New short story
Bowlegged
I’d been driving for a while when the light came on for gas. Pulling off the interstate got me into this little town I’d never heard of and right into a dinky little gas station with a restaurant next door.
Since the whole world now is just one long line of Shell stations attached to 7-11s with Taco Bells on the other side of the parking lot, the idea of eating actual food in a place like this was too much to pass up. I gassed my car, parked on the side, and headed in to the restaurant. It was one of those old booths-down-one-side, counter-down-the-other joints that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a jukebox in, but no. I could see the XM receiver up on a high shelf with wires coming out of it and going up into the ceiling. Modernity.
I can sit in a booth at Burger King, so I sat at the counter. I felt tall. I felt like the stranger who’d just ridden into town. I felt mysterious and dangerous, and I started eyeballing the other folks in the place.
“You look like you need some tea, sugar,” said the too-thin counter girl. She seemed like someone who had tried too hard to look 18 once, and now was trying too hard to look believably 29. Apparently to her, mysterious and dangerous strangers drank tea. And went by “sugar.”
“Coffee please,” I corrected her. I hadn’t taken my sunglasses off yet, and I knew it made me more dangerous.
“It’s your stomach,” she said. “Too bright in here for you?”
“No, it’s--” I started, then took off my glasses. “You know how it is, you get used to having ‘em on, and just forget.”
“Oh, now that’s nicer. Handsome face like yours, now we can all see it better,” she winked as she set my coffee down. She put a little porcelain creamer next to it, and made sure by laying on of hands that I saw where the sweetener packets were.
As I brought the coffee to my lips, she brought the menu out from under the counter and put it on my left, opposite the creamer. “You take your time, sugar.”
I took my time, but I didn’t take any more of the coffee. Not only was it not good coffee, it would have to improve markedly to be poor coffee. It had been made, by my rough estimate, several weeks before, possibly in the back of a tanker truck that had been driven very slowly through a house on fire, and kept warm since likely by means of a low-yield nuclear weapon. It was coffee that would make a Navy Seal drop to his knees and beg for a merciful release. Looking over the menu, I asked as casually as I felt possible for a dangerous stranger, “Is that tea still an option?” and found that it was.
Most of my first glass was needed to rinse the taste out of my mouth. After that I could focus on the menu. I like to think that I learn lessons pretty quick, so I asked for a recommendation on what to have to eat, and upon getting one, I ordered what was billed as “the biggest cheezesteak sandwich this side of Asheville” with a side onion rings. I’d been driving on the interstate and back roads off and on all morning, and I wasn’t a hundred percent sure which side of Asheville I was on any more, and I didn’t ask.
Little joints like this always seem to smell great, and this one was no exception. It smelled like buttered toast and grilled red meat and fried onions and baked pies. The counter girl smelled like a perfume an old girlfriend of mine in high school used to wear and seemed to be entertained by my resumed eyeballing of the place.
“You meetin’ someone?” she asked. The tea glass had been refilled without my noticing.
“Just stretchin’ a bit.” Dangerous strangers talk just like local folks. It’s part of their mysterious allure. “Been in the car all morning.”
“It’ll catch up with you.”
“How long y’all been here?” I asked, remembering my dad talking that way to little shop owners when he drove his truck from town to town.
“We watched ‘em put the highway in,” she said. Then what she’d said caught her short and she added, “I used to come over after school and watch.” She wasn’t too much older than me, I started to feel. I remembered when this interstate was put in, too, because it took away so much of my dad’s business, and I was in elementary school then.
“So you grew up around here?”
“Honey, I grew up in here,” she laughed. “Meemaw used to work here, and she kept up with me after school. I used to sit in that booth over there and do my homework until it was done, and when she got off at 6, she’d carry me home. I’d have dinner with Mama and Daddy, Daddy’d look at my homework, I’d go to bed, get up the next mornin’, go to school, then it all started over.” She told me this in the same voice you’d tell somebody how to make a cake, like she was giving me the recipe for counter girl. “Hey, Petey,” she said to an old man working his way onto the seat next to me.
“Ashley,” he said to her the way old people who’ve made all the pleasant chit chat they’re ever going to make say. Only so many breaths left, no sense wasting them. Not rude, just efficient.
