Left Behind

Teddy woke up on cold linoleum, staring at the underside of a booth table he didn't recognize.

For a moment he didn't move. He just listened. There should have been the low hum of the car engine, the rhythm of tires on the highway, the sound of Mia humming along to the radio with her mouth half-open in that way she always did when she was almost asleep. Instead there was the clatter of a dishwasher somewhere behind a swinging door, the scrape of a chair, a stranger's laugh two booths over.

He was at the diner. The one with the cherry pie sign in the window and the sticky ketchup bottle shaped like a tomato. They'd stopped here for lunch — hours ago, or was it minutes? Time didn't work the same way when you were this still for this long.

He must have slid off the seat when Mia jumped up. She always jumped up fast when her dad said let's go, come on, we're losing daylight. Teddy remembered the scrape of her sneakers, the door chime, the particular blue of the sky through the window just before it swung shut.

And then nothing. Just the linoleum, and the dust, and the shape of a booth leg like a metal tree.

He tried to remember if she'd looked back. He decided she had. He decided that mattered, even from down here, even now.

A waitress with tired eyes and comfortable shoes found him near closing, when the dinner rush had cleared out and the floor needed sweeping. She held him up by one paw, turned him over like she was checking for a name tag.

"Well, hello," she said, not really to him, the way people talk to a plant or a photograph. "Somebody's missing you."

She set him on the counter next to the register, propped up against the napkin dispenser so he could see the whole diner — the pie case, the door, the parking lot beyond it going gray and then black as the sun gave up for the day. It wasn't so bad, up there. He could see everything that came and went.

Nobody came for him that night. Or the next day, which passed in the particular slow way that days pass when you cannot move and can only watch a door.

On the third day, a trucker in a red cap noticed him and said, half-joking, "You selling that fella?" The waitress — her name tag said DONNA — said no, actually, someone was going to come back for him, she was sure of it, families always did, and if they didn't she was going to mail him herself, she already had it half planned out, she just needed an address.

Teddy didn't know if that was true. But he decided to believe it anyway, because believing it was better than the alternative, and because from where he sat, propped against the napkins, he really could see the whole parking lot, and he intended to keep watching it.

On the fifth day, a blue station wagon pulled in fast, too fast, gravel spitting from under the tires. A girl was already unbuckling before the car had fully stopped, already pushing the door open, already running — and Teddy recognized the particular way she ran, elbows out, like she was racing something only she could see.

The bell over the door rang. Donna looked up and smiled like she'd known all along.

"I knew it," Mia said, breathless, snatching him off the counter and pressing him hard against her chest, the way you hold something you were afraid you'd invented out of missing it too much. "I knew you'd still be here."

Teddy didn't say anything, because he never did. But if he could have, he might have told her that he'd never doubted it either — not really, not underneath the waiting — because some things, once they've been loved enough, simply understand that they're worth coming back for.

Outside, her dad leaned on the horn, laughing, already forgiven for the five days it had taken him to turn the car around.