Lucien and Amber

A story of two nearly invisible people of Hiram Falls who discover that the stars can sometimes conquer their shyness and hesitation.

December 8, 1974

The stars wink above Jenna’s Diner in Hiram Falls. They blink and sparkle, disappear and reappear as clouds, wispy and thin, move across the frigid sky with speed that would amaze Lucien Fortier, if he only he could see them. But he can’t. It’s too dark. So to Lucien it seems as though someone is turning the stars on and off and then on again but in no discernible pattern.

Kind of like Lucien’s moods, which shift faster than the speed of light. Which is why most people are a little leery of Lucien every time they bump into him. 

Lucien is standing in the parking lot of Jenna’s Diner, his boots having crunched to a halt on the snow that thawed in the sun and froze when it set. He tilts his head back and stares at the stars. The panorama swallows him, makes him feel like a speck, a tiny molecule in the universe.

Lucien takes surprising solace in that sensation, in the knowing that he is just as insignificant as the next guy — no better, no worse. And who knows, he thinks, maybe there’s another Lucien standing on one of those stars, looking out at the vastness, at the brilliance. 

“Cool,” Lucien says to no one.

Cool is Lucien’s favorite word, a word adopted during what he calls his New York Period when, for a time, he bounced around on strangers’ couches, wore blue jeans and white t-shirts, white socks and black shoes and went to smoky cafés and listened to beat poetry that made no sense to him whatsoever, though he still nodded and learned to snap his fingers at the right time.

Lucien is still unsure why he hopped the train in Hiram Falls and made his way to The Big Apple. He knows he needed something different, somewhere different, some place where he could be overwhelmed by the lights and noise and people, needed to be shaken out of whatever it was that made him feel like his feet were stuck in April mud.

“I was just trying to find my groove,” he told folks when he came back.

Ten years later, Lucien is still looking for his groove.

He’s near 30 now and lives alone in a tiny apartment above The Hiram Falls Apothecary and eats spaghetti from the can or a bologna sandwich on white bread with mayo and Velveeta. He bounces from one job to another, “shit jobs,” he calls them, jobs where all he does is fetch things. A hod of bricks to the mason, packs of shingles up the ladders to the roofers, two-by-fours to the framers, whatever Lucien can carry. And small though he may be, “I can carry shit,” as he likes to say.

But he’s the low man. Always the low man. They make fun of his name, call him “Lu-lu” or “Grunt” or “Butthead,” which is closely followed by bellowing for him to go get this or that and goddamnit be quick about it.

Lucien can take only so much of it at one time, so he ends up quitting. And then gets another job that pays him a buck-fifty an hour and leaves him unable to stand straight in the mornings.

This fall, when someone yelled at him to hurry up while he was halfway up the ladder with a 70-pound rack of cedar shingles, he just stopped climbing and let the bundle slide off his shoulder, and he watched it explode at the bottom in a cloud of dust. He was down the ladder, into his truck and spitting out to the road before anyone truly understood what Lucien Fortier had just done.

Stars wink above the diner as Lucien feels the cold creep through his coat and makes him think he is losing his resolve – the determination he carefully constructed in front of the mirror in his apartment when he stood proud with his best shirt and clean pants and brushed-off boots.

Lucien scolds himself, tells himself to “just go do it for chrissakes,” and walks up to the steps and into the diner.

Now what Lucien is dead set on doing is to ask Amber Ouellette — the new waitress at the diner and, in Lucien’s mind, the only Ouellette worth a damn — if she’d like to go out on a date.

But now, suddenly, standing just inside the Diner door, the heat and chatter rising up on him in a way he hadn’t expected, fogging up his glasses, almost knocking him over, and just moments before he actually does it, he is still not sure that he can, even though all he wants is to have a nice dinner with Amber at some nice restaurant with white tablecloths down in St. Albans, or maybe they’ll go bowl a couple of frames down at Crystal Palace Lanes, or go to a movie at the Orpheum or maybe, just maybe, go for a walk down by the river in the light of the stars. 

“Wouldn’t that be cool, Amber?” he says.

