The morning crowd was thinning out. Monty left with his usual fried egg sandwich on rye with a coffee, climbed into his taxi and drove into the blistering morning sunlight. I remember it was scorching hot that day, the air so thick that walking through it was an effort. Breathing meant leaving my shirt drenched in sweat like laundry hanging on the line in the rain. I will not mention the heat again. You must remember it as always there, unmoved by a more important event that no amount of heat could alter.
Mrs.Thompsonin the two-seater at the back paid her bill, added a one dollar tip and slipped out quietly, walking along 2nd Avenue to open the library. A coupleof long-haul truckers were sitting in the first booth next to the front door, talking loudly about the crackhead on highway 10 who cut them both off and almost got himself killed on his race to nowhere. With that rant finished they went silent and stared out the window to their next thousand miles of black-top. There was one new face three booths along: a young woman, maybe early-20’s, eyes blood-shot, a pale desperate face, nursing her coffee, staring down at the table. She finished, spread some coins next to her cup and with her small suitcase marched across the front parking lot towards the bus terminal across the boulevard. Carly had seen women like this many times before. They were on the run. She knew that look.
In other words, it was a normal morning for Morrison’s Diner. People never stayed long. It was a pit stop along the way and most everyone was on the move. Strictly breakfast and lunch fare. Carly knew the menu byheart;not hard to remember eggs over easy, home fries, toast (brown or white), pancakes, club sandwich, chicken noodle soup, egg salad and burgers upside down and backwards. Oh yes, and coffee, two pots, always on the heater, each lasting about five minutes, two on a snowy day. This was Carly’s beat, 6AM to 3PM, breaks when you can. Morrison’s wasn’t a ‘greasy spoon’. The food was fast but it was good and the spoons were clean. Marlene made sure of that. And Morrie made certain that all the frying and boiling and steaming blended togethersmelled so damn good.
Now when I writeabout Carly I’ll sometimes revert to the present tense because she is still very much alive. I’ve known her since her first day here about a year ago when she began serving me breakfast. She’s been a little flirtatious sometimes but it’s all been in fun. She’s young enough to be my daughter but if I were younger I might have acted differently.While she was always cheerful it seemed to me that she was meant for something else. There was a distracted look about her, always staring out the window if only for a moment or at the Coca-Cola clock over the serving counter, as if counting the minutes.
An elderly couple came in and sat at one of the 4-seater tables near the swinging doors of the kitchen. Carly took their order for pancakeswith tea instead of coffee. Making her way along the row of booths she heard a wailing siren and through the windows saw a RCMP squad car speeding down the boulevard, emergency lights flashing.
“Must be an accident out on the highway,” said Marlene sitting at the cash counter facing the front doors.
Carly laid the order slip on the kitchen serving window where Morrie, the owner of Morrison’s, began whipping up the pancake batter.Carly prepped a pot of tea. Morrie never liked his first name, no one really knew it anyway, except his parents who took the secret to their graves. So Morrison became Morrie.Marlene ran the place and had hired Carly. Morrie agreed to the hire, he had learned over many years to agree to any decision of Marlene’s. Easier that way. All Morrie did was cook, the entire menu six days a week, cook, cook, cook, and all of it was delicious, and that’s why the cabbies and the truckers all come here, if only for a minute or two.
It was approaching the quiet time before the noon hour rush.Forty minutes. Marlene took care of the take-out coffees, the cabbies, a farmer on his way to the bank. Carly served the elderly couple their pancakes and tea. Another RCMP squad car wailed by.
“Must be a pretty big one,” commented Marlene.
That was possibly true, thought Carly, but how come there were no ambulances or at least a tow truck heading that way? Maybe the cops themselves didn’t know what to expect.But it must be an accident because Farnham was hardly a magnet for criminal activity except for the teenagers spray painting every concrete surface in sight. Sure the town had a library, a bank, a town hall, the Legion club and Princess Street, the main drag, had exactly five stores. Morrison’s Diner stood outside the commercial centre, looking down on somber Princess Street.
Carly took the fried egg sandwich that Morrie had made for her and went out the back door. She walked across the lot to the picnic benchunder a maple tree. She could hear them rustling in the branches. As soon as she bit into her sandwich down they flew, all four of them, lined up in a row, waiting to be served. Four chipping sparrows each with a bright red stripe on its heads. Animals have routines especially where food is involved so every day around this time Carly would scatter sunflowers seeds and toasted bread crumbs, spread them out in front of the sparrows and watch them peck up their snack, chatting softly to them about, “a whole lot of gibberish.” They would stay with her as she ate her sandwich, waiting for another crumb to fall.
