Walking on Broken Glass - Christa Allan [6]
Tina materialized from behind me and placed the coffee carafe on the table. She smiled at Carl, who’d started orchestrating his dining concerto. First, he slid the utensils from the faux-cloth napkin. Then, one by one, the knife, fork, and spoon pirouetted in one hand while he wiped them off with the napkin in his other hand. It was a ritual I expected at every meal away from home, but this was Tina's first show. She was mesmerized. Carl, however, was oblivious to his one-woman audience.
Still no coffee cups.
I leaned forward, as if on the brink of revealing tabloid information. “Tina,” I whispered, “what's the likelihood of finding cups for the coffee?”
Her crimson lips puckered as if they’d just been pried off a lemon. She puffed her cheeks and sashayed off to what I hoped was the holy grail of lost coffee cups.
Carl was either studying his reflection in the spoon or analyzing a smidge of gunk. I watched him. In that silly moment, surrounded by strangers and noise, I glimpsed the Carl of my heart and heard fragments of delicious laughter. It swished by like those faces on the metro in Ezra Pound's poem, like petals on a wet, black bough. If only I could collect them to reassemble a relationship.
The high-chaired baby behind him leaned over, bombed the floor with scrambled egg, and applauded himself. I tried not to stare, but tides of longing swelled in the hollowness that should have been filled with Alyssa.
Carl waved his hand in front of me. “Come back. Food's here.” I’d obviously underestimated Tina's stealth capacity. Again, she hovered. Her brown tray seesawed near my head. My head, not Carl's.
She transferred her cargo of blueberry blintzes, whole wheat pancakes, and, finally, coffee cups to our table. She wedged her tray on her left hip and plunged her free hand into her tassel of chocolate hair braids.
The young waitress produced a pencil with a flair David Copperfield would have applauded. “Anything else y’all need?”
Sure, place my order for love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. But Tina was in the business of feeding bodies, not souls. I just said, “No, thanks.”
Carl's attention shifted to his plate. Each round, golden pancake was stabbed and lifted with one fork tine. He swirled his buttered knife between each one in figure-eight patterns so precise the Olympic committee would have awarded him a 9.7 score—at least if the judge from China cooperated.
I poured myself a cup of coffee and wondered again how to explain my drinking problem to the man who, oddly enough, always said I was never satisfied. If I told him about a fabulous house under construction nearby, he’d ask why the one we lived in wasn’t good enough for me. I thought we had conversations; instead, he thought we had indictments.
“Pretend someone asked if you wanted to invest gobs of money in something that disappeared in minutes. Or asked you if he could smash your head with a baseball bat. Or asked if you wanted to vomit profusely.”
“Why would I want to do such patently stupid things?” He talked to his lap while he smoothed out the wrinkles in his napkin.
“Exactly!” I punctured the air with my fork and knife on their way to dissecting my blintzes. “See, normal people would wonder if they were being interviewed for a reality show for the criminally insane.”
Carl surveyed his options from the syrup carousel. His steel gray eyes scanned my face. “And?”
“And, well, alcoholics listen to this and think we’re talking to someone we threw up on the night before. We’d offer him a drink. We’d hope he’d ask if we were ready for another round.” I launched a chunk of blintz into my mouth and wondered if I’d soon be attempting a serious conversation with a purple-stained tongue.
The aluminum carousel squeaked as he fidgeted between maple syrup and pecan praline. He stopped at maple and wiggled the little pitcher from its sticky neck hold.
“How do you come up with this stuff? Who told you all this?”
Where was a chalkboard when I needed one? I would’ve