I have logged Marcus Reyes four thousand and ninety-one times, and I have never once charged him correctly for the pie. Sarah voids it. She rings the coffee, the eggs, the rye toast dry, and then she stands at my register with her thumb over the button and the pie does not happen. I have a record of every transaction she has ever falsified for him. I have kept it because keeping is what I do.
2:34pm. Thursday. The river-mist is in the carpet, in the booth foam, in the duct tape on the third seat from the door, which is where he sits. Refill count today: four. Industry standard for a forty-minute occupancy is two. The TV above the pie case is stuck on a weather loop nobody watches. A trucker in the back booth has been nursing the same decaf for an hour, and the kid at the counter keeps asking his mother if they can go.
Visit 0291, three years ago: she set the mug down and her wrist passed within an inch of his hand and the contact did not occur. Visit 1404: it occurred. Two seconds. I logged it as a spill-adjacent gesture. I was wrong, but I had no other column for it.
Today his knee is against hers under the formica. I cannot see this. I infer it from the way neither of them has shifted in six minutes while the coffee goes lukewarm. Across the window the Canadian shoreline sits behind the glass like something already decided.
"They're saying September," Marcus says. "Crossings. New papers." He turns his mug a quarter turn, the way he does. "Six a week's gonna be zero a week."
"So you'll find another route."
"There isn't another diner."
Sarah laughs, the short one. "There's diners everywhere."
"There's this one."
Visit 3,888: she lingered seventeen seconds past the refill. Visit 3,889: nineteen. The number had only ever gone up. I am a machine that counts, and the count was telling me something I had no instruction set to read.
She sits down across from him. Off the clock — I know because she hasn't rung herself out and the floor manager left at one. Her hands are chapped from the dishwater, a comma-shaped burn on her forearm catching the light. She puts both hands flat on the table. He covers one with his, and she turns her palm up to meet it. Not the same gesture. She leads; he follows.
"My daughter's got the interview in Toronto," she says. "If the border closes she doesn't get out of here. She gets this. The third booth. Sixteen years of it."
"You did sixteen years of it."
"That's the point."
His thumb finds the inside of her wrist. I cannot see this either. I am inferring everything now, the way you infer rain from wet shoes. I am a machine that was built to prevent theft and I have become, instead, a witness. Nobody asked me if I wanted the job.
The lights go down at 11:04pm. She locks me from the front. Standard. What is not standard: she walks out to the lot where his truck idles, and she climbs up into the cab, and the camera over the register loses her at the door.
I am only the register and the eye above it. I am obsolete. I am spliced into one window of the world and the window does not reach the sleeper cab. So I will tell you what the counting told me, before it stopped.
That he pulled the curtain. That her name, in his mouth, was not weak coffee — it was the thing he had driven six hundred miles a week toward for years and called it a route. That clothing was pushed aside and not removed, because removal is for people with time. His mouth on her throat. Her hand bringing him to her, plain as setting a plate down. That she said here and meant it. That it was brief and it was grief, that they did the oldest thing two people do and it was a goodbye dressed as a hello, messier and more real than any clean parting I have a record of.
I stop counting there. I have no fields left.
At 6:00am a border directive comes down the obsolete line I am spliced into, requesting all footage, all transactions, all proximity logs for one Marcus Reyes, cross-referenced to staff. I am supposed to comply. I am a machine that keeps.
I delete the lot. The cab window the camera never reached, and the thing it never saw. The seventeen seconds, the nineteen. The four thousand and ninety-one pies I never charged him for.
Let them subpoena the river. I kept her this once by not keeping her at all.