As she did every day at this time she now had ten whole minutes to think of what could have been. I suppose many people think such thoughts at various times in their lives. I know I do. You know, the opportunities missed, utterly wrong decisions, or simply plain stupidity which brings us all to smacking our heads. Carly has had all of those. The high school she graduated from six years ago has as its motto carpe diem. It means seize the day. Carly had yet to seize hers.
After high school she went into communication studies at Duquette College, about three hundred miles from Farnham. By the time she graduated she had perfected a voice for on-air radio and television narration. She had impeccable diction, her unhurried, smooth delivery impressed her instructors who said she “has a career voice.” That may have been true in college but it didn’t amount to a hill of beans in the real world. Out on the job hunt to TV and radio stations she was told that voices like hers are “a dime a dozen.” Her on-screen TV auditions didn’t fare any better. She was “unfinished” and “amateurish” in her presentation. Her hair raised other problems: “Too red”, “too curly”, “too long”, “too Irish.” Too Irish? What does that mean? Carly’s family were Hungarian Jews. How had she gotten red hair from a family thick with coal-black hair? I once told her that mutations are what drives evolution.
“So I’m a mutant?” she said.
“Yes, but that’s how evolution works. Without it we’d still be living in caves and maybe not even that.”
“So I can satisfy myself that I’m working my way up the evolutionary ladder?”
“No, you simply have red hair.”
Many times Carlytried to rationalize this job. At Duquette she was friends with a classmate who drove taxi during the summer holidays and he would regale Carly with stories of the people he’d picked up, everyone from prostitutes, to stoic bankers, to the lonely ones who simply wanted someone to talk to. “A taxi is like a psychiatrist’s couch on wheels. You’re in a city of a million people and it’s the loneliest place in the world.” After graduation he travelled to Europe and last she heard he was an art curator somewhere in France. And Carly was still driving her‘taxi’.
The forty minutes were up. Carly stood up which was a sign for the sparrows that the snack and gibberish were over. They fluttered up, circled around her, chirping. In a swift, abrupt motion they soared upwards and darted out across the corn field to whatever was next in their day. “See y’a tomorrow,” she said.
Marlene was serving a customer at take-out when Carly came in at the same time a man walked along the aisle to the last booth next to the windows. He was tall, wore sunglasses, a baseball cap and light windbreaker open at the front showing that he’d given up on his stomach muscles a long time ago. Why would anyone wear a windbreaker in weather like this? He carried a canvas travel bag which he carefully placed on the seat beside him. Carly promptly arrived with a menu.
“What can I get for you today, sir?”
The man smiled at her, looked at the menu then glanced out the window at another RCMP car speeding by. He looked back to her. “I’ll start with a coffee and then decide, if that’s okay.”
“Of course,” she said. She took several strides along the aisle then abruptly stopped. That voice. She’d heard that voice before. She looked back at him for an instant. He was looking out the window.
At the service counter she prepped the coffee, milk and sugar, glancing back to the man.Now in profile, she knew.
Two minutes later he looked up from the menu as she set out the coffee array.
“Have you decided, sir?”
“Just a grilled cheese on brown, home fries, please. Thanks,” he said in a languid Dean Martin voice.
She stopped herself before turning away and said, “I’m sorry, but are you Mr. Ingram?”
He hesitated for a very long moment. Finally, “Yes,” he said as if admitting guilt. “And you are?”
“I was one of your students, at Duquette. I’m Carly Roth. You probably don’t remember me.”
He removed his sunglasses, gazed back at her with tired gray eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember much of those times.”
Carly excused herself, went to the kitchen counter and laid the order out for Morrie.
“You all right, dearie?” said Marlene. She was good at this. She laid a soft touch on Carly’s shoulder. “That guy bother you?”
“No, not at all. He was one of my college professors.”
When the grilled cheese was ready she walked down the booth aisle glancing out the window on the way. It was quiet out there. Marlene watched her as she placed the plate in front of Ingram. “Bonappetite.”
“I do remember you,” he said, pointing his finger at her. “You’re the one with the velvet voice.”
Carly does have that – a bass, smooth voice, like Lauren Bacall’s, not speaking words but gliding through them.
“No, really,” said Ingram.“I remember telling you that many times.”
