The Never-Open Desert Diner Read Online Free

bare shoulder and half oval of breast, seamless yet distinct against the instrument. The woman and the instrument were a cameo in the empty room.
    She stopped playing. I felt shame. I had no right to be there. It was wrong.
    Too late, I realized the light had slipped behind me. A misshapen silhouette of my head was cast through the newspaper and across the floor in front of her. She turned toward the window where I stood. She returned her attention to her instrument. Her chin dropped to her chest. She was lost again in her private music. I felt shame but was helpless to turn away. I continued to listen.
    The sun dropped below the mountains. It only took a few minutes. She played on until I could no longer separate her from the darkness. I walked from the house into the dusk and remembered the name of the instrument — a cello. I sat in the cab with the engine idling and thought about the woman and the cello and the red room and the haunting music I didn’t hear. I whispered to myself, “Go home, Ben.”
    The headlights wrangled the soft darkness in front of me. I stared but didn’t see. She might have been standing there for some time. The sleeveless flowered print dress she now wore was loose fitting and fell to her knees. A slight wind fluttered its hemline. Her coal eyes were intent upon me. She moved only to push wild strands of her long dark hair away from her face. There was little chance she could see me with the headlights shining in her eyes, though I felt as if she could. Maybe I wanted her to see me through glass the way I had seen her.
    I opened the door and slid out from behind the wheel until I felt the chrome running board under my boots. The interior lights flashed on and off. She reached up again and brushed the hair from her face. I stepped out in front of the headlights. She took a step backward to the very edge of light.
    She didn’t shout. Her voice lifted itself without effort over the rise and fall of the gently fluctuating rpms of the Detroit diesel.
    “Are you a music lover or just a pervert?” she asked.
    There were only two ways to answer that question. I wasn’t pleased that the question so precisely limited my response. “Are those my only choices?” I asked. When she didn’t say anything, I said, “I guess I’m a music lover.”
    “Go ahead, then,” she said, her voice breaking this time. “Take it and go.”
    “Take what and go?” I asked.
    Instead of answering me she turned and disappeared into the darkness. The faint sound of her footsteps stopped. From out of sight, she asked, “Did the owner send you?”
    I didn’t know what she was talking about. “No one sent me,” I answered, aiming my voice up and out into the night.
    “Then why are you here?”
    “I just wanted to apologize again for what happened this morning.”
    Her own laughter caught her by surprise. It erupted from her throat in choking hiccups before it exploded into a brief howl. A coyote answered her call. She howled back in a long, high-pitched response that made me shiver. I tossed my head back and let loose a howl of my own. My effort fetched only silence.
    There was no way for me to know if she was still nearby.
    “I’m a truck driver,” I said. I turned back to the cab and stepped up on the running board. I stood there high and small beneath the first shy desert stars. “I’m sorry I bothered you, ma’am,” I said. “Thanks for the loan of the wall.”
    I already had one leg inside the cab when her clear voice drifted down out of the darkness: “You’re welcome.”
    I listened hard for more and wished for another hiccup of laughter or a tender howl. All I could hear was the rhythmic fall of her shoes on sand that told me she was moving farther away up the slope. The coyote let loose again while I was closing the door.
    As I backed up to turn around, my headlights rose slowly toward the entrance. She stood on top of the hill beneath the arch, her arms wrapped around herself against the