Look Up

The corner diner was always a little too bright for its age, the chrome stool legs polished by a thousand fidgety knees, the neon sign in the window humming like it had a secret. Sweet tea flowed from the spigot like a slow river, catching sun in the glass, and Cindy set down another sweating mason jar with a flick of her wrist.

“Order up, sweetheart,” Gus called from the pass. “Fried chicken, black-eyed peas, collards. And your daydreams, if you want to send those out, too.”

“I don’t daydream,” Cindy lied, tying her ponytail tighter. “I strategize.”

Gus snorted. “Your strategy looks a lot like starin’ at Booth Three.”

Booth Three had a newcomer who had started showing up every Thursday. He had the kind of face that made strangers want to tell him secrets: clean jawline, a sun freckle by one eye, hair that never quite decided if it wanted to behave. His phone never left his hand. He ate with his left, scrolled with his right, and Cindy had lost three nights of sleep wondering if his eyes were blue or green.

She grabbed a coffee pot, slid into his orbit, and set the plate down.

“Fried chicken, black-eyed peas,” she said, watching the reflection of his mouth in the coffee’s surface. “You’ve got the good taste of a regular and the posture of a man about to miss his bus.”

He didn’t look up. “Sorry, thanks,” he murmured, thumb tapping.

Cindy poured coffee, slow, steady. “You take cream?”

“I—uh—yeah. Two.”

“Cindy!” squawked a voice from the counter. Loretta, a regular with lipstick older than half the diner’s fryers, wagged a finger. “That boy is gonna sprain his neck with his eyes glued down like that. Tell him he’s missin’ the best thing in here.”

Cindy smiled without breaking eye contact with the top of his head. “Which would be?”

“The pie,” Loretta declared. “And your face.”

Cindy winked at Loretta and set creamers on the table. Her heart was beating louder than the old diner clock that ticked above the pie case, and she could feel it in her fingertips.

He forked a piece of chicken without looking. “This is amazing,” he said absently, the way you say grace while thinking of groceries.

“Good to hear.” She hesitated. “You know, some of us are taking bets.”

That made him look up. For half a second. Hazel. Hazel and green when the light hit. “On what?”

“On whether you ever look up long enough to notice we painted the ceiling.” She pointed upward. The ceiling was the same cracked egg-shell white it had always been.

He squinted. Then he smiled, brief and reluctant, like a door creaking open. “Huh. That is… a very white ceiling.”

“We used twenty-seven coats.”

He laughed, and it was a warm sound. Then his phone buzzed and his eyes fell back to it.

Cindy set the coffee pot down, fingers betraying her by tapping a rhythm on the tabletop. “Hey there, good lookin’,” she said with a softness that made Gus glance over. “You’re eating your plate of fried chicken and black-eyed peas, and I’m pouring your coffee and pinin’ for your heart, and you won’t look up. You might be missing your fate.”

He froze. His thumb stopped. The diner’s hum got louder, the tick of the clock counting her heartbeat for her.

He looked up, properly, and the room snapped into focus. “I’m—wow, I’m sorry,” he said. “That was blunt.”

“I’m a professional,” she said, lifting her chin. “At blunt. Also coffee. Both bottomless.”

He set the phone face down. “I’m Eli.”

“Cindy.”

“Nice to finally meet you,” he said. “I’ve been… I’ve been writing this message to my mom for an hour and a half.”

“To your mom?”

“Yeah. She’s—” He rubbed the back of his neck. “She moved in with me last month. Early-onset Alzheimer’s. Today is a good day, and I’m trying to write down all the names of people she loves while she still remembers who they are.”

Cindy’s hands stopped tapping. The clock took a breath. “Oh.”

“I keep getting it wrong,” he said, half-laughing, half-apologizing. “Spellings and dates. It feels like if I look away from the list for a second, something might slip through.”

Cindy slid into the booth across from him like she had always belonged there. “You ever tried pen and paper?”

“I work in software,” he said, a little sheepish. “Paper scares me. It’s too real.”