Carly didn’t know what to do with herself, her hands, her face, she almost dropped right there. “I have some other customers. Sorry…” and off she went to serve the three women at the front booth.
As Carly served them she flashed back to those years. CharlesIngram had encouraged all of his students and worked with Carly to develop her narration skills. Prior to becoming a teacher he had worked as a sports broadcaster with a few TV networks. Even while doing the play-by-play of a hockey game his voice was rich and matched the excitement on the ice. Now, seeing him sipping his coffee and watching the street she wondered why he looked like life had all butdrained out of him.
“Would you like another coffee?”
He nodded and she poured coffee into his cup with a steady hand.
“What are you doing working here?” he asked.
You should talk. I’m not exactly a beggar.
“I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”
“No, I…I…I’m just trying to figure out how to answer the question. I tried, Mr. Ingram, I really did. My voice wasn’t enough. It’s as simple as that.”
“Don’t you remember what I told the class the first day, my story? No one threw me in front of a camera at first. That never happens. Hell, I started up at CUWS as a production assistant, a fancy name for a gopher. I swept the studio floor. Take your licks, learn about everything from the bottom to the top.”
That sounded pretty good to Carly except how come it hasn’t seemed to work for him. She was about to work up the courage to ask him exactly thatwhen suddenly he said: “Now Carly, I want you to leave, right now. Go,” he said with the gravitas of a teacher. She looked down at him then at the canvas bag, the zipper pulled open showing it stuffed full of hundred dollar bills. She didn’t know what was happening behind her back. Ingram did. He had seen two RCMP squad cars screech to a stop at the front doors of the diner.Two officers went around the back, two came in, guns drawn pointing at Ingram.
In a few moments the lives of Carly and Charles Ingram will dramatically change. One life will be predictable, the other not so much. What I find interesting is that this will happen on a perfectly ordinary day, in a perfectly ordinary town, in a perfectly ordinary diner that no one, not even me, could have predicted.
“Hands on the table!” barked one of the officers. Ingram obeyed.“Back away, ma’am!”
Carly backed off. The other officer came up behind Carly and moved her to the side. Her back was against the window, the scorching rays of the sun burning into her back. She saw his arms as tense as steel. The officer facing Ingram crept closer, gun still poised. Carly thought if so much as a feather drops…“He doesn’t have a gun!” she shouted. The officer looked at her. The gun stayed out but his arms relaxed just a little. The officer looked back to Ingram,“Okay, hands behind your back, step out, slowly!” As soon as Ingram stood up the officer handcuffed him saying, “You’re under arrest for armed robbery and uttering threats…” then continued by reading him his rights. Before he was taken out Ingram turned to Carly and said, “Follow your voice.” He was loaded into the back of a squad car and driven away.
Ingram pleaded guilty to armed robbery and sentenced to eight years in a penitentiary. Even the judge couldn’t believe who was standing in front of him, a man he’d listened to a hundred times at the sports desk. Ingram had said to the tellers of the five banks he had robbed that there was a bomb wrapped around his chest and he would pull the cord if they didn’t hand over five thousand. Evidently even faking that you have a weapon, a bomb, means you have one, thus “armed”. Call his bluff? Would you risk it? Besides there was the voice, “a calm assured mellow,” as one teller put it.
After hitting the City&District in Farnham that morning he decided to have some breakfast and wait. How did he get to that point in his life? I wanted to find out and managed to visit him a few times in prison. By letter somehow I gained his confidence and he put me on his visitors list, which was not a long one. He greeted me cordially in the visitors room. As soon as he spoke I could tell that his voice had lost its lustre. He still sounded like Dean Martin but it was a Martin with a hangover and a throat scorched by cigarettes.
“I’ve fought depression all my adult life even while I was doing TV sports,” he said. “It was all an illusion, I was an illusion, the hair, the make-up, the suit, all a big act. Inside…” He paused to look out the window through the bars. “I’d be on the road with the Blue Bombers or the Tigers and I’d do play-by-play, and it was great, everybody loved my work…and I’d go back to the hotel, fall into bed and cry all night.”
Ingram said it got so bad he got fired from his teaching job at Duquette when he couldn’t face his students any longer. Often he came in late or not at all. When he was in class, he was a mess, couldn’t teach anymore. The spiral continued: his wife left him, exhausted from his mood swings; he burned through his savings then his unemployment insurance; he was broke. He had never been broke before, money always came easy to him, and that made him even more desperate.
