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The Girl in the Clean, Well-Lighted Place You are on the road on a book tour, and it’s late, but not late, just past the time when you know you should have eaten—your stomach has told you so. The motel room is quiet, with things scattered about in the casual clutter of a man alone, and you really want to be anywhere but here. It’s not like you’re in a strange town, since you grew up just outside it and went to school here, but things have changed in thirty years, and night has settled on you like an empty shell inside which even familiar stars cannot light the way. Towns, the people in them—they change. Have to. It’s their nature. You’re back for professional reasons, not because of aging and dying parents, as was the case almost a decade ago; you’re back briefly, and then you’ll leave again, off to other places. It’s not like being in a town where everyone ’s a stranger and the buildings and streets are strange. You know the town, and some of the people you still know, though they’re older now and off in their own worlds, and your woman, the one person you really want to be with, is not with you, though you can almost imagine her beside you, sense her with all your senses, the way you do a woman you are profoundly in love with. You are the stranger, in town for a day or two, then back on the road. You are tired of cheeseburgers and Subways and pizza, the standard fare of the book tour—you want steak in some clean, well-lighted place, as Hemingway described a café in one of his stories. You want to sit in a room where people are enjoying food and each other’s company, where children chirp and giggle and couples whisper across the table to each other and rub feet, and you want to watch and listen, for this is what you do as a writer: you sit and watch and listen and record, and if you can, you make something of it. You drive around behind Leigh Mall, where once there was a Morrison’s, but the cafeteria is gone, something else in its place, but not a place to eat, so you stop and idle, then notice across the street a sign advertising a restaurant or a bar, where a full meal might be served. You drive over there and park 38 Things Literary, More or Less in front. There are many parking places to choose from—it is not a busy night. When you enter this clean, well-lighted place, you realize that you are the only person there, with lines of silent, empty tables and booths, all dressed out for company, but no one else is there. A pleasant but quiet and empty place. A restaurant without customers. Then there are two pleasant people before you, a man probably in his late thirties, a manager perhaps, and a teenage girl, a waitress. You tell them that above all else in this life right now you want a good steak, tenderloin or rib eye cooked medium-rare, and a nice place to eat it in, that nothing else matters. The man tells you that they cater primarily to a lunch crowd, that the only steak they serve is a rib eye, which is certainly not a specialty, that you’d do better to go over to Old Hickory or out to the Golden Horn, where they are known for their steaks. But Old Hickory’s closed on Monday nights, and the Horn is way out on 82 West, and, besides, this guy’s being honest, which you find reassuring, so you say, “I’ll just have your rib eye, medium-rare.” The pretty little teenage waitress escorts you to your booth, which she’s allowed you to choose, a hard decision since you could sit anywhere you want to, and asks what kind of dressing you want for your salad. You tell her and sit back and think about how damned lonely it is on the road, but sometimes lonely is not bad because lonely teaches you to appreciate the things and people in your life that keep you from being lonely. Sometimes you like lonely, but tonight you don’t. Tonight you hate it. Then your salad is in front of you...

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