Ashley had a cup of coffee on the counter before he was through settling. They seemed to exchange some meaningful look that escaped me. I gave up trying to be dangerous and mysterious. I nearly gave up on the plan to eat. I wasn’t sure I could endure knowing that there was someone on this planet who could drink that coffee.
Then my food was in front of me, and I ate anyway. It was big. It was doubtless at least two nails in my coffin, if not one whole side of the box itself. But Ashley knew how to recommend. It was the best thing I’d eaten in memory. I couldn’t eat it without occasionally moaning in pleasure.
“Ashley’d make a good little woman for you,” said the old man.
I choked, the way you do when you start to exhale just at exactly the same moment you’re swallowing something. It doesn’t jeopardize your airway, but it shoves just a little bit of whatever you were about to swallow up on top of your palate and it feels like you’ve suddenly got a sinus full of chewed cheezesteak. It took a while for me to sort myself, and a lot of tea.
“I beg your pardon?” I finally managed to say to him.
“Ashley.” He drank the alleged coffee and showed absolutely no sign of a human reaction to it. “She needs a man. You look likely.”
“No offense, sir, but you don’t know me.” Maybe I hadn’t completely given up on being mysterious yet.
“Peter Reynolds,” he said, putting his hand out just like my dad used to, crisply, with no reservation, and no hesitation over whether or not you were going to shake it. He didn’t quite look me in the eye, but I didn’t hold that against him. It was an awkward turn for an old guy on a stool to make just to get his hand around to where I could shake it.
“Jesse Hales.” My father taught me to shake any hand that’s offered to you unless you’re looking to start a fight. I was not ready to be in a fight with anyone who could drink that coffee, even if he did look to be in his late 80s, so I shook his hand the way I was taught to, firmly, and was impressed to find that he was fully up to the task of returning it firmly.
“Where you from, Jesse?” One thing about the small towns is, you can’t hide being a stranger there.
“Spartanburg. My dad used to make sales runs through this part of the state when I was a kid,” I wasn’t exactly sure how I was planning to explain, so I had a bite of my sandwich and drank some tea before continuing, “I’m going around to places he used to visit.”
“He with you?” he asked me. How do people you’ve never met before always know the exact question to ask that you don’t want to answer?
“No, sir. He’s home. He’s not well.”
Mr. Reynolds drank some more coffee. “It’s hard being sick. People make such a fuss.”
“Yes, sir, they do.”
“Here, Petey,” Ashley said, setting a plate down in front of him. She then made rather a production out of getting him set with his silverware and napkin, holding each piece still for a moment in front of him, then setting the silverware down solidly and then handing him his napkin. The whole time, she was looking at his face very kindly, like she needed to make sure he was paying attention to her. I suddenly realized that he must be almost blind. “Eat it, now, don’t keep runnin’ your mouth and let it get cold.”
“What is it today?” he asked her. His voice was gruff, but affectionate. He spoke to her like a niece he loved but saw too often to treat like having her there was a special occasion.
“It’s corned beef today. The little green things aren’t going to hurt you, they’re peas.” She turned away, never pausing while telling him, “I’m getting you more coffee.”
He grumbled under his breath while putting his napkin in his lap, and seemed to take his time doing it. Halfway through, I realized it was the same “God is great, God is good” blessing I’d been taught to say as a child. I was chewing a big bite of unblessed cheezesteak when I realized this, and felt ashamed.
After a moment, he was making good time with his food, and she was back with the coffee and the tea. She executed a perfect double pour, and asked me, “So that seems to be workin’ for you, I guess?”
Before I could answer, Mr. Reynolds said, “His name’s Jesse, and he’s single.”
“Petey, what did I tell you about runnin’ your mouth? Don’t mind him, sugar. You thinkin’ about dessert?”
I didn’t know what I was thinking. “Maybe so. When I get an idea, I won’t keep you in suspense.”
“Glad to hear it, Jesse,” she said, winking as she turned to go back down to the other end of the counter.
“What makes you think I’m single?” I asked him.
“I’m old, and I’m ‘bout half blind, but I ain’t stupid. I told you Ashley’s needin’ a man and you look likely, and you don’t even once mention bein’ attached, ergo you most likely ain’t.”