“Paper is forgiving,” she said, pulling a pen from behind her ear and flipping his paper placemat. “It lets you cross out what you got wrong and keep what you got right. Also, you can draw little hearts around the names you don’t want to forget.”

He watched her draw a heart. He smiled again, a longer smile this time. “Cindy, right? C-I-N—”

“D-Y,” she said. “Like the sugar crystals.”

“Okay,” he said, writing. “Cindy, who makes bottomless coffee and paints ceilings twenty-seven times.”

“Told you. Professional.”

He picked up a piece of chicken. “I should have looked up sooner.”

“I tried to catch your gaze,” she admitted. “Winks. Smiles. At one point I did a dance with the salt shakers. Loretta’s still traumatized.”

“Loretta is loving this,” Loretta announced from the counter. “Heard every word. I’m puttin’ it in my church group chat.”

“Loretta, don’t you dare,” Cindy said.

“Too late,” Loretta said, thumbs flying. “Hashtag DinerFate.”

Eli groaned. “I am so sorry if I made you feel invisible.”

“You didn’t,” Cindy said. “You felt… far away. Which is different. Sometimes far away can come closer.”

He looked at the placemat list she’d started. “Will it be weird if I ask you to write ‘Grandma Louise’ for me? Your handwriting looks like it remembers things.”

Cindy printed the name in careful loops. “Not weird.”

“She used to bring me here,” he said. “This place, actually. Told me to pick the chicken because ‘it’s fried in oil and love.’ I think she thought this diner was the center of the universe.” He searched her face. “It might be.”

“Flattery will get you extra biscuits,” she said. “And pie. Definitely pie.”

Gus leaned over the pass. “You plannin’ to do any work, or do I tell the Health Department you’re contaminatin’ Booth Three with romance?”

“Mind your biscuits,” Cindy called. To Eli, softer: “You like peach?”

“Love it.”

“Good,” she said. “You’re gonna need something sweet after that list.”

He glanced at his phone, screen dimmed, then back at her. “You’re right, you know. About fate.”

“I’m just sayin’ phones are small and the world is not.”

He gestured at the coffee pot. “What would have happened if I didn’t look up?”

“You’d miss my very persuasive sales pitch on pie,” she said. She leaned in, conspiratorial. “And maybe… you’d miss meeting someone whose heart beats loud enough to scare the clock.”

He inhaled like someone who’d been underwater and surfaced into sky. “I’d like to hear it.”

“My heart?”

“Your sales pitch,” he said, but his eyes told a different truth. “And your heart, if that comes with the pie.”

Cindy rolled her pen between her fingers. “Okay. Here’s my pitch: You look up once, just once, and you get pie with two forks. And then maybe, if you’re not allergic to conversation, you tell me your grandma’s favorite song, and I play it on the jukebox. And if you’re feeling very reckless, you give me your number on the back of that placemat that forgives everything.”

“Reckless,” he repeated, smiling. “I don’t know if I remember how.”

“Baby, take a shot,” she said, and she surprised herself with the way her voice trembled.

He picked up the pen. He wrote down digits in a steady hand. “Grandma Louise loved ‘Crazy.’ Patsy Cline.”

Cindy hopped up, dropped two quarters into the jukebox, and the diner warmed with a voice that knew a thing about longing. She set down the pie with two forks. Their fingers touched. Neither of them apologized.

Loretta clapped once, delighted. Gus pretended to drop a pan in shock.

Eli slid the phone across the table to her, screen-down. “Hold this for me?”

“I’ll keep it safe,” she said.

He looked up and kept looking. “I’ll keep this safe,” he said, tapping the space between them where the air felt like a held breath.

“Deal.”

Outside, the neon hummed. Inside, the clock ticked in time with two new rhythms. And the sweet tea flowed, and the pie disappeared, and the list on the placemat gathered names like stars, forgiven and remembered, while two people learned the miracle that can happen when you glance up, just once.

- Julia O’Hara 2025

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