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THE NUMBER ON THE SIDE of the building was one-thirteen Main Street, and the building was a little country diner called Terry’s Diner. Nothing special about it.
The address was one-thirteen, but the guy sitting in the booth by the window wondered why it was one-thirteen. The number made no sense because there wasn’t a one-twelve or any other addresses on the street. Main Street in Tower Junction, Wyoming was really like the only street. The other streets snaked off of it like little streams feeding off one slightly larger river.
The guy dressed far too nice to be a local. He wore cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, and a black suit. His clothes looked expensive because they were expensive. They had probably been bought in Texas or New Mexico. That was what Aubree thought.
Aubree was the youngest waitress who worked at the diner. She had just turned eighteen, less than two weeks ago. Today was her first shift on the floor by herself, but the whole waitress thing wasn’t that hard. You greeted people. Took their orders. Wrote them down on a ticket for the cook. He made the orders and stabbed the ticket on a spindle when it was ready. Then you brought it out to the guest. Not a big deal. And the menu was pretty plain. It was an all-American diet: cheeseburgers, soups, salads. No seafood. No pastas. But there was chicken on the menu and even a chicken sandwich. No fried foods except for French fries, and even they weren’t really fried. They were microwaved, but Aubree was taught that there was no reason to tell the guest about how the fries were cooked.
She had greeted the guy sitting by the window, but all he had wanted was coffee and nothing else. The guy wore nice clothes, but that wasn’t the thing that really stuck out to Aubree. The thing that really struck her was that he would’ve been good-looking for an older guy, except that he had a vicious deep-set scar that ran jagged across his face like someone had come at him with a chainsaw and skimmed the outside of his face. His left eye was completely grayed out like a blind man’s, and the left part of his nose and left nostril were missing. The only thing that was left was a black hole shaped like a tiny pyramid.
The guy’s right eye was an amazing ice blue color like the middle of the ocean. He had silver and gray hair slicked back, creating the perfect style. He also had a beard that was peppered with black and gray hair.
The guy was probably in his late forties, not an old guy, not like a grandfather, but close to her dad’s age.
Most of what Aubree could see about the guy was the good side of his face, and there was nothing wrong with that. But when she brought him his coffee, he turned his features directly to her, and she swallowed hard when she saw the hole on the one half of his nose. The rest of the scar had faded into his hairline perfectly at the top of his head, and it barely scraped across his upper lip. It left a slight cleft that wasn’t bad, not at all. One time in high school, Aubree had to “volunteer” at a homeless shelter with other students who were a part of the local church. At this function, she had seen a guy with the upper part of his lip and teeth completely missing. The guy had tried to grow a mustache over it, but it was still visible.
Aubree remembered being told by her teacher to stop staring, but she couldn’t help it. She watched the guy eat. She remembered that it had sickened her to her stomach. She felt bad about that later. After all, the guy wore a denim vest with military and veteran patches all over it. He had served in Vietnam or some war that happened long before she had been born.
The guy in the booth at the window accepted the coffee from her and never touched it.
He never looked back at her again. He just sat and stared out the window like he was waiting for something or someone.
The guy had a serious way about him like he was ex-military or a cop or both.
Other than the cowboy hat, which rested on the table in front of him, and the boots, the guy really didn’t fit in. Besides Tower Junction being a small town and the fact that Aubree knew almost everyone in it, the guy stood out. And that wasn’t because of the scar. It was more than that, but Aubree couldn’t explain it.
Whatever the guy was waiting on, there was no doubt that there was something on his mind. Something that was important, like he was waiting on a miracle—some outside force to answer his prayers.