Joe's Diner Page 15

  “It would have to be a pretty good contest to be able to recoup our costs. Those ads are expensive.”

  One corner of her mouth quirked down, the tip of her tongue appeared in the other corner, which turned up, and one eye closed. “Hmm. . . ,” she said and disappeared again.

  Mark shook his head. The woman was making him dizzy.

  When she didn’t come back, he saved his work to a temporary file and hurried to the kitchen.

  He was in the middle of making an omelet when Chantelle appeared, leaning over the counter where they placed the orders to be delivered. “Do you own a digital camera?”

  He didn’t look up. “Yes, I do.”

  “I hope you had it packed and shipped with your stuff.”

  This time he did look up. “Yes, I did.”

  “What about software? Could I transfer pictures from it onto my computer?”

  He transferred the omelet to a plate, added a scoop of hash browns, and slid the plate onto the counter directly in her direction, forcing her to move. “No, of course I didn’t have Josh pack the software. But I have the software loaded onto my laptop, and I have the cable hookup in my laptop case.”

  “Do you think your laptop is compatible with my printer?”

  “Probably.”

  Her eyes lit up, and she smiled so brightly, he imagined the room got lighter. “Great!” she singsonged, clapped her hands together, and skipped off, returning to the front of the restaurant.

  Kevin froze beside him. The two men turned and looked at each other. “Uh-oh. . . ,” they mumbled in unison.

  ❧

  Mark shook his head and backed up a step. “No. I’m not wearing that. No way. Never. Not in a million years.”

  Chantelle held out the most ghastly excuse for a hat he’d ever seen in his life. The thing looked like a cross between a fishing derby and an ecological waste dump.

  “I don’t need you to wear it long. Just a minute or two.”

  “Well. . .” He let his voice trail off as he considered her request. He wouldn’t be caught dead wearing such a monstrosity in public; but if she only wanted him to try it on, he supposed he could do that.

  “Just long enough for Aunt Ellen to take our picture.”

  His stomach took a nosedive into his shoes. “No. Absolutely not.”

  “But you have to. It’s for the ad. Everyone who isn’t working right now is coming in on their days off just for this picture. Please?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “This is for our contest. On Monday, we’re starting Crazy Hat Month. For everyone who wears a crazy hat, they get ten percent off their meal. I ordered a big bulletin board, and we’ll post a picture of everyone who wears a crazy hat, with their permission of course. Then on the weekend, everyone who comes in, whether they buy a meal or not, gets to vote on the craziest hat of the week. The winner will get a free meal for their family.”

  “You’re crazier than that ugly hat.”

  “And if we bought a package of that expensive photo paper, I wonder if we might be able to sell the pictures to people. Or better yet, we can put a jar on the front counter. If anyone wants to buy a picture, they can put a dollar into the jar for charity. Like the children’s hospital burn unit or something.”

  “You are crazy. Very crazy. And I thought we were going to discuss what we were going to do for promo.”

  Her smile dropped. “But we did discuss it. You said okay to the ten percent off, and to running a contest, and to running two ads.” She held up the camera. “You gave me your camera. You even told me we could use your laptop to process the pictures right away.”

  “But—”

  Ellen stepped forward and removed the camera from Chantelle’s hand. “Come on, Mark. It will be fun.”

  He looked at Ellen, and all resistance drained out of him. Joe still wasn’t up to coming to the diner, but Ellen had come, apparently just to take the picture.

  Chantelle stepped forward and laid her hand on Mark’s forearm. “Everyone’s waiting for us outside. Those who are working today have to get back to work, and everyone else is here on their day off. Please? We have to make this fast.”

  “I give up,” he muttered and accepted the hideous hat. Still, even though he had agreed, he refused to wear the hat except for the amount of time it took for Ellen to snap the photograph.

  His breath caught when he saw all the staff outside, all wearing their uniforms, along with a profound variety of very crazy hats.

  Chantelle tugged on his sleeve. “Come on. I’ve got the ad all made up, but you’ve got to download the picture and format it properly for me really fast. Deadline is at three-thirty this afternoon for Sunday’s paper. I thought it would be a great shot to have everyone standing in the doorway so we can get the Joe’s Diner sign in the picture, too.

  Mark forced himself to smile as everyone positioned themselves, not by height, but by where they could stand without their hats clashing with that of the person next to them.

  “Aren’t these hats great?” Chantelle whispered in his ear when they were done.

  Mark whipped the hat off his head, then winced when he pinched his palm with a fishing hook. “I’m beginning to seriously question your taste. What makes you think this bizarre idea will work?”

  “Just think. This is a family restaurant. Parents can keep the kids out of their hair for a few hours by having them make their hats. On the weekends, lots of teens come in because we’re affordable, and wearing a crazy hat gives them an excuse to do something wild and crazy without getting out of hand. And while I’m thinking of it, do you think we can allow people to enter more than once in a week, as long as they have a different hat?”

  Mark shrugged his shoulders, past the point of caring anymore. “Why not? The purpose of this thing is to draw a crowd. If someone is crazy enough to make more than one hat in a week, they deserve to get a discount off their meal.”

