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The Right Time
Episode 3 of 3 of Four Minutes Fast by Megan Pruitt · free to read
The clock over the register had been four minutes fast since 1990, and on Thursday morning, before anyone else came in, I fixed it.
The man it belonged to had died at a red light six minutes after he left the diner under it. For seven Thursdays he had come back and left again at 3:23 by its hands, and every time it sent him out the door four minutes too soon.
I stood on a chair and took it off its nail. I turned the little knob until the minute hand matched my phone. I hung it back up, and it looked exactly the same.
Then I made a fresh pot, set out the creamers, and waited for Dorothy.
She was seventy-eight. She came in mornings for the books and the coffee and to tell Ernie the hash browns were too dark. She stopped under the clock with her cup.
“Who touched Lyle’s clock?”
“I did,” I said. “It was wrong.”
“It’s supposed to be wrong. He set it.” She looked at me a long time. Twenty-eight years I had worked for her, and I had never argued with her about anything but the hash browns.
“He would have liked you,” she said finally. “He liked people who fixed things without asking.”
“I’m asking now.”
“Put it back by Friday,” she said. She went to do the books and left her coffee on the counter under the clock, and she didn’t come back for it.
At two Ernie came out and checked the clock against his watch. He nodded and went back in.
At 3:08 by the right time, booth four was not empty.
“You new?”
“Eight weeks.”
He glanced up at the wall and frowned. “That clock right?”
“It’s right.”
“Huh. Thought I was later than that. Coffee and the cherry, then. I’ve got time.”
This time Ernie brought the pie. Lyle stared at him.
“Ernie? You look like your own father.”
“Long week,” Ernie said. He put a hand on Lyle’s shoulder, just for a second, and went back through the door fast.
Lyle ate crust last. He told me Dot wanted a new sign out front and he wanted a new grill, and they were going to fight about it all summer. I said the sign would win. He said it always did.
I wanted to tell him. I had the whole thing ready, the light and the truck and the hallway. I didn’t. If I told him, he would leave early to beat it, the way he did everything, and I had no idea what early would do.
At 3:20 he looked at the clock and stretched. “Got to make the bank.”
“You’ve got three minutes.”
“Three minutes,” he said, and settled back. “Dot’s going to think I took the long way.”
At 3:23 by the right time he stood and put a five on the table.
“Drive careful,” I said.
“Always,” he said, and tapped the frame, and the glass was just glass.
Ernie came out of the kitchen and stood at the front window with me, looking up the road toward the light, though there was nothing to see but a parked car and the sun on the asphalt. We stood there until 3:30.
I couldn’t go to the register. Ernie went for me. He stood in front of the frame a long time, and then he turned around looking like a man who had forgotten a word he had always known.
“There’s nothing here,” he said. “Just the ribbon cutting.”
Next Thursday.
At 3:08 the bell over the door rang, which it had never once done for him.
Dorothy came in first, holding the door. Behind her came a man of seventy-three in a brown jacket, slower now, with a cane he clearly resented.
“Booth four, Wanda,” Dorothy said. “Same as every Thursday. Thirty-two years, you’d think he’d let me pick a different booth.”
He sat sideways with his bad leg out in the aisle. Dorothy ordered for both of them, coffee and the cherry and two forks.
“He’s four minutes late to everything now,” she said. “Ever since somebody fixed his clock.”
Lyle squinted at the wall, and then at me.
“Who fixed my clock?” he said.
“I did,” I said.