“Right. Ergo. Yeah.”
“Well, you ain’t, are you?”
“No, sir. No. I’m single.”
“I thought as much. So what’s wrong with our Ashley?” He had by this point pretty much finished everything on his plate except for a rogue pea that wouldn’t stay put.
“How is it just that simple to you? I just met her for one thing.”
“Damn, boy. You just met everybody at some point or other.”
“I mean, you don’t just walk into a restaurant one day and start wooing the counter girl.”
“Listen to you. Wooing. And she ain’t the counter girl, she’s the manager, makes a good living. Owner hired her ‘cause he’s too old to run the place every day. Anyway, what’s wrong with her?”
I’d dodged it before, but he was clearly going to press this. “Nothing’s wrong with her. She seems like a fine girl. But we’re not cattle. Maybe we wouldn’t get along. Maybe we don’t like the same things. Maybe I’m not the right kind of guy for her.”
He leaned way over into my face. I could see now: cataracts like tiny sand dollars in both eyes. “Do you like girls, son?”
“Yes,” I answered. “It’s not like that.”
“Fine. Let me tell you something, Steve.”
“Jesse.”
“Sure thing,” he said, taking a big slug of coffee. “I married the first girl I ever kissed. We kissed for the first time when the preacher said we could. We were married 48 years when she went home to glory. I gave her four babies, and three lived to make babies of their own. I was untrue to her exactly once, when I was in Italy and they said it was over. Got drunk, got stupid. I told her about it, she put me in another bedroom, and I never lay with her again for the rest of our married days. The next time I lay with her it’ll be in the ground.”
While he took another drink I said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Reynolds,” but he never heard me.
“So even before she passed over,” he continued, “I didn’t think I’d ever be with a woman again. But not for any fool-ass reason like ‘not getting along,’ I can tell you that. You ain’t cattle, no, but you got the same workin’ parts as cattle. And livin’ a full life sometimes means you got to find somebody to hold onto in the cold night and do things you wouldn’t tell the preacher about on Sunday mornin’.”
Ashley was on the edge of what I guessed was earshot. I glanced over, afraid she might be listening in on what propriety told me was guy talk. She had her back turned to us. She was shapelier from this angle than I’d given her credit for before. And her hair fell in a perfect cascade from a banana clip down her back to her waist. I felt a pang I hadn’t felt in a long time.
“So after a decent mourning period, I decided I’d lived up to my vows in every regard but that one, and paid a decent penance for the trespass I did commit, so I started looking around. Do I have your attention, Jesse?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, putting my pang aside and turning back to him. “Sorry.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he mused knowingly. “That’s progress. Anyway, something a young man like you won’t understand maybe, but needs to: at any age a man is, he’s in competition with every other man out there for every woman he sets his eye on. But,” he paused for a sip, “the older you get, the fewer men there are in the game.”
“The fewer women, too,” I said.
“Don’t matter. You’re only lookin’ for one.”
“Good point,” I said, though my logic class from college was screaming arguments in my head.
“Then you concede that you are lookin’. More progress.” Ashley walked past to the other end of the counter. Without exactly meaning too, I watched as she did.
“What?” I asked.
“Pay attention now, you hear? Once a man gets ready to find a woman to treat serious and treat right, all he’s got to worry about is findin’ a woman that’ll put up with him. Now, you set your sights on Ashley there. I’ve known her long enough to know she’s done took a shine to you already.”
“She doesn’t know me,” I insisted again.
“Stop back-slidin’, boy. You were makin’ progress. You listen to me. You think she calls every stranger walks in here ‘sugar’? Dangerous people come in here. She’s a good girl. She calls you ‘sugar,’ she’s done made up her mind that you ain’t somebody gonna make her regret doin’ it. Ashley, darlin’.” He didn’t even raise his voice, and she came right over. So much for the edge of earshot.
“What you need, Petey?” her voice was somehow just a little different, softer. Maybe it was my ears that had changed. Mr. Reynolds didn’t answer, he just moved his coffee cup a little. She refilled it. I looked at her while she did it. She looked at me. We both smiled. Her eyes were bright green, flecked with gold. “You need anything, Jesse?”