“No. Not really, Lucien,” Amber says, her heart fluttering, looking at Lucien’s fogged-up glasses, unsure of what else to say. “You want a booth or are you gonna sit at the counter?”

Amber Ouellette, who’s nearer to 30 than she cares to admit even to herself, doesn’t know what to make of Lucien. For that matter, she doesn’t know what to make of any man.

Amber’s formative contact with men has been with her brothers and cousins and uncles and the men who call themselves uncles who come by the Ouellette compound to watch TV on the snowy black and white or to just shoot the shit and get drunk and smoke dope.

And ever since she can remember they give her that sly smile as they burp and fart and ask her ‘How ya doing, darlin’ Can you get me another beer from the fridge?” And this happens no matter which Ouellette trailer she’s in, all of them arranged like spokes in a wheel circling around the old family homestead which was abandoned years ago and finally caved in last winter in the big blizzard.

Amber is just three months into this new job as a waitress at the diner. She’s fresh off the only job she’d ever had, typing and filling out forms and answering the phone for Brad Pike at Pike Insurance across from the bank. She and her cousin, Cheryl, were both hired to replace the diner’s longtime waitresses Mira and Patsy who walked out one morning at 7:32 a.m. after working at the diner for what seemed like 100 years.

People still talk about it, about how Mira and Patsy, with half their orders up, took their aprons off — didn’t even hang them up for gosh sakes, just tossed them on the counter — and waved goodbye to everyone saying they couldn’t wait another minute to get out of town.

Amber heard about the walkout from Brad Pike, a man with bad breath who returned from breakfast pissed as hell that his eggs and sausage came late and were cold to boot. When Amber heard how he described Mira and Patsy in such hateful terms, she wondered how he might be describing her to people in town. Worse still, she’d just gotten off the phone with a man distraught at Brad’s letter — which she had to type — denying his insurance claim. There was nothing she could do to make it right.

So that night she went over to Cheryl’s trailer and the two of them got up at 3:30 the next morning, slipped out like the wind and went down to the Diner to see if they could get hired.

Jenna Bartels, the owner of Jenna’s Diner of course, liked the two right away. And not just because they were up and making sense at 4 in the morning. She’d known them since they were kids and knew what they were up against up on Lincoln Hill, up living in the “Ouellette Compound” as the Ouellettes call it, or “The Eyesore” as the rest of the town calls it.

So Jenna hired them on the spot. She even agreed to deposit their tips and wages in their bank accounts given that the Ouellette men, and their hangers-on, always seemed to have plenty of cash for cigarettes, beer and pot but never enough for groceries and the electric bill and were constantly hunting around Cheryl’s and Amber’s bedrooms looking for where they might have hidden some cash.

It didn’t take Amber long to love her new job. She likes Jenna and her mom, Lavender, who comes in to run the register and, Rina, the quiet woman from the top of Mt. Riga, who fills in for Lavender when she doesn’t feel like working. And Amber likes getting up early when everyone else is asleep and likes getting decent pay for once and a bonus: breakfast and lunch that doesn’t cost her a dime.

The only thing she hasn’t figured out is how to deal with all these men giving her moon eyes and soft whistles, and she still shudders when she thinks about the time that older gentleman from Barton pinched her ass as she went by. Jenna banned him for a year and told Amber not to worry; most men wouldn’t dare do such a disrespectful thing.

Nonetheless, the experience added to Amber’s shyness honed in high school when she grew like a bean and had scary looking acne until one day, long after she graduated, all her pimples just vanished like magic and Amber’s beauty broke through, though you’d have a hard time convincing her of that.

So if Amber were to tell you, she’d say men scare the bejeezus out of her, even though, if asked, she’d admit that Lucien Fortier seems gentle and nice and kind of cute.

But she still doesn’t know what to do with his question, sprung on her all sudden like, as he wipes the steam off his glasses with his shirttail, an act Lucien undertakes because he still doesn’t know what to say next.

Amber doesn’t either, so she grabs a menu and leads him down to Booth 9, the one that has the nice view of the falls in the daytime, and after he slides in on the turquoise Naugahyde seat she asks him whether he wants water or coffee.

When she returns with a mug of coffee, she asks what he’d like.

