A BITTER DISAPPOINTMENT #2

                                   

By Ronald Sparling

 

Dutch came from a small town outside Sault Ste Marie that had one small strip mall with a diner where Dutch started his kitchen career after leaving school at 15. He started by washing dishes and mopping floors, cleaning up after customers spilled their food and cleaning the toilets. But Dutch was not without ambition, and was soon doing food prep for the cook, a retired lumberjack who’d lost one eye to a flying wood chip and who was continually slicing his fingers because of his lack of depth perception. By the time Dutch was 17, the cook was only working dinners and Dutch was at the diner by 4 am, lighting the stoves, chopping the onions and tomatoes and shredding the cheese, pre-scrambling the eggs and laying out the bacon to be ready for the first customers who would walk through the doors he opened at 5. There was a regular crowd who drifted in more or less together on their way to the mill where they would work as their fathers had: until they retired or died, whichever came first.

 

In those days Dutch thought he would work and die in the diner. He got his twin brother, a troubled youth who’d spent more than his fair share of time in juvie, work there as a dishwasher and cleaner, and before his eighteenth birthday, Dutch was engaged to a young girl who worked at the dollar store in the same strip mall as the diner. All was going as planned until the night his fiancé, in the throes of a passionate embrace, cried out his brother’s name.

 

The next day Dutch was on the highway headed west.

 

When he reached Jasper he clambered down from the bus, saw a help wanted sign and became a short order cook at the bus station diner. Once again Dutch thought life was going his way until he lost three front teeth, knocked out in a bar by a rig-pig from the oil fields in the north with no particular grudge against anyone but with a huge wad of money in his pocket and no woman to spend it on. Soon after Dutch left the bus station diner for work at a small cabin resort near some famous falls a short drive out of town.

 

But they say that everything happens for a reason and it was at the falls that Dutch fell in love for the second time. Amanda was from the big city, Vancouver, and had her own car. What she didn’t have was any interest in Dutch, but when you’re sixteen, attention from anyone is better that no attention at all.

 

Amanda had been sent to the cabins by her parents who knew the owner and thought it would be good experience for their daughter to see what it was like to work for a living. She went begrudgingly but not without dragging her best friend along with her.

 

Throughout the summer Amanda let Dutch hold her hand when they went walking along the mountain trails that surrounded the cabins, her best friend always at her side. Dutch took this in stride; he’d heard of chaperones though truth be told, he’d always thought of them as an old aunt sitting in the parlour with a young couple like he’d seen in the movies. But he told himself that she was young and maybe this was the way things were done in big cities. Besides, she still allowed him to kiss her when they bid goodnight at the door to her trailer, although never with open mouths. The thought of his dentures ending up in her mouth was too much for Amanda to stomach.

 

When they walked Dutch talked of his plans for them when she finished high school and they would live together, at the same time assuring Amanda that he would never push her into marriage until they were sure their love was true and forever. He talked of the small diner they would own and of how she could run the front and greet the customers and take their orders and he would run the kitchen where he would prepare the food and call out cheerfully to her when her orders were ready. He talked of having their regular customers who would call to each of them by name and say things like “The usual, Amanda,” and she would know exactly what they wanted and Dutch would know exactly how they wanted it cooked. And how, at the end of the day, they could relax in one of their very own booths in their very own diner and have a cold beer and talk about the nice people they met. And how, sooner or later, Dutch would be leaning across the table to stroke her bulging stomach where their first baby lay.

 

At the end of August, Amanda returned a virgin to her big home in the big city and forgot all about Dutch.

 

I’ll be heading to the big smoke come Christmas, Dutch told everyone he met. Yep. Vancouver. Promised the little lady, I did. Wrote her just the other day, in fact.

 

But home alone at night, he beat himself up for his bad handwriting and stupidity when his letters came back return to sender, no such address. That his calls never went through, well that, as everyone knew, was to be expected, the result of the poor infrastructure and telephone lines the Rockies were famous for.

 

Still, it was with a great deal of excitement and anticipation that, as Christmas approached, Dutch hopped aboard the Vancouver bound train, so much so that he barely noticed the mountains and the rivers they passed as he sped toward the second love of his life.