“I’m good, Ashley. Thank you.”
“I bet you are,” she said, and got away. I heard her greet an old lady who was just coming out from someplace I couldn’t see the other side of the kitchen, maybe the restroom.
“What are you, her personal match-maker?” I asked him, my voice still full of the smile I’d shared with Ashley.
“Nope. I just like to see people happy, and she’s been too long without somebody to make her happy.”
“So, hypothetically, say I took a liking to her. What makes you think we’d get along?”
He looked at my now-empty plate. “How was that sandwich?”
“Excellent. Possibly the best I’ve ever had.”
“The name didn’t put you off ordering it?”
“Well, it did seem a little …”
“Redneck?”
“I didn’t want to say it that way, but yeah.”
“So, how’d you come to order that redneck sandwich?”
“It came recommended.”
“So does Ashley,” he said flatly. He drank a little more coffee while that sank in. “I want you to think about something, Steve.”
“Jesse.”
“Of course you are. You look at that girl over there,” he gestured to the old lady without calling attention to himself. She was standing several seats down from us and still chatting with Ashley; now that I looked directly, I saw that the “girl” was probably in her mid-60s. “I met that girl because we got introduced by someone who knew us both and thought we’d get along.”
“And did you?” I asked, unsure of where this was going.
“At first? We got along like oil and water. I was used to things my way, and she was used to things her way. But through determination and a desire to stay warm on cold nights, I took that straight-legged girl and made her bowlegged, and now we’re both a lot happier.”
I nearly spewed the tea I was drinking all over the counter when he said it. Then I laughed.
“Well, I’m glad that’s settled,” he said. He put his hand back out, just like before, “Jesse, it’s been nice meeting you. I look forward to seeing you around more often.”
I shook his hand and said, “We’ll see how it goes, sir.”
As he got to his feet, he called Ashley over again and told her, “Jesse’s lunch is on the house, hon, but he needs you to give him a ticket and a pen.”
“I can do that. Take care, Petey. Wayne says you got to pay him before he’ll send any more of those hams over.” She started to get her order book out of her apron pocket and dig for a pen.
“Come on, Tanya, let’s go pay Wayne for his hams,” he said to the old lady. As they walked out, I saw that she was, indeed, bowlegged. I laughed again.
“So, what did you two boys talk about?” she asked, innocently.
“Don’t give me that look, missy.” I said as kindly as I could, to make sure she knew I was kidding around. Also, I was trying to make it pretty obvious that I was writing my phone number down on the ticket she’d slid to me.
“Ooooo. Listen to the mysterious stranger who walked into my life. Already giving orders.”
But she took the paper and the pen when I slid them back to her. The pen went back into her apron pocket.
The paper went around and into the back pocket of her jeans.
Thanks for reading! Please let me know what you think.
I’d been driving for a while when the light came on for gas. Pulling off the interstate got me into this little town I’d never heard of and right into a dinky little gas station with a restaurant next door.
Since the whole world now is just one long line of Shell stations attached to 7-11s with Taco Bells on the other side of the parking lot, the idea of eating actual food in a place like this was too much to pass up. I gassed my car, parked on the side, and headed in to the restaurant. It was one of those old booths-down-one-side, counter-down-the-other joints that I wouldn’t have been surprised to find a jukebox in, but no. I could see the XM receiver up on a high shelf with wires coming out of it and going up into the ceiling. Modernity.
I can sit in a booth at Burger King, so I sat at the counter. I felt tall. I felt like the stranger who’d just ridden into town. I felt mysterious and dangerous, and I started eyeballing the other folks in the place.
“You look like you need some tea, sugar,” said the too-thin counter girl. She seemed like someone who had tried too hard to look 18 once, and now was trying too hard to look believably 29. Apparently to her, mysterious and dangerous strangers drank tea. And went by “sugar.”
“Coffee please,” I corrected her. I hadn’t taken my sunglasses off yet, and I knew it made me more dangerous.
“It’s your stomach,” she said. “Too bright in here for you?”
“No, it’s--” I started, then took off my glasses. “You know how it is, you get used to having ‘em on, and just forget.”