“I told you,” Lucien says, softly. “I’d like to take you to dinner or walk with you under the stars.”

“And I told you. Not interested.” 

Lucien, flustered, orders a burger and fries. “And a vanilla shake, please.”

Amber can feel her face flush, wonders why she is being so harsh, wonders whether she said what she said a bit too loud. She folds her order pad and tucks it in the pocket of her apron, turns and goes right into the kitchen where she stares at the back of Jenna who is flipping three hamburgers and two grilled cheese sandwiches for the family at Booth 7. 

Jenna can feel Amber staring, so she turns. 

“It’s Lucien,” Amber says.

“What’s he done?”

“He asked me out on a date.”

Jenna is about to say ‘well that’s nice,’ but then she sees Amber’s face and is not sure how to read it. She turns back to the griddle. She clatters the spatula. She moves the onions to the corner. Finally, deciding she can’t hold back another moment, she turns.

“There’s nothing wrong with that, Amber,” Jenna says. “He’s not so bad. He’s just a little moody. Probably because he’s a lonely guy. Has no family. They all died early. And this is a tough time of year when you’re lonely, what with the holidays and the days short as they are.”

Amber gives that some thought. And she gives some thought to the fact that Lucien has been nothing but friendly to her. And she wonders, again, just for a moment, what in tarnation is wrong with me.

Lucien, meanwhile, sits in the booth staring at his coffee mug and cannot console himself. He glances out at the other diners and wonders how many of them heard Amber turn him down, and sees one woman quickly avert her eyes before his meets hers. Lucien looks back out the window into the darkness, wishing he could see the stars winking in the night. 

He ponders what he should do. He fidgets, finally sips his coffee and watches Amber bring out an order for the family in Booth 7, sees her smile, such a beautiful smile, he thinks, and watches her smooth, balanced walk, graceful even. And that just makes Lucien feel sad and a thought needles into his mind that maybe he should just leave. Perhaps so, he thinks, perhaps that is what I should do. Yah. That’s what I’ll do.

So he slides out of the booth, reaches into his pocket, pulls out a folded $5 bill from his frayed wallet — a morning’s work — tucks it under the sugar shaker and walks out of the diner, upset that he’d forgotten about the tiny bell above the door that announces his departure. 

Amber hears it. 

“Cancel the order, Jenna,” she says through the server window. 

“Hadn’t started it.”

Amber goes out to Booth 9 and sees the $5 bill, and she feels sad. More than that really — she feels horrible. She feels she has done Lucien wrong and has done so not because of anything Lucien has done, but because she doesn’t know what to do when a man asks her out.

So she picks up the $5 bill, tucks it into her apron pocket and rushes to the door and outside without even getting her coat or hat, the air biting cold against her thin uniform.

And there is Lucien, standing in the middle of the parking lot, leaning back and looking up at the sky.

Amber walks up beside him.

“Aren’t the stars cool?” Lucien asks, still looking up. “So clear and bright in the winter. Look how they come on and off. Just like that.”

Amber looks up and watches the stars appear and disappear as the clouds skid across the sky, the stars almost luminescent against the black, and she takes a deep breath and feels the cold, clear air deep in her lungs, and it awakens something inside her. Makes her feel strong, alive.

“Yes,” Amber says, still looking up. “The stars are really cool, Lucien.”

She smells the hemlocks that surround the parking lot, hears the falls that give the town its name, hears Lucien shift his feet on the crunchy snow. She looks over at him.

“And, yes,” she says, “it would be nice to have dinner with you in St. Albans some night at a fancy restaurant with white tablecloths.” 

He turns and looks at her. He smiles. Amber smiles.

“Let’s go inside, Lucien. Have your dinner. You paid for it for gosh sakes and, besides, it’s freezing out here.”

Lucien lingers a moment, one last look at the stars, so majestic, so gorgeous, both warmed by the thought of sitting together at that restaurant some night soon.

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This story, presented to live audiences by Vermont Stage Company, emerged from a writing workshop in which I asked participants to create a story using a line from one of several poems written by my friend, the late Reuben Jackson. I derived this story from Reuben’s poem, “thinking of emmet till” which begins: “Stars winked above the diner …”