Chapter One
Kyle had already reached the age where he had reconciled the fact that his life was going to come and go with very few people outside of his immediate circle of friends and customers noticing. And he was fine with that. It was comfortable. Sure, he still had some worries, as everyone does. But he’d reached the point in life where he had to accept that he wasn’t going be much more than an animated leaf icon sprouting from a few Ancestry.com family trees.
As with everyone, he hadn’t always felt this way. He’d had dreams of being, at the very least, a footnote in a record book here and there. Always a tall kid for his age (particularly after that growth spurt between his sophomore and junior year of college), Kyle had worked his way through the ranks of football leagues at the Y and had endured brutal Two-a-Day drills at the high school level to become a first-string offensive lineman. True, he hadn’t garnered the attention that All-State quarterback Jamie Parker did. To tell the truth, he hadn’t attracted much attention at all, but at least he got to wear the letter jacket - royal blue wool with baby-blue leather sleeves, textiles that have always been and will always be the ticket to instant reverence in high school. Like most things, football had its pros and cons, but it had provided a ready-made group of friends to hang out with and a scholarship to a Division II university, thanks to his mom’s masterful promotion of him to coaches via links to a YouTube homemade highlight reel of his best moments on the field. A career in pro ball had been a possibility back then, and “possibility” is synonymous with “absolute certainty” when one is still young enough to have more possibilities than missed opportunities.
Perhaps he hadn’t set the collegiate world on fire, but he had managed to keep his stats high enough to see that scholarship renewed - at least, he had until that unfortunate, unseasonably warm November day when he’d blocked a tackle and taken the hit for running back Corey Marks. Kyle had felt his knee pop, the pain feeling like a shrill scream sounds. He had gone down hard as he watched through eyes blurred by pain and sweat as Marks went the distance. Marks would receive the write-up in the paper for his “amazing run” while Kyle had been given the consolation prize consisting of months of physical therapy and a nicely-worded form letter on university letterhead, regretfully informing him that his academic free ride had just come to an end. Once Kyle had regained some movement in his leg, he’d learned that NCAA insurance wouldn’t cover the medical bills because his injury, while severe enough to keep him from playing for a year, hadn’t been “catastrophic” enough, at least not to a soulless, pencil-pushing insurance adjuster. In addition to the medical bills he couldn’t pay, he also had to contend with a tuition bill for the Spring term that would have previously been covered by a scholarship he now no longer had. The only learning he had ending up doing that semester consisted of a first-hand education in how bankruptcy court worked.
As soon as he had been upgraded to only “moderately damaged” merchandise, he had been able to wrangle a scholarship at an unremarkable Division III college and finish getting his Bachelor of Science in Hotel and Restaurant Management. Playing with the pros was out of the question, but at least Kyle’s mom had been able to see him do the cap-and-gown walk. As the fragility of Kyle’s future had been firmly established, he’d dared not take summers off and instead had knocked out as many class credits as he could as quickly as he could.
Kyle’s mom would succumb to cervical cancer a few years later. Preoccupied with her injured, financially ruined and futuristically compromised child had resulted in more than a few missed Pap tests. This would be apparently more tragedy than Kyle’s father had signed up for when he had vowed to be loyal “through sickness and health” and he would abruptly absent himself from the family shortly after her diagnosis via a shameless divorce and new romance with an old high school girlfriend he had reconnected with on Facebook.
So, Kyle had no longer nurtured any grandiose expectations as to how his life was going to go. He had long since recognized that the status and easy outs that came from athletics was behind him and his existence was going to be unremarkable at best. But he had managed to do a few things right and he had learned that trading excitement for contentment wasn’t the worst thing a person could do.
Like most people entering the workforce for the first time, Kyle had difficulty finding a job that suited him. Managerial jobs in the area had left him with a choice of either managing a restaurant that was part of a national chain or serving the whims of the various owners of the few local eateries that still existed. Since he hadn’t been interested in mortgaging the freedom he’d worked so hard to obtain by finishing school so quickly, Kyle had opted to turn a building that had originally been a fast food joint into a small diner he would simply name “Kyle’s” (for a lack of anything better when the time came to apply for licenses) and gave being his own boss a try.
