Where Broken Hearts Break
Laura Skinner
A long way down a highway, yet nowhere near the end, there's a diner that catches lost dreamers and tumbleweed. A heart once said that this must be where dreams come to die - where broken hearts go to break. It’s one of those places where hearts might stop on their way to somewhere else. Most drive past, one in a dozen might stop, but beyond the desert-dusted windows and broken venetian blinds, there were five hearts beating who stayed. Keeping the red vinyl booths and checkerboard linoleum floors as shiny as the chrome-plated tabletops. Day in, day out, serving sandwiches to strangers and pies to passers-by. No soup served cold and no salt shaker left empty. Each heart broken yet running the rarely visited and never spoken of Broken Hearts Diner like clockwork. Being here made me see life really was do or die. You could fall or you could rise, and yet, we were all still there. Waiting. Whilst waiting tables.
After the thing that made me come here, but before I actually left, a heart told me that there were stages to grieving. I’m pretty sure there were five. They were talkin’ about death, I think. That I could handle. It was the living thing I found grief in. When it wasn’t what it once was, or what it was once meant to be, and suddenly you’re stuck in a diner. Those five damn stages. I think I met them all here… at the Broken Hearts Diner.
Denise hasn’t been here all that long. She showed up last week and every day since. She sits at the counter, rock music playing with her headphones in, doodling the daily crossword while taking rather little notice of anything else. Her first night on the job I asked her what brought her here.
‘I’m not here. Or I won’t be here long. I’m an artist, not a waitress. I’ll be in the galleries one day and this will all just be my origin story, printed in tiny letters on the wall.’
I asked her where she moved away from. She said her life. Then she blew a purple bubble and went back to sketching monsters peering around her abandoned crossword puzzle. A single word ‘Demons’ written in all caps in the boxes of twenty-seven down, ‘another word for lovers’. I remembered that feeling of denial well. I’m not just a heart cooking in a diner… I matter. I mean something. I’m going places. But just as my signature dish would always be the soup of the day, the wall behind the counter was as close as she’d ever get to a gallery wall.
Anne escaped her ‘better half’, leaving him in Brooklyn last June. Now she’s got her three kids, their two goldfish, and a crappy one-bedroom apartment to look after. She spends her days grumbling, insisting that she ‘doesn’t fucking deserve this!’ whilst listing the many great injustices that the world had apparently chosen to bestow on her. Whether that be a snarky customer or an accidental paper cut, her responses were generally the same. ‘This is an absolute joke!’, ‘What the fuck’s this for?’ and ‘It was asking for it!’. Although I’m sure that the plates that would shatter were rarely asking for it, I can’t say I’ve never done the same. There's a specific kind of anger though, which she and I shared most. The kind where you’ve been so angry for so long, it can be kind of fun. A lot more fun than being sad anyway. I asked her why she was here. She glared at me for an answer. I guess it was a stupid question. But I still asked another one.
‘Where would you rather be?’
‘Dreaming’s the last thing I’ve got the fuckin’ time for! Being here is certainly no dream! A cosmic joke, even. Some kind of punishment for living! All I really want is for those damn kids to pull their weight and those damn customers to be a hell of a lot more decent too!’
She threw the dirty dish she was carrying at the floor and stormed out to refill the not-so-decent customer's coffee cup. Alone in the kitchen with the shattered porcelain, I nudged a perfectly innocent plate off the counter to join the mess on the floor before I went back to flipping patties for the next order.
I understood Anne but Bethany was my favourite. In her own words, she was well south of fifty but nowhere near twenty anymore. Once on track to be a Broadway star, she grew up leading her church choir up in Buffalo. She would always be dreaming of making it in the big city which was not so far but still a world away from her hometown. How she ended up here, I’m still not entirely sure. I asked her of course, but she was always looking forward so she only told me where she was heading.
‘Kid, I’m dreaming of the spotlight and I’ll get there, don’t you worry! If I make good in the world then the world will make good on me, I’m sure of it!’
The problem Bethany had that Anne and I didn’t share with her was that she was maybe too hopeful. She looked to the future as though she could just wish it into existence. As far as I know, Bethany still completely intends on waking up one day and being the next big star. I’ve lost count of how many husbands she no longer has and the many places she’s found herself dreaming. If I were her, I’d have stopped bargaining on future happiness a couple of happily ever afters ago, but not Bethany. She’s got this idea that if she just wipes enough tables and can balance enough plates, she’ll make her way to a promotion and from there, take over the world. I haven’t got the heart to tell her that the road from scrubbing tables to singing on Broadway isn’t so direct. At least smashing plates gave you the feeling you’d at least made a difference in the moment. Even if it was just one less piece of crockery to clean.