  “One more thing. You don’t have to, but everyone else is going to wear their hat during working hours to keep in the mood of the contest.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Yes. Everyone.”

  Mark stared at Chantelle, wearing a wide-rimmed beach hat that she’d made into a real beach. She’d made the rim into the water, complete with blue waves, jumping fish, swimming birds, and a doll on a surfboard. The crown was a sandy island sticking out of the water, complete with a palm tree and a sun sticking up on a wire protruding from the top of the palm tree. Beside the palm tree was a badly constructed hotdog stand, made from cardboard and a picture she’d cut out of a magazine.

  “You made that, didn’t you?”

  She beamed, like it was something to be proud of. “Yes!”

  He stared blankly at the monstrosity in his hand, telling himself that nothing was worse than Chantelle’s hat. Being in the kitchen, hardly anyone would see him. He hadn’t lived here for four years, so he doubted anyone he knew would see him. If they did, they would have seen Chantelle first, and nothing was as bad as that. At least the hat she’d made for him was at one time a proper fishing hat. Something macho and respectable.

  “You win. But do me a favor. Don’t skip. Walk nice and calm, and let’s get back to work.”

  ❧

  While he waited for Chantelle to pick him up for church, Mark picked up the local community newspaper from the front step. The sight of the front page nearly made his heart stop.

  Local Restaurant Goes Crazy

  In full, vivid color, on the front page, was a photo of a large group of people, all wearing ridiculous hats, standing by the front door of Joe’s Diner. The first few lines of the article clarified the title with the name of the contest. He studied the sea of faces carefully. Not one of the people in the picture was a staff member. He wondered if any of the staff knew about the picture, because no one had told him another picture had been taken.

  Quickly, he paged through to page five to read the rest of the feature article.

  Today marked the end of th
e second week of the contest. Inside was a picture of the fifty-ish man who won the prize for the first week, holding up the gift certificate they had presented to him. He was grinning from ear to ear and wearing a hat sporting a racetrack around the brim, complete with cars that drove in a big circle around the hat when the man moved his head.

  Mark didn’t want to think of how many hours the man and others like him had spent making ridiculous hats for the sake of a lousy ten-percent discount off the price of an already reasonable meal. When Chantelle handed the man his prize, he said that he hadn’t really expected to win and that the prize was a bonus he hadn’t even considered. He’d simply had fun making the hat and even more fun wearing it.

  The article also mentioned the charity jar. About half the people who had worn hats wanted to keep a picture of themselves, and they’d been more than happy to donate a dollar to a worthy cause in exchange for a copy of the picture.

  A car horn honked. Mark jumped and looked up to see Chantelle in her car, waiting at the curb.

  “Sorry, I didn’t see you pull up. I was reading the morning paper.” He handed her the newspaper before she slipped the car into gear. “Did you have anything to do with this? I notice they quoted you. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Chantelle’s mouth gaped open when she looked at the picture on the front page. “I didn’t know. The newspaper phoned and asked me a few questions, but no one told me they were going to use it for an article. I just thought their advertising department was phoning as a follow-up to see if we wanted to run another ad. Which I didn’t.” She laid the paper into her lap and grinned at him. “You’ve got to admit, we’ve been busy. After hitting the front page, we’re bound to be busy until the contest is over. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well, what do I get? You told me you didn’t think this would work, but I proved you wrong. I win! I think you should give me something.”

  Mark gazed into her face. Since they no longer drove to work together, by the time he arrived, she was already wearing one of the ridiculous hats that she’d made to promote the contest. None of them did her justice. All they did was make her look silly, which he supposed was the point. She hadn’t cared that the hats were unflattering. She wanted only to bring people into the diner, and her plan had worked. For the past two weeks, they’d had record crowds and often had a wait in nonpeak hours.

  Today, just as she had on every other Sunday, Chantelle wore a minimum of makeup. Instead of a bizarre hat, she wore a large, stylish clip to hold her hair in place in such a way that accentuated her diamond-shaped face and rosy cheeks. Her blue eyes sparkled with delight, and her beautiful smile could have competed with a fully lit Christmas tree if it hadn’t been the wrong time of year. Crooked nose aside, she radiated pure joy and an inner beauty beyond description.

  What he wanted to give her was a kiss. But he couldn’t.

  “Mark? Is something wrong? Why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something stuck on my face?”

  Mark blinked a couple of times and shook his head. “No. Sorry. Let’s go. We shouldn’t be late.”

  “I forgot to tell you. Uncle Joe is going to church today. He invited us to go with him, to his church, and then go over to their place for lunch afterward.”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  This time, Mark found himself paying attention to the sermon without Chantelle’s prompting or her infamous question-and-answer periods. The reason wasn’t only that he found the pastor at their uncles’ church much more interesting than the pastor at Chantelle’s church.

  The pastor’s topic was the eternal life promised to those who accepted Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior. Of course, he’d known that since he was a child. He’d been brought up in church. But today, Chantelle’s words about God not promising anything else besides salvation echoed in his head. At first, he simply listened politely as the pastor spoke, but when the pastor read a verse where Jesus Himself promised that future Christians would have troubles throughout their lives, that was when Mark really started paying attention.

