“The usual for the table,” Jolene stated, her voice raspy from decades of cheap cigarettes, not bothering to phrase it as a question. Silas gave her a single, sharp nod, mirrored by the five men sitting around him, and she wrote absolutely nothing down on her green order pad before turning and walking back toward the kitchen. Mateo, the youngest member of the group at thirty-eight, let out a long, heavy sigh, leaning his muscular torso back against the booth and rolling his thick neck until something near his vertebrae cracked with the volume of a snapping branch. “Man, I desperately need about four of those coffees and a solid week of uninterrupted sleep,” Mateo grumbled, rubbing his dark, exhausted eyes with the heel of his calloused hand. Sitting directly across from him was a man they universally called Deacon, who had a jagged, intricate cross tattooed onto the side of his neck despite the well-known fact that he had never voluntarily stepped foot inside a church in his entire life. Deacon snorted derisively, tapping his silver skull ring against the laminate table. “You need to stop letting your kid kick you out of your own damn bed, brother. She’s four years old, Mateo. She doesn’t pay rent.” Mateo shot him a dark look, leaning forward. “She has severe nightmares, Deacon. You try telling a terrified four-year-old to tough it out.” Deacon smirked, entirely unapologetic. “Buy the kid a nightlight, T.” Mateo groaned, burying his face in his hands. “I did buy her one. She ripped it out of the wall and threw it at my head.” A low, rumbling laughter moved smoothly around the table, never loud enough to draw unnecessary attention, but entirely real and deeply grounded; it was the rare, authentic kind of laughter that lives deep in the chest rather than the throat, born of genuine brotherhood and shared misery. Silas smiled slightly without parting his lips, letting the warmth of the black coffee bleed into his calloused hands, but he stopped mid-sip when the brass bell hanging above the front door chimed sharply.
Force of habit dictated that Silas immediately evaluate any potential threat entering his perimeter, but the man who shuffled through the glass door was no threat at all; he was ancient, not just old in the generic, inevitable way that time happens to every living creature, but old in the profound, devastating way that suggested life had systematically taken incredibly important things from him, one agonizing piece at a time, over the course of many decades. The staggering weight of those accumulated losses had settled permanently into his fragile body the way damp weather settles deeply into rotting wood, curving his frail shoulders forward as if the very air inside the diner was pressing down upon him with the force of an anvil. He walked with agonizing slowness, heavily relying on a battered wooden cane whose rubber tip had been worn almost entirely smooth by miles of aimless wandering, and he wore a faded, military-green windbreaker that was visibly threadbare at the elbows, featuring a small, tarnished American flag pin fastened securely over the left breast pocket. The old man stood in the entryway for a moment too long, his rheumy, pale blue eyes scanning the quiet room, and the young teenage hostess named Chloe—who had only been working at the Rusty Anchor for three months and still looked perpetually startled by her own shadow—cautiously approached him clutching a laminated menu to her chest. “Just one today, sir?” Chloe asked softly, her voice wavering slightly. The old man looked down at the menu in her hands, then slowly raised his head to survey the diner once again, and something in the incredibly defeated, hollow way he performed the action made Silas’s jaw tighten involuntarily beneath his beard. It was not the casual, indecisive look of a hungry man trying to choose a comfortable booth; it was the heartbreaking, deeply hesitant look of a man desperately trying to figure out whether he still had any tangible right to occupy space in the world at all.
