Chapter 148: Last Day
Emily was officially working her final shift at Bee’s diner. Earlier she had come in to work thirty minutes before she was supposed to. All so that she could catch the manager before he left. When she had handed the man her resignation letter he had read it with a sorrowful look in his eyes. And then once he had been done with it, he had looked up at her.
"You were one of the best night shift waitresses that this diner has ever had. I am sad to lose you. Is there anything else I can do to make you reconsider your decision?" He had asked, and Emily had shaken her head.
And the man, clearly used to waitresses’ quitting, had not tried to follow it up some more. Instead, he had simply accepted the letter and nodded.
Now Emily was in the middle of what would be the last time that she ever set foot in Bee’s diner as a worker there.
Thanks to her sleeping problem, Emily had quit a lot of jobs. She had quite a bit of experience when it came to that. But one thing that she had found to be consistent was that there was a certain feeling when it came to quitting. There was just something about the last shift, or working off the two weeks notice that was required in order to leave a job that just felt different. All of the things that used to bother you about the place. Suddenly did not seem so bad. Emily had had that feeling come over her in the majority of the various places that she had worked at. And as it turned out, Bee’s diner was no different.
Coming into work night after night, Emily had not really been interested in anything at the diner. After all, it was hard to get excited over the same walls, same furniture, tables and chairs arranged in one particular way each and every single night. But now that she knew that she would not be coming back.
The whole place just looked different. It had a new feel to it. Logically, Emily knew that everything was as it had always been. The only thing that had changed was her. She was seeing things with rose colored glasses now because she would not be seeing it ever again.
And her rose-colored glasses theory was proven to be true when the police walked in. Normally, Emily always served them while feeling a low-level irritation, at their crude remarks and their entitled attitudes. But now, as she took their orders and gave them their food, when Emily smiled at them, the smile was genuine. It was not a smile that said that she was happy to see them, but it was one that said she was happy to be seeing them for the last time. Something that she was pretty sure that most of them would take offense to. But since they could not read her mind, she kept on smiling at them.
Some of them even returned the smile. Even if the ones that they gave her looked very fake and practiced, like they had spent hours in the mirror learning how to smile charmingly.