Hon, You Want the Usual?

An essay by Chad Schomber

Preview Chapter of my upcoming book, Smells Like Monday.

There’s a way a diner smells that doesn’t change with the season. Grease. Syrup. Coffee that’s been burned just enough to feel like home. You could be in the desert. You could be in a snowbank. Doesn't matter. The menu still reads like a ransom note from 1963. Eggs any style. Meatloaf on Wednesday. Pie.

You slide into the booth. The vinyl sticks. That’s part of the welcome. Cracked red plastic that’s softened at the corners from decades of elbows, newspaper pages, and mid-shift naps. If you're lucky, the sugar dispenser is half-glued with residue and the waitress calls you “hon” like she’s been doing it for three decades. She hasn’t. But she inherited the tone.

A diner isn’t a restaurant. Not really. It’s a holding tank. For drifters, regulars, late-shifters, and people avoiding their own kitchens. Some come to eat. Most come to pause. Nothing bad can happen to you while you're waiting for toast. That’s the unspoken promise. Toast is safety. Toast is time travel. Toast is cheap.

And the coffee. Oh, the coffee. Poured from a pot that could survive nuclear fallout, into mugs that never match the saucers. It tastes like it’s been waiting for you. Like it’s tired too. Like maybe it wants to talk about something that happened in '78, but won’t unless you ask.

You get characters in here. Guys with one jacket and too many stories. Women with lipstick from last night and bingo cards in their purse. Kids pressing their noses to the dessert case like they’re at a zoo. The waitress knows them all. She knows which couple tips in change and which one’s divorced but still eats together on Thursdays.

Menus don’t change, but the chalkboard lies. Soup of the day hasn’t been updated since Opening Day. But they still write something. Chicken and rice. Clam chowder. Words with no expiration date.

In the kitchen, the line cook is some kind of magician. Or maybe just stubborn. He can make a patty melt while nursing a hangover and listening to a cop argue with a roofer about traffic. No apron. Just a stained T-shirt and a thousand-yard stare. The kind of man who’s burned his fingerprints off flipping hashbrowns and doesn’t miss them.

Time is strange here. You could be five minutes or five decades from wherever you came from. The clock over the counter ticks like it means it. But no one looks. Except the trucker who has a schedule. The rest of us drift in between bites.

You eat slow here. Not because you’re savoring. But because there’s nothing better waiting outside. The sky might be dark. Or bright. Doesn’t matter. Inside it’s always the same yellow light. The same low hum. The same feeling that someone might be about to tell you something important, right after they finish their sausage links.

It’s not nostalgia. That’s too clean a word. This isn’t about the past. It’s about the middle. The in-between. The parts of life that don’t get written down but still have a receipt. Diner food comes with proof. You were here. You ate. You mattered, briefly.

Every town has one. Sometimes two.It sits by the highway or the old train tracks or the courthouse. It's been “for sale” longer than it’s been profitable. The roof leaks. The tiles don’t match. But the sign still lights up most of the letters. That’s enough.

And when you leave, full but not satisfied, the bell on the door tings once. Just once. Like a farewell. Like the clink of a spoon against a chipped mug saying, “See you next time, hon.”

After midnight, it changes. The lights dim without dimming. The booths seem to lean in closer. You can hear the hum of the fridge like it’s talking to itself. Outside, everything’s empty but the parking lot glows. That fluorescent blue that makes a dent in the dark. You sit and watch the steam off your mug curl like a cigarette held by a ghost.

Someone’s always there in the corner. Writing something. Notebooks full of nothing important. Just names they’ve overheard. Faces they’ll try to remember. It’s not loneliness exactly. Just the kind of quiet that asks you to stay a little longer. Order another slice. Pretend it’s breakfast. Pretend it’s still last week.

And maybe it is. In a diner, time loses track of itself. Everything folds inward. The salt. The booths. The stories. All pressed together under a sky that doesn’t care what hour it is.

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