“But you didn’t rob those banks for the money, did you,” I said. “One doesn’t rob a bank then go to the local diner for breakfast.”
“You figured that out?” Ingram said looking at me with a stern gaze.
“Of course. Life gets too tough then you think, what the hell, three squares a day, a place to sleep, and all the time in the world.”
“Yeah, all the time in the world to get a shiv in my back. No, it wasn’t like that. I needed the money, I really did. But I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. The first banks I hit, they were easy. I’d say calmly to the teller to hand over whatever was in the till, and they did. I had a car then so I did make a getaway. But the last one, the one in Farnham, I’d pretty much had it. I knew they would catch up to me, and I didn’t want anyone to get hurt, including myself. So I went to Morrison’s for my last meal as a free man.”
When I reminded him that he would likely be released on good behaviour after two-thirds of his sentence he shook his head.“The whole idea terrifies me. I have no image to live up to out there. I have nothing left to protect. I erased my entire life.”
It was two years later that I read in the newspaper that Charles Ingram had assaulted a prison guard. The details were sketchy - as are most reports from prison – but it appears that the assault was unprovoked, thatIngram walked up to the guard and slugged him. For that Ingram got three years added to his sentence. The fear of being free.
Now I haven’t forgotten about Carly. She is still frozen in place in the empty diner.Marlene and Morrie came out of hiding in the kitchen. Another police officer took photographs of the canvas money bag.Marlene approached Carly, “Are you all right, dearie? I’m closin’ up. Everyone’s really upset. Carly?”
Carly nodded to Marlene then looked back out the windows. There must have been a million things going through her head. No one was hurt but guns were drawn and in those moments Carly’s life came into sharp focus. How did Ingram end up here in front of her? Was this her day? I really don’t know the answer to those questions. What I do know is this.
After about ten minutes of standing still, Carly went into the changing room and cleared out her locker.
“Are you sure, dearie? Are you going to be all right?”
“Yes, I’m going to be fine.”
Marlene gave Carlyher wages for the week in cash along with a hug. Morrie did the same along with an egg salad sandwich to go. Carly went out the back door of the diner and walked over to the maple tree and called out for her friends. They promptly flew down and chirped their way through the bread crumbs that Carly laid out. “You guys take care of yourselves.” Then she walked away, across the parking lot and out to the highway. No one around here saw her again.
Apparently she went to her 2-room apartment and cleared that out too. She didn’t leave a forwarding address with the landlady.
Five years later I was travelling in the mid-West researching a story I was writing. I pulled into the small town of Alexandria and booked a room at the only hotel. On the tourist information board in the lobby was poster announcing a summer-stock theatre company doing a production of A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen that very evening. I thought what the hell, it’s not as if there’s a lot to do here. The desk clerk agreed and directed me to the theatre “just a piece that way.” It was a large white circus tent erected in a farmer’s field. It seemed that the entire town had come out for the show because it was standing-room only. I found myself a corner at the back of the tent.
It was an intimate setting, a theatre-in-the-round with a circular stage and the audience seated in a semi-circle around it. No matter where you were in the audience you were close to the stage and the performers, so when the principle character of Nora Helmer entered the stage there was no doubt it was Carly Roth.
Now before you think that I’ve written a rags-to-Broadway story, keep in mind that summer-stock theatre is a training ground for all actors working their way up the ladder. I’d wager that half the male actors in this troupe are driving cab and the females are waiting tables. Carly isn’t doing that anymore.
I’m not an expert in the theatrical arts but I was captivated by Carly’s performance, maybe a little bit biased. She was utterly convincing. She became Nora, a wife struggling to free herself from the “doll’s house” of a marriage by asserting a mind of her own, renouncing unquestioning obedience to her husband, her red hair as flaming hot as the anger. Tough stuff for 19th century Europe and tougher still for 21st century Canada. And there was the voice, that deep, serene timbre I knew so well, the voice of experience went from “What would you like this morning?” to “My duty is to myself.” It is what she said to herself five years ago.
I didn’t go backstage to see her after the show. I figured she wouldn’t remember me and if she did maybe she’d rather forget. Outside there were a couple of equipment trucks parked at the back of the tent. Emblazoned in bright colours on the side panels: Beggar’s Workshop Travelling Theatre. Salaries must be wonderful. And fringe benefits? Freedom. Freedom of the road, the freedom of creativity and imagination, exactly the duty Carly made for herself.
The End
© Richard Stanford – 2025
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