“Oh, now that’s nicer. Handsome face like yours, now we can all see it better,” she winked as she set my coffee down. She put a little porcelain creamer next to it, and made sure by laying on of hands that I saw where the sweetener packets were.
As I brought the coffee to my lips, she brought the menu out from under the counter and put it on my left, opposite the creamer. “You take your time, sugar.”
I took my time, but I didn’t take any more of the coffee. Not only was it not good coffee, it would have to improve markedly to be poor coffee. It had been made, by my rough estimate, several weeks before, possibly in the back of a tanker truck that had been driven very slowly through a house on fire, and kept warm since likely by means of a low-yield nuclear weapon. It was coffee that would make a Navy Seal drop to his knees and beg for a merciful release. Looking over the menu, I asked as casually as I felt possible for a dangerous stranger, “Is that tea still an option?” and found that it was.
Most of my first glass was needed to rinse the taste out of my mouth. After that I could focus on the menu. I like to think that I learn lessons pretty quick, so I asked for a recommendation on what to have to eat, and upon getting one, I ordered what was billed as “the biggest cheezesteak sandwich this side of Asheville” with a side onion rings. I’d been driving on the interstate and back roads off and on all morning, and I wasn’t a hundred percent sure which side of Asheville I was on any more, and I didn’t ask.
Little joints like this always seem to smell great, and this one was no exception. It smelled like buttered toast and grilled red meat and fried onions and baked pies. The counter girl smelled like a perfume an old girlfriend of mine in high school used to wear and seemed to be entertained by my resumed eyeballing of the place.
“You meetin’ someone?” she asked. The tea glass had been refilled without my noticing.
“Just stretchin’ a bit.” Dangerous strangers talk just like local folks. It’s part of their mysterious allure. “Been in the car all morning.”
“It’ll catch up with you.”
“How long y’all been here?” I asked, remembering my dad talking that way to little shop owners when he drove his truck from town to town.
“We watched ‘em put the highway in,” she said. Then what she’d said caught her short and she added, “I used to come over after school and watch.” She wasn’t too much older than me, I started to feel. I remembered when this interstate was put in, too, because it took away so much of my dad’s business, and I was in elementary school then.
“So you grew up around here?”
“Honey, I grew up in here,” she laughed. “Meemaw used to work here, and she kept up with me after school. I used to sit in that booth over there and do my homework until it was done, and when she got off at 6, she’d carry me home. I’d have dinner with Mama and Daddy, Daddy’d look at my homework, I’d go to bed, get up the next mornin’, go to school, then it all started over.” She told me this in the same voice you’d tell somebody how to make a cake, like she was giving me the recipe for counter girl. “Hey, Petey,” she said to an old man working his way onto the seat next to me.
“Ashley,” he said to her the way old people who’ve made all the pleasant chit chat they’re ever going to make say. Only so many breaths left, no sense wasting them. Not rude, just efficient.
Ashley had a cup of coffee on the counter before he was through settling. They seemed to exchange some meaningful look that escaped me. I gave up trying to be dangerous and mysterious. I nearly gave up on the plan to eat. I wasn’t sure I could endure knowing that there was someone on this planet who could drink that coffee.
Then my food was in front of me, and I ate anyway. It was big. It was doubtless at least two nails in my coffin, if not one whole side of the box itself. But Ashley knew how to recommend. It was the best thing I’d eaten in memory. I couldn’t eat it without occasionally moaning in pleasure.
“Ashley’d make a good little woman for you,” said the old man.
I choked, the way you do when you start to exhale just at exactly the same moment you’re swallowing something. It doesn’t jeopardize your airway, but it shoves just a little bit of whatever you were about to swallow up on top of your palate and it feels like you’ve suddenly got a sinus full of chewed cheezesteak. It took a while for me to sort myself, and a lot of tea.
“I beg your pardon?” I finally managed to say to him.
“Ashley.” He drank the alleged coffee and showed absolutely no sign of a human reaction to it. “She needs a man. You look likely.”
“No offense, sir, but you don’t know me.” Maybe I hadn’t completely given up on being mysterious yet.