Kyle had struggled at first, exhausting the modest inheritance that came from his mother’s passing. But he had kept things going by keeping his overhead ridiculously low. He had established an efficient routing of arriving before the sun came up, doing the food prep work before he opened the place, taking the orders, delivering the plates, running the register, doing the dishes and answering the phone (although the phone was rarely answered… customers that were already in the door were top priority). Once word had spread of his generous hand when it came to portion-size and the open kitchen where customers could be entertained by sitting at the counter and watch him cook, Kyle had been able to afford hiring the occasional part-time help. He’d usually taken on a high school or college kid to act as server or dishwasher, depending on the social skills of the prospective employee.
He had initially closed up shop at three in the afternoon when he had started and that still hadn’t changed. He hadn’t heard much demand for dinner service - certainly not enough to add six hours to his workday. He’d paid close attention to horror stories of restaurateurs who had grown too fast, too quickly and saw their businesses collapse under their own weight. In the back of his mind, Kyle had always been quite aware that he had no family to rely on should the diner fail, so he had been very slow to take risks. Life had proven to be unsteady enough already. Keeping 45 seats filled and keeping the profits slightly more robust than “razor-thin” had been enough of a challenge without tempting fate.
If there was one thing Kyle had always liked about owning the diner, it was the immediacy of it all. In order to keep the place running, he had to live in the here and now. Supplies had to be ordered, food had to be prepared, the diner had to be clean, the money had to be handled properly… it was nearly impossible to worry about what the future might bring when he had to focus on simply getting through the day. And that had been good for him. Kyle liked a life where his problems were the kind that could be solved right then and there.
For example, when he had first leased the building, he’d have to address the problem of the sign outside. Because the space had previously held a chain restaurant, Kyle had already been saving quite a sum by not having to replace ventilation equipment, refrigerators, freezers, tables, bar stools, shelving and counters left by the previous tenants in exchange for being let out of their lease early. Normally, this would have resulted in inflated rent but the landlord had been having a hard time leasing the place after an established franchise restaurant had failed there. So, Kyle had managed to negotiate a very favorable lease and really couldn’t complain. But the sign had presented a problem.
The previous occupants had owned a franchise that centered its menu almost entirely around fried chicken. This meant that Kyle now had use of much larger deep fryers than he really needed but, cost of canola oil to fill the things notwithstanding, this was certainly a good problem to have. But it also meant that Kyle had to come up with the money for a flat top grill for cooking nearly everything on his menu that wasn’t deep-fried or go in the oven. This was a doable accommodation as Kyle was making the transition from chicken joint to diner. But the remnants of that sign had been another matter.
As required by the franchise, the previous owners had installed a “monument” sign, which was a huge sign on a large pole and it was meant to be permanent. This had been an asset to the previous tenants, but a liability to Kyle. He would look into it and learn that the cost to change the face of the sign itself would have been what he would have expected to pay for a good used car. He had been hoping to simply cover the sign with a temporary one of his own, but zoning laws forbade that. It was at that moment when Kyle had realized he was making a financial commitment from which there would be no “takesies-backsies” and bit the bullet. But even that hadn’t solved all the problems.
The previous restaurant had sold chicken in a bucket and there was a massive steel facsimile of their trademark bucket jutting out of the top of the sign. Kyle would obtain a few estimates before giving up on the idea of removing it as simply cost-prohibitive. He had even contacted local scrap-metal dealers and “antique” dealers with the idea of giving them the bucket if they would simply remove the thing, but no one fell for that one.
So, Kyle would finally hire painters to simply paint the bucket plain white. And that worked for about two days before someone on Yelp pointed out that the bucket now looked suspiciously like a cup in which one might give a urine sample for a drug test. So, Kyle had to hire the painters again. They told him of a restaurant in Canada with an identical problem who had painted the sign to look like one of their coffee cups. And although Kyle had served coffee in ceramic mugs, he bought some personalized white cups for take-out business and thus the problem was eventually solved when the markings on the sign followed suit. Life, and his business, would soldier on.
No, his life wouldn’t be one people would talk about. But it would be a good life.
And today, when that front door opened, Kyle met the girl who gave him reason to believe it was going to be a great one.
