This Is Not What We Discussed

Jenna looked up from the bar’s counter across the busy room to the diner door as its jangling brass bells signaled the entrance of her next customers. Over the din of hungry families and breaking truckers all digging into waffles, burnt coffees and conversation, Jenna could always still hear the diner door opening – almost sensing the coming or going before it happened. It was one of the honed skills that came with working the diner for over two decades.

Jenna rinsed out the Mr. Coffee pot, watched the new couple settle in at a booth by the window near the pie case, and put on a fresh pot of coffee. She thought back to the early years at Marty’s. She was pushing 40 now and had never imagined she’d still be here all these years later.

She was two weeks and one day shy of sixteen when she first walked into this place looking for a summer job. Wage back then was a dollar a day plus tips – and the tips tipped the balance so that by the time junior year began Jenna decided to stay on to work afternoons and evenings a few days a week.

It was never her first idea to still be rinsing out the Mr. Coffee pot 20 years down the road. Not that she really minded things as they had panned out – it just wasn’t what she’d ever really imagined.

She must’ve spaced out down memory lane because suddenly the familiar gurgling of brewing drip coffee settled to a hush. It was another sound – like the brass bells on the diner door – she could always pick out through the cacophony of diner sounds. Her hands reached in an age-old familiar motion toward the shelf above the Mr. Coffee and swung down two thick-lipped white diner mugs. At some point, they all had tacky ‘MARTY’s’ fired across them. But now, on most of them, the writing had begun to fade or chip off from their countless cycles through the heat of the dishwasher.

She filled the mugs with hot black coffee and stepped out from behind her bar of silent reverie to deliver the steaming coffees to her new customers at the booth. As she set out she could already hear the gentleman at the table say with great agitation, ‘this is not what we discussed!’

20 years of waiting tables will give you a heightened ability to read people and Jenna knew before she arrived with the coffee that the gentleman was pretty unhappy about something.

As she approached the booth she thought the wife looked almost pacific against the backdrop of a tide of tension and frustration rising and falling in her husband’s mien. People were funny like that, Jenna thought. Seemed like there were always couples she’d watch in the diner who looked like maybe they were trying to play opposites just for the fun of it. Her fun, anyway. She loved all the people she got to watch come in off the I-40 to refuel on their way to god-knows-where. She could write a book about it if she wanted to.

Navigating the couple’s order of pie proved nearly comical to Jenna as she watched the gentleman wrestle with whatever was eating away at him and let it all out on the question of the pie. Jenna figured peach pie and apple pie were pretty much the same thing anyway – they were both fruit pies, had the same crust, and came with vanilla ice cream. But this gentleman was making a real big deal about which pie to order.

His wife wasn’t even really arguing his choice – but he just kept kind of circling back on himself and giving his own argument its rebuttal. When he’d finally settled on peach without the vanilla ice cream, Jenna headed back to the bar counter to get the pie out of the pie case. Over the diner’s din, she could still hear the gentleman carp about this that and the other thing.

Her curiosity for the people who came in and out of this place heightened her hearing for their dialogue. She could pick it up like the gurgling of the drip coffee or the brass door chimes heralding the arrival and departure of these living characters.

The Monday morning lunch rush was just picking up and a family of six walked in, battling to install themselves in the booth next to the odd couple. Over the noise of twin toddlers and the loudness of the pre-teen’s very loud nonverbals, Jenna couldn’t make out much anymore.

She brought the peach pie and two forks over to the couple and refilled their mugs with coffee. Heading back to the kitchen to get a stack of menus for the large and boisterous family, Jenna could hear the gentleman lodging a complaint into thin air about the quality of the coffee. Apparently, they’d just come from LA where the coffee was exceptional and he was spewing out all sorts of fancy words and foreign-sounding names as he lamented the tired taste of what Jenna had just refilled their cups with. Jenna just smiled.

After she’d taken care of the booth next to them, she took a moment to stop behind the counter. After all these years at Marty’s Jenna learned that things don’t move any faster or slower if you stopped to breathe or you didn’t – even during the rush.

In one seamless movement, she pulled down a Marty’s mug and poured herself coffee. She leaned against the counter and breathed in the aroma of the dark brew. It smelled smoky, leathery, and kind of murky. It was nice. It was still only 20¢ a mug with free refills and it was familiar. She took a sip.

It still smelled and tasted as it did the day she started working at Marty’s. She didn’t know what kind of coffee the gentleman had tasted in LA – and she was pretty sure it really was better than coffee off the I-40 in the Arizona desert – but she still thought he made a bigger deal of it than he’d even done for the two pies. It was just pie after all. And it was just coffee.

She put the mug down on the counter – coffee she’d return to later – probably when it was lukewarm. She could still hear the gentleman repeating that line again and again, ‘this is not what we discussed.’

She couldn’t quite figure out if he was talking about one of the discussions he’d had with himself – about pies or whatever – or if he was referring to some other expectation that of course hadn’t been met.

She sighed a smile and headed over to take the boisterous family’s orders. The pre-teen was sulking more than the gentleman in the next booth and the two toddlers were successfully resisting the parental efforts to keep these jack-in-the-boxes down in their booster seats. She handed a menu to the dad who looked so wearied and distracted he would probably never read the menu and just order bottomless coffee. And a menu for the mom whose eyes betrayed the truth that as much as she had known that parenting would be so wild, she really hadn’t understood what she’d signed up for.

‘Yeah,’ thought Jenna, ‘that’s probably not what they’d discussed either.’