My waitress Mary

Truck stop glowing under fluorescence, bloodshot eyes everywhere—long-haul drivers slumped like ghosts, builders with cement dust in their hair, travelling salesmen chasing the next few quid or two. Cheap knives scraping plates, sad memories soaked into the formica like old coffee.

I’m waiting for Mary in her red and white pinafore.

Above the jukebox a chalkboard menu, white chalk, blue chalk shadows, powder on the floor.

Tonight’s special: –

Meatloaf and fries with a doorstop of white.
Spicy sausage and mash with a doorstop of white.
And Bill Bradley’s blue cheeseburger riding high.

All the same price, and bottomless coffee black as the highway outside.

The latrine door hangs there with its brass sign gone dull, needs a spit and polish bad. Duck-grey paint peeling back in sad curls, the cracks stuffed with spider cocoons, little grey tombs fused in time.

And then there’s Mary, scribbling on her order pad, smiling through two thick layers of makeup and those tarantula-leg eyelashes. Beauty spot or old plucked mole, turquoise stud winking on her lip like a cheap jewel from the market.

Soft-rouge Mary with her cheap mortgage and her man just a distant smoke now, probably sitting in some East End dive with the snooker boys, no money left except for the booze and the fags and those pork snacks in the bowl with the painted Japanese geisha smiling her painted smile.

Mary—beautiful woman twenty years back, now an aged Greek goddess with the warmest heart and the softest smile this side of the Mississippi.

My father never did appreciate her, not once.

Cancer in the end,
a 70s disco wake at the club,
whisky and soda, lights spinning slow.