Bullies Targets The Wrong A Waitress — Unaware She's A Karate Black Belt Working Part-Time
Chapter 2
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Dotty Carter had run that diner since her husband passed. August Carter—everyone called him Gus—had been the town's police captain for almost thirty years. He died three years ago, quietly in his sleep, the way good men sometimes get to. After he was gone, Dotty kept the diner running because she said it kept her close to him.Every regular in town understood what she meant. Every regular in town also understood the small glass case by the register. Inside it sat Gus Carter's old badge, worn smooth at the edges. Nobody touched it. Nobody joked about it. Not until that Tuesday.Joe had grown up two streets over, in the house her grandparents built. Her parents were gone before she could really remember them—a car accident on a rainy road years ago, the kind of story a town tells once and then goes quiet about out of respect. Dotty raised her. Gus raised her too, in his own way, teaching her patience before he ever taught her anything else.He used to say something she never forgot: "Anybody can throw a punch, Joe. It takes a real person to hold one back." She didn't understand it as a little girl; she understood it now.What most people in town didn't know, and wouldn't know for a while yet, was that Joe held a black belt in karate. She had earned it the hard way over six years under a man named Harold Dunmore, who ran a small dojo two blocks from the diner. She had competed once, seriously, back in high school. Something happened at that last tournament—something that made her walk away from competing for good. She never talked about it.Not even Dina, her closest friend at the diner, knew the full story. All Dina knew was that Joe moved differently than other people: calm, steady, watching everything like she was always aware of every door in the room.That Tuesday morning started like any other. Joe came in at 6:00, tied her apron, and refilled the syrup bottles. Dina Fox showed up ten minutes later, yawning, her hair still damp from the shower."You're always here before me," Dina said. "It's annoying.""Somebody has to keep this place standing," Joe said, and smiled a little.Dotty was in the back, going over the morning order with the cook, a heavyset man named Roy who had worked there for almost twenty years, since he was a young man barely out of his teens. Roy didn't talk much, but he ran that grill like it owed him something, and he had a habit of sliding an extra pancake onto a kid's plate when their parents weren't looking. He kept to himself mostly, content behind the kitchen window, though every so often Joe caught him staring off toward nothing in particular, somewhere far past the walls of the diner. She'd never asked him about it; some quiet, she figured, wasn't hers to poke at.