Burnt Sugar Custard at Mile Marker 47

The diner sat alone on the highway like it had missed a memo about closing time. No other buildings. No gas station glow. Just a low concrete rectangle and a sign with half the letters burned out, buzzing softly in the dark. One of the O’s flickered on and off, as if it couldn’t decide whether it was worth the effort.

One light flickered inside. A bell rang when I pushed the door open, sharp and lonely, though nobody was behind the counter yet.

I took a stool anyway. Vinyl cracked under my weight. The counter was worn smooth where elbows had rested for decades, the laminate dulled to a soft shine. A stack of menus sat untouched at the end, corners curled, prices crossed out and rewritten in pen. Coffee rings marked the surface in overlapping circles, like a quiet record of who had waited here and how long.

The air smelled like old coffee and sugar that had seen heat too many times. Burnt, but not unpleasant. Familiar, even if I couldn’t place where from.

A radio murmured somewhere in the back, too low to catch words. Just the rhythm of a voice, steady enough to keep the place from feeling abandoned.

When she came out from the back, she looked tired in the way that meant practiced. Not the kind of tired that asks for sympathy. The kind that knows how to keep going. Hair pinned up, sleeves rolled, a faint dusting of flour on her cheek like she’d forgotten it was there. She paused when she saw me, just for a beat, eyes flicking toward the windows like she was counting cars that weren’t there, then reached for a mug.

She didn’t ask what I wanted. She poured coffee and slid it over. It was hot enough to steam the cold from my hands, the ceramic chipped along the rim in a way that suggested it had survived at least one fall.

“Kitchen’s closing,” she said. “But I’ve got custard left.”

“Burnt sugar?” I asked.

She smiled at that. Not big. Just enough to show I’d said the right thing. “Always.”

I’d pulled off the road because my phone had died and the radio was nothing but static. Because the mile markers were coming too fast and then not at all, numbers blurring until they lost meaning. Because the night felt too wide, like it was daring me to keep driving straight through it and see what happened.

Because sometimes you stop even when you don’t know why.

She took a ramekin from the cooler and set it on the counter. White ceramic, faint crack along one side that had been repaired once and left alone after. She sprinkled sugar across the surface, careful but not precious, shaking the spoon until it lay even and pale.

She lit the torch and leaned in. The flame hissed. Blue at first, then orange. The sugar bubbled, darkened, smoothed itself into glass. The smell was sharp and sweet and faintly bitter, cutting through the old coffee like a memory you hadn’t meant to think about.

She shut the torch off and waited. Tapped the top with the back of a spoon. Listened.

“Good enough,” she said, and set it in front of me.

I broke the top with the spoon. The sugar shattered clean, like thin ice on a pond you know better than to step onto. The sound echoed too loud in the quiet diner, then faded. Underneath, the custard was pale and smooth, still warm. It tasted like eggs and milk and patience. Like someone had stood over it and waited instead of rushing. Like the kind of thing you only make when you expect to be here a while.

I ate slowly. There was no reason not to.

For a moment, I thought about what it would mean to stay somewhere long enough to learn its rhythms — to know which cracks mattered and which ones held. The thought landed, heavy and precise, and I set it down again before it could ask anything of me.

“You pass through?” she asked.

“Trying to,” I said. “Headed west.”

She nodded, like west was an answer she heard a lot. Like it meant something specific here. The way people say it when they don’t want to say running, or starting over, or I don’t know what else to do.

“How far?” she asked.

“As far as the car gets me.”

“That far,” she said, and poured herself coffee from the same pot, grimacing at the last inch like she already knew how it would taste.

We ate in quiet for a minute. The diner hummed, the refrigerator cycling on and off. Outside, a truck roared by, wind rattling the windows, then nothing again. The silence settled back in like dust, fine and familiar.

I noticed a map taped behind the counter, edges yellowed, corners held down with old receipts. Pushpins marked places. Some clustered close, towns I recognized from signs I’d already passed. A few far apart, spaced like guesses. None of them labeled.

“Those customers?” I asked.

She followed my gaze. “Some of them.”

“You keep track?”

“Not on purpose,” she said. “People leave marks whether you mean them to or not.”

She watched me finish the last bite, then took the empty ramekin and held it for a second longer than necessary, like she was weighing something.

“My dad taught me this,” she said after a while, tapping the rim. “Used to make it when business was slow. Said it gave people something to remember us by.”

“Seems risky,” I said.

She wiped the counter with a rag that had seen better days, the motion slow and practiced. “Everything is.”

I asked how long she’d been there.

“All my life,” she said. “Left once. Came back.”

“What happened?”

She shrugged. “Out there didn’t taste right.”

The radio in the back clicked off. Somewhere, water shut down in a pipe.

“You ever think about leaving again?” I asked.

She didn’t answer right away. She lined up the mugs behind the counter, handles turned the same direction. “Sometimes,” she said. “Mostly I think about tomorrow.”

“What about it?”

She smiled again, smaller this time. “Someone might stop.”

I paid. She waved off the tip, then accepted it anyway, folding it once before tucking it under the register like she’d done a thousand times before. When I stood to leave, joints stiff from the stool, she asked where I was sleeping.

“Car,” I said. “If it starts.”

She reached under the counter and handed me a charger, cord wrapped tight with a rubber band that had lost most of its stretch. “Give it back next time.”

“Next time,” I said, though we both knew how that usually went.

She walked me to the door. The bell rang again, louder this time, sharper against the quiet. Outside, the night felt smaller. Manageable. The road was still there, waiting, but it didn’t feel like it was chasing me anymore.

My phone buzzed to life in my hand. One bar of signal. Enough to let someone know I was still moving. Enough to keep the map from going blank.

I stood there longer than I needed to, engine idling, watching the diner through the glass. She was already turning off lights, moving through the space like she knew every shadow and which ones to trust. The last bulb flickered, hesitated, then went dark. The highway swallowed the sound.

As I pulled back onto the road, the mile marker slid past my headlights, the number barely visible before it vanished into the rearview mirror. The radio crackled once, then settled into something almost like music.

On the drive, the taste of burnt sugar lingered. Sweet, bitter, gone too fast. The kind of thing you don’t forget, even if you never return.