“Peter Reynolds,” he said, putting his hand out just like my dad used to, crisply, with no reservation, and no hesitation over whether or not you were going to shake it. He didn’t quite look me in the eye, but I didn’t hold that against him. It was an awkward turn for an old guy on a stool to make just to get his hand around to where I could shake it.
“Jesse Hales.” My father taught me to shake any hand that’s offered to you unless you’re looking to start a fight. I was not ready to be in a fight with anyone who could drink that coffee, even if he did look to be in his late 80s, so I shook his hand the way I was taught to, firmly, and was impressed to find that he was fully up to the task of returning it firmly.
“Where you from, Jesse?” One thing about the small towns is, you can’t hide being a stranger there.
“Spartanburg. My dad used to make sales runs through this part of the state when I was a kid,” I wasn’t exactly sure how I was planning to explain, so I had a bite of my sandwich and drank some tea before continuing, “I’m going around to places he used to visit.”
“He with you?” he asked me. How do people you’ve never met before always know the exact question to ask that you don’t want to answer?
“No, sir. He’s home. He’s not well.”
Mr. Reynolds drank some more coffee. “It’s hard being sick. People make such a fuss.”
“Yes, sir, they do.”
“Here, Petey,” Ashley said, setting a plate down in front of him. She then made rather a production out of getting him set with his silverware and napkin, holding each piece still for a moment in front of him, then setting the silverware down solidly and then handing him his napkin. The whole time, she was looking at his face very kindly, like she needed to make sure he was paying attention to her. I suddenly realized that he must be almost blind. “Eat it, now, don’t keep runnin’ your mouth and let it get cold.”
“What is it today?” he asked her. His voice was gruff, but affectionate. He spoke to her like a niece he loved but saw too often to treat like having her there was a special occasion.
“It’s corned beef today. The little green things aren’t going to hurt you, they’re peas.” She turned away, never pausing while telling him, “I’m getting you more coffee.”
He grumbled under his breath while putting his napkin in his lap, and seemed to take his time doing it. Halfway through, I realized it was the same “God is great, God is good” blessing I’d been taught to say as a child. I was chewing a big bite of unblessed cheezesteak when I realized this, and felt ashamed.
After a moment, he was making good time with his food, and she was back with the coffee and the tea. She executed a perfect double pour, and asked me, “So that seems to be workin’ for you, I guess?”
Before I could answer, Mr. Reynolds said, “His name’s Jesse, and he’s single.”
“Petey, what did I tell you about runnin’ your mouth? Don’t mind him, sugar. You thinkin’ about dessert?”
I didn’t know what I was thinking. “Maybe so. When I get an idea, I won’t keep you in suspense.”
“Glad to hear it, Jesse,” she said, winking as she turned to go back down to the other end of the counter.
“What makes you think I’m single?” I asked him.
“I’m old, and I’m ‘bout half blind, but I ain’t stupid. I told you Ashley’s needin’ a man and you look likely, and you don’t even once mention bein’ attached, ergo you most likely ain’t.”
“Right. Ergo. Yeah.”
“Well, you ain’t, are you?”
“No, sir. No. I’m single.”
“I thought as much. So what’s wrong with our Ashley?” He had by this point pretty much finished everything on his plate except for a rogue pea that wouldn’t stay put.
“How is it just that simple to you? I just met her for one thing.”
“Damn, boy. You just met everybody at some point or other.”
“I mean, you don’t just walk into a restaurant one day and start wooing the counter girl.”
“Listen to you. Wooing. And she ain’t the counter girl, she’s the manager, makes a good living. Owner hired her ‘cause he’s too old to run the place every day. Anyway, what’s wrong with her?”
I’d dodged it before, but he was clearly going to press this. “Nothing’s wrong with her. She seems like a fine girl. But we’re not cattle. Maybe we wouldn’t get along. Maybe we don’t like the same things. Maybe I’m not the right kind of guy for her.”
He leaned way over into my face. I could see now: cataracts like tiny sand dollars in both eyes. “Do you like girls, son?”
“Yes,” I answered. “It’s not like that.”
“Fine. Let me tell you something, Steve.”
“Jesse.”
