All stories › Science Fiction › Four Minutes Fast › Episode 1
Booth Four
Episode 1 of 3 of Four Minutes Fast by Megan Pruitt · free to read
I had the coffeepot in my hand at 3:12 by the wall clock, and booth four was empty, and then it wasn’t.
He was sliding his hat onto the seat beside him like he had been there all along. Brown jacket, wide collar, the kind of glasses nobody had worn in thirty years. He looked up at me and smiled.
“You new?” he said.
“Six weeks,” I said, which was true in a way he couldn’t understand.
“Coffee and the cherry, if Ernie made it.”
“He made it.”
I poured. My hand was steady, because this was the sixth time and I had practiced. The first Thursday I dropped the pot. The second I went into the walk-in cooler and stood there until the cold made me stop shaking.
I had told nobody. The second Thursday, Ernie came out for a smoke at 3:15 and saw him, and went back inside without a word, and we had not said one sentence about it since.
I brought the pie myself. Ernie stayed in the kitchen. He had cooked there since 1990, and on Thursdays at 3:12 he found something to scrub.
My phone was on the counter by the man’s elbow, where I’d set it down to pour. He nodded at it.
“Dot let you bring a calculator to work?”
“It’s a phone,” I said.
“Sure it is,” he said, grinning, because he thought I was being funny.
He ate the way he always ate, crust last. He looked at the bare wall by the restrooms.
“Where’d the jukebox go?”
“Dot sold it.”
“She would,” he said. “She hated that thing.”
He asked if Dot had picked out new booths, because these were blue and he remembered red. I said she had. He nodded like a man who lets his wife pick the booths.
At 3:22 by the clock he reached for his hat. I didn’t know why I did it. I lifted the pot and topped off his cup.
“On the house,” I said.
“Can’t say no to that.” He took one swallow standing, and set it down. Then he put a five on the table. “Keep it. I’ve got to make the bank before the drive-through closes.”
“You’ll be early,” I said.
“Clock’s fast,” he said, tapping the frame as he passed under it. “That’s the idea.”
The bell over the door didn’t ring. It never did for him. He had his hand on the glass, and then the glass was just glass.
I picked up the five. Series 1993, crisp, the old small portrait. Coffee and pie had been $2.85 in 1994. It was $9.40 now.
Every Thursday I rang up his $9.40 out of my own tips so the pie count matched and Dorothy never asked. I kept his fives in an envelope in my apron. Six of them now, still legal and still impossible.
Ernie was standing in the kitchen door with a towel over his shoulder.
“That’s Lyle, Wanda,” he said.
“I know it’s Lyle.”
Everyone who had ever worked there knew Lyle. His picture hung by the register, a man in a brown jacket cutting a ribbon. Under it was the clipping, framed. Dorothy had hung it the week of the funeral and never taken it down.
I had read it ten thousand times. Local restaurant owner killed. Thursday, May 12, 1994. Struck and killed at 3:25 p.m. at the County Road 9 light by a gravel truck that ran the red.
“He set that clock,” Ernie said. “Four minutes fast, so he’d never be late. Never wore a watch, either. Said the clock was all the watch he needed. Four minutes early to everything.”
“It’s six minutes to the light,” I said. “He leaves at 3:23 by that clock.”
“Which is 3:19,” Ernie said. “Which puts him at the light at 3:25.” He looked at the booth, and the cup, and me. “Except today.”
“I gave him coffee.”
“You gave him five seconds.” He folded the towel in half, and in half again. “Go read it.”
I walked to the register. Lyle in his brown jacket, cutting his ribbon. The same frame, the same yellow paper.
Struck at 3:25 p.m. Died two days later.