I grew up bouncing between foster homes across three different counties. My mother left the hospital two days after I was born and never came back for me. My father spent most of my childhood behind bars for a robbery charge nobody in the family ever wanted to discuss in detail.
I learned early how to keep my belongings packed light. How not to get too attached to a bedroom, a school, a family that might change its mind about you by Christmas. How to leave a place quick and quiet the second life shifted underneath me again.
I learned early how to leave a place quick and quiet.
When I aged out of the system at eighteen, I walked out carrying two black trash bags of clothes and absolutely no plan beyond the next bus ticket.
I ended up in Wexford Creek because the rent was cheap and nobody in this town asked too many questions about where a young man had come from or where he was headed next.
I bounced through a string of terrible jobs — stocking shelves, washing dishes, two miserable weeks at a call center — before I landed at Otis’s Diner on Route 9.
Otis hired me during the breakfast rush after another waitress walked out mid-shift without so much as a two-week notice. I’d walked in that morning asking, on a whim, whether they needed any help at all.
“You ever carried three plates at once?” Otis asked, wiping his hands on his apron, sizing me up.
“No, sir.”
“You got ten minutes to learn.”
“You got ten minutes to learn.”
That was Otis. Big as a refrigerator, permanently grumpy-looking in a way that never quite matched how kind he actually was underneath it. He gave me a shot nobody else in that town was willing to give a twenty-year-old with no references and a foster-care history he never once asked me to explain.
Mrs. Odetta Vance came into that diner every Tuesday and Thursday morning, eight o’clock sharp, same booth by the window every single time.
The first morning I served her table, she looked up from the menu and stared at my nametag a long moment.
“Elijah,” she said. “You look tired enough to collapse straight into my waffle.”
“Long week, ma’am.”
She snorted. “Try being eighty-five.”
“Try being eighty-five.”
That was our introduction. After that, she always requested my section, whether I was working it or not, and Otis just shrugged and let it happen because arguing with Odetta Vance apparently cost more energy than it was worth.
Sometimes she insulted my haircut.
Sometimes she questioned, straight-faced, whether I’d ever once smiled in my entire life.
Mom texted. I typed back: “Have a good time.” When I refused to invite them to a grand 12
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