  He’d been thinking a lot about his life in the last couple of weeks. It had started when Chantelle flooded him with questions when they were at the park. At the time, he’d simply answered, thinking that she had the strangest way he’d ever seen of getting to know someone. When Mark got to know someone, he learned by observation, not with a barrage of personal questions, one right after the other.

  But in answering her questions, he had to think about his replies.

  For everything she’d asked, regardless of the personal nature of the question, something in his reply had to do with his job. Most people in today’s society spent more time at their job than anything else in their life besides sleeping, including family time. However, in talking about it, he saw that his entire life revolved around his job, including his social life and what little was left of his spiritual life. Of course, he still believed the Bible and everything God said. But for the past number of years, Mark hadn’t lived the way he believed.

  Somewhere along the line, he’d stopped living for the God of the universe and started using all his time and energy to serve the god of his job. In doing so, he’d cut himself off from everything else in his life that should have been important. Everything revolved around his work. Without that job, he’d lost his anchor. And that made him realize that he was holding the wrong anchor. The problem wasn’t that God wasn’t answering his prayers. His problem was that he was serving the wrong god.

  Not that he expected God to solve all his troubles once he turned himself around. The pastor’s message confirmed that, which he already knew. Christians still had to face problems, maybe more than the average nonbeliever. Things would still continue to go wrong. But now, for the first time, it finally sank in that even when things did go wrong, he could still have peace because at the end of it all, no matter what happened, God promised him the gift of eternal life. Nothing else mattered.

  At the close of the service, instead of following the pastor’s prayer, which was more geared toward the new believer, Mark did something he hadn’t done in a long time. Instead of asking God to fix his problems and listing the things he’d like changed, Mark opened his heart and told God that he would try his best to be open. From now on, Mark promised he would spend less time working and more time listening to whatever it was that God was trying to tell him. And then, he would do it.

  “Amen!” the pastor called out. “Go! In the peace of Christ!”

  Because it was Joe’s first time back to church since his heart attack, Ellen, Mark, and Chantelle tried their best to get him home quickly, before he could get too tired. He protested, saying that he could handle church just fine if he was already starting a light exercise regime. However, his arguments fell on deaf ears as they escorted him all the way to his car. Joe even grumbled that he was quite ready to start driving again, but Ellen hushed him with a simple narrowing of her eyes while she started the car.

  Mark then followed Chantelle to her car and, unlike Joe, slid into the passenger side without complaint.

  Instead of staring out the window the entire drive to Joe and Ellen’s home, Mark watched Chantelle.

  He’d been watching her closely, studying her, and most of all, getting to know her. There was more to Chantelle than the bubbly, animated little blond that everyone came to know and love. And everybody did love her. Since she worked such long hours at the diner and didn’t have time to see her friends, her friends had come to see her. In fact, they accounted for a noticeable portion of the diner’s business, with or without silly hats.

  Watching her interact with her friends showed a side of Chantelle that he, at first, had been too self-absorbed to see.

  He’d already known that she’d only held data-entry and low-level office jobs prior to working at Joe’s Diner and that she’d been out of work for six months before Joe hired her at the diner. What he hadn’t thought of was what being out of w
ork with minimal education and training had really meant in day-to-day life.

  She hadn’t realized that there was a one-week holdback on payday at the diner, which put payday on the fourth day of the month. If she would have asked him for an advance, he gladly would have given it to her or even given her a personal loan, but she hadn’t said a word. He didn’t realize just how broke she was until a group of her friends came in and left an extremely large tip, saying that since it was a tip, she couldn’t turn it down. She’d broken down and cried, saying that she now could pay the rest of her rent, which was overdue.

  Mark couldn’t imagine not having enough money to pay the rent. He also couldn’t imagine not having enough money to pay for groceries; yet one day, when she’d invited him inside her home for coffee, he discovered the hard way that the cupboards were nearly bare. Apparently, one reason Chantelle didn’t mind working long hours six days a week at the diner was because her meals were paid for and all she had to have on hand was what she needed for breakfast and nothing else.

  Mark’s cupboards at his apartment were often bare because he didn’t have the time to go grocery shopping, never because he didn’t have the money to spend.

  Using Chantelle’s own bizarre methods of getting to know someone, Mark asked her a few carefully worded questions. He found out that, after being out of work for six months, she not only had spent all her savings, she’d cashed in her small retirement savings plan, and her debts were mounting to the point where she could no longer obtain any more credit.

  As soon as he learned this, Mark had immediately tried to give her money, but she’d refused him. Again, he used Chantelle’s own methods and worked around her.

  Once a week he made an excuse to borrow her car, then filled up her gas tank while he was out. Mark smiled to himself as he recalled her confusion when she commented that she was surely losing her mind, that she couldn’t remember the last time she had to buy gas. He’d also taken it through the quickie-lube place for a complete tune-up during one of his trips to the wholesaler. The following day she’d mentioned how the car “felt” different, but he wouldn’t admit what he’d done. He admitted only to filling up the tank with premium gas and quickly changed the subject. Another time, he’d gotten all the brake pads changed and rotated the tires. He wanted to give her more, but for now it was a start.