharp cheek-bones, Chinese-slanty eyes, and black hair combed straight back and greased flat to his head. “The interesting and mysterious type,” Mary Ellen said later. He was wearing an expensive looking single breasted suit, banker’s grey, soft and rich looking, a silk black-and-white candy-striped tie, soft, button-down collar, and a pair of those fancy Italian shoes.
He’d thrown his light tweed topcoat over the next stool with a dark fedora on top. His heavy purplish ring... probably amethyst... caught the late sun and flung colored lights across the counter when he stirred his coffee.
I glanced out at the driveway, but there was no car there. That surprised me. This was no local guy. I wondered where he came from... and how he got here. I’d pegged him as the foreign car type. The kind of guy who plays the bigtown sophisticate with wide-eyed college kids.
“Little Miss Mary Ellen,” he repeated. “Nice. Rolls off the tongue like a poem.” Then he noticed the cheap vinyl peeling off the seats, the busted floor tiles, and the scarred, old wooden counter. “What’s a doll like you doing in a dump like this?” he said.
“I own a piece of the place,” Mary flipped back. “What’s your reason for being here, mister?” The guy giggled.
I gripped the emery block so hard my knuckles faded white. “What’s your excuse?” Excuse! People had to have an excuse for being in my place. The diner I’d put together with the sweat and the ache of ten lousy years...
But my trolley car diner wasn’t always like this. Before that big Detroit operator, Jim Parrish, built that big carny-looking restaurant of his across the road, my “Trolley Lunch” did O.K, I used to get most of the truck trade, and if you know the Dixie Highway between Detroit and Toledo, you know what the truck traffic is. My little place did all right. My brother Joe handled the short orders, and Kitty... Mary Ellen’s ma... took care of the counter. When I wasn’t managing the place and handling the ordering, I was drumming up business in Detroit and Toledo. I used to hit the big trucking outfits with advertising and promotion stuff, matches and blotters, and calendars. Sometimes free coffee and homemade cookies. Once inside, I’d talk my head off, whipping up word pictures about homemade soup, big bull sandwiches, and good coffee in big mugs with free warm-ups. Business was booming.
After Joe and Kitty died in that wreck, I tried to go it alone. But a jinx was on the place. Business fell off. Customers started griping about the food and the service. I hired a cook, but he was a drunk and I had to get rid of him. I hired a counter man. He was fast and glib, but he couldn’t keep his fingers out of the till.
All hell broke loose. I fell and broke my hip and was laid up for six weeks. Mary Ellen had a bad siege of pneumonia. A customer swallowed a glass chip in the mashed potatoes and sued me for five thousand dollars. I didn’t want to do it... but I had to close the place for a while. Then, Jim Parrish built that big, flashy restaurant across from mine and grabbed off my regular trade. He landed the Greyhound stop franchise, too.
The location is terrific for a food stop, so I don’t blame Parrish a bit. The next restaurant north is up in Flat Rock. But the traffic detours the town. Then there’s a chicken shack south of here near Monroe. I’m midway. Me and Parrish.
His place is really a driver’s dream. And he called it just that: “Driver’s Dream”... a big place with U-shaped formica counters and cute waitresses in bright yellow uniforms. Plus the flaming jukeboxes, the fluorescent lights, and the slot machines. I can’t compete with anything like that. But I tried to for a while. That was my mistake. I put up a half dozen shacks in the rear and a flashing neon sign in front to pull the motel trade. But no dice! It was like throwing money in the furnace.
Last year I decided to give it up... unload the “Trolley Lunch” on the first sucker I met with a bank account and a yen to go into business for himself. But then I decided to wait until Mary Ellen got married and had a couple little ones. That would knock those screwball stage ideas out of her head! Stan Clark looked like good husband-material to me. But Mary Ellen dangled him like a puppet. Mary Ellen had dollar signs and glory dust in her eyes... and definite ideas about “latching on to a gravy boat.” And this slicker with the snaky eyes looked like Mr. Gravy himself. He sat there grinning at Mary Ellen with a big mouth full of tiny teeth.
“So you own the place?” he was saying in that tenor coo of his. “High finance, eh, gorgeous?”
Mary leaned across the counter confidentially with that sick siren look on her pan. “Not too high, mister,” she whispered in that artificial stage voice. “Just in range, honey. Just in range!”
She dazzled him with a come-hither look and walked with her little rolling strut into her back room. The door to the ladies’ room was open, and Mary was smearing on lipstick and checking the cracked cabinet mirror for the results. She pivoted fast and almost collided with me in the doorway.
“Listen to me, Mary Ellen. I want you to cut it out...”
“What are you talking about, Unk?” she said. Injured innocence!
“You know what I mean. Cut it out. I don’t like his looks!”