Daisy is Bethany’s opposite in every way imaginable… but I quite like her too. She is both the happiest and the saddest girl that I’ve ever met. Everything about her smiles from her name to the yellow bow in her ponytail. Her blonde hair always shines and even her yellow uniform somehow looks brighter than anyone else's. All of this is true. Yet, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her smile. Maybe she’s so sad she makes everything else look happy in comparison... I asked her how she got here. She shrugged and told me in her charming southern way.
‘Heavens knows? I s’pose I just hopped on the bus and it stopped here. There was nothing much left for me back home... Nothing here neither. An’ there was no point in dreamin’ there might be anything else out there...So I stayed.’
Bethany spent the rest of the day trying to convince her there was always something you could change and always a dream worth dreaming. Anne pointed out that if she wasn’t busy dreaming, she could get back to work because it wasn’t her fuckin’ job to do everyone else's for them. From what I’d gathered, the charming and pretty Daisy hadn’t so much caught the bouquet as been pummelled with it. Her wedding bells had rung and her groom hadn’t been seen since. I suppose neither had she. I don’t know the whole story but she told me once that it hadn’t been a thing one could fix with a prayer and some sweet tea.
Adeline’s been here the longest. Sometimes I think she was here before the diner and I’m sure she’ll long outlive it. She’s got kind eyes with a very specific kind of joy behind them. As though what she’s got is enough and what she gets is what she gets. ‘Que sera sera’, I think the song goes. She told Daisy that anything could be a dream if you let it. I used to think she’d given up on it all, stopped dreaming, lost all hope in life. Now I think she might be the only one living it. She generally lets everyone deal with the days in their own ways and simply gets on with her own. But she always stands up for Daisy against Anne and encourages Denise to cut back to one earphone at a time, and even though she’s far too content and practical to dream for herself anything other than what she’s got, she’s constantly rooting for Bethany to achieve her dreams. I asked her once what brought her here. She smiled.
‘I once had two hearts. Both hearts mine, both hearts theirs. A long time ago, theirs left with half of my own, and now I’m here. And if this is where I am, I’ll be making the most of it! Half a heart and all. I have all I need right here,’
She was the only one who ever asked why I was here. I didn’t know how to answer. I too had half a heart, if that.
‘I’m a cook. I just needed somewhere to do it.’ And it was true, if not the whole broken-hearted story.
She smiled and asked me, ‘So is this your dream? Is your heart happy here?’
I’d never questioned it before. Didn’t think it mattered all that much. Not since I became a broken half of a heart.
But I was here. I’d broken plates and hearts, I’d dreamed, and I’d bargained, and I’d been depressed for probably longer than I knew. Adeline asking me the simple enough questions I’d been asking other hearts for years made me wonder what exactly had been stopping me from accepting it all, as she had. What was stopping me from accepting that this here could be my happiness?
‘I’m thinking that maybe broken hearts don’t break here.’ I finally answered her, ‘And maybe they don’t have to stay stuck here either... It’s all a process, those stages, right? But accepting isn’t the end, is it?’
Adeline smiled in a way my mother had so many years ago. A proud and hopeful smile I could never forget.
*
It’s been a long time since my heart worked at that diner. And no, it didn’t break there. But what I didn’t know then, and wish I could go back and tell myself, was that broken hearts do heal. And dreams change. And life moves on. Nothing stays the same. Except for the Broken Hearts Diner with its red vinyl seats and checkerboard floors - that's never changed. And I hope it never does. Because living isn’t as simple as I once thought. You can do and you can die and you can do it all over again.
Some days I feel as though I never left that diner, or that moment when it all clicked into place. And some days I feel like I was never there at all... But I’m a long way through my life now, yet nowhere near the end and I can truly appreciate what that diner gave to me when life had all but taken everything else away.
Laura Skinner is a creative writing student at Macquarie University. She enjoys reading mystery novels and biographies. Although quite different genres, she enjoys them for the same reasons. Both prioritise unravelling characters and their stories, which is also what she tries to create with her own writing.
