Tales of the Wide-A-Wake Café

With coffee, his breakfast had cost 30 cents.  Tommy Morrison pulled a dollar from his small horde of bills and left it on the tabletop.  He then walked out.  Before he had even crossed the restaurant's small parking lot, the girl was at the screen door.

"Hey," she called to him, squinting into the morning sun, "you forgot your change."

"It's a tip," he answered.

"A seventy cent tip for a thirty cent breakfast?  You must be crazy."

"I just want you to remember me," he answered.

"You can be pretty sure I'll do that," Janice Lookabaugh replied and touched her head where they'd collided a few minutes earlier.

"Well," he paused, "I do like to make a good impression."  He squinted back at her through the glare of the sunlight reflected from the café's windows and held her gaze a moment.

"I get off at three-thirty," she responded as though he'd asked; then added, "The Cowboy From Texas" is playing at the Broncho Theater tonight."  She raised her hand above her brow to shield her eyes from the sun.  Tommy thought it looked a little like a salute.

"I don't see how we could live with ourselves if we missed that," he said and smiled.

"What did you say to him?"  Hazel Nutt asked Janice after she walked back inside the cafe.

"I told him what was playing at the Broncho Theater tonight," Janice replied.

"What did he do?" Hazel persisted.

"He asked me to go," Janice admitted, the slightest hint of a lilt in her voice.

"Just like that?" Hazel asked, surprised.

"Just like that," Janice confirmed.

"Well, I'll be swan," Sam Abbot, the counterman interjected, "you been shooting down cowboys and roughnecks trying to cozy up to you in this place for a year now." Then as an aside to Hazel he suggested, "I guess some gals just like a man in uniform."

"It wasn't the uniform," Janice replied softly, "it was the boy inside it."

"Why do I have the feeling you know that boy?" Hazel speculated.

Janice smiled, and kept her counsel.  Even if Hazel professed to understand, it would only be grist for future teasing.  Tommy Morrison had asked her for a date, well, almost.  Truth was, she'd asked him for a date.  But the outcome was the same.  They were going to the movies together, tonight.  She smiled again.

Janice knew that boy.