“Sure thing,” he said, taking a big slug of coffee. “I married the first girl I ever kissed. We kissed for the first time when the preacher said we could. We were married 48 years when she went home to glory. I gave her four babies, and three lived to make babies of their own. I was untrue to her exactly once, when I was in Italy and they said it was over. Got drunk, got stupid. I told her about it, she put me in another bedroom, and I never lay with her again for the rest of our married days. The next time I lay with her it’ll be in the ground.”
While he took another drink I said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Reynolds,” but he never heard me.
“So even before she passed over,” he continued, “I didn’t think I’d ever be with a woman again. But not for any fool-ass reason like ‘not getting along,’ I can tell you that. You ain’t cattle, no, but you got the same workin’ parts as cattle. And livin’ a full life sometimes means you got to find somebody to hold onto in the cold night and do things you wouldn’t tell the preacher about on Sunday mornin’.”
Ashley was on the edge of what I guessed was earshot. I glanced over, afraid she might be listening in on what propriety told me was guy talk. She had her back turned to us. She was shapelier from this angle than I’d given her credit for before. And her hair fell in a perfect cascade from a banana clip down her back to her waist. I felt a pang I hadn’t felt in a long time.
“So after a decent mourning period, I decided I’d lived up to my vows in every regard but that one, and paid a decent penance for the trespass I did commit, so I started looking around. Do I have your attention, Jesse?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, putting my pang aside and turning back to him. “Sorry.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he mused knowingly. “That’s progress. Anyway, something a young man like you won’t understand maybe, but needs to: at any age a man is, he’s in competition with every other man out there for every woman he sets his eye on. But,” he paused for a sip, “the older you get, the fewer men there are in the game.”
“The fewer women, too,” I said.
“Don’t matter. You’re only lookin’ for one.”
“Good point,” I said, though my logic class from college was screaming arguments in my head.
“Then you concede that you are lookin’. More progress.” Ashley walked past to the other end of the counter. Without exactly meaning too, I watched as she did.
“What?” I asked.
“Pay attention now, you hear? Once a man gets ready to find a woman to treat serious and treat right, all he’s got to worry about is findin’ a woman that’ll put up with him. Now, you set your sights on Ashley there. I’ve known her long enough to know she’s done took a shine to you already.”
“She doesn’t know me,” I insisted again.
“Stop back-slidin’, boy. You were makin’ progress. You listen to me. You think she calls every stranger walks in here ‘sugar’? Dangerous people come in here. She’s a good girl. She calls you ‘sugar,’ she’s done made up her mind that you ain’t somebody gonna make her regret doin’ it. Ashley, darlin’.” He didn’t even raise his voice, and she came right over. So much for the edge of earshot.
“What you need, Petey?” her voice was somehow just a little different, softer. Maybe it was my ears that had changed. Mr. Reynolds didn’t answer, he just moved his coffee cup a little. She refilled it. I looked at her while she did it. She looked at me. We both smiled. Her eyes were bright green, flecked with gold. “You need anything, Jesse?”
“I’m good, Ashley. Thank you.”
“I bet you are,” she said, and got away. I heard her greet an old lady who was just coming out from someplace I couldn’t see the other side of the kitchen, maybe the restroom.
“What are you, her personal match-maker?” I asked him, my voice still full of the smile I’d shared with Ashley.
“Nope. I just like to see people happy, and she’s been too long without somebody to make her happy.”
“So, hypothetically, say I took a liking to her. What makes you think we’d get along?”
He looked at my now-empty plate. “How was that sandwich?”
“Excellent. Possibly the best I’ve ever had.”
“The name didn’t put you off ordering it?”
“Well, it did seem a little …”
“Redneck?”
“I didn’t want to say it that way, but yeah.”
“So, how’d you come to order that redneck sandwich?”
“It came recommended.”
“So does Ashley,” he said flatly. He drank a little more coffee while that sank in. “I want you to think about something, Steve.”
“Jesse.”
“Of course you are. You look at that girl over there,” he gestured to the old lady without calling attention to himself. She was standing several seats down from us and still chatting with Ashley; now that I looked directly, I saw that the “girl” was probably in her mid-60s. “I met that girl because we got introduced by someone who knew us both and thought we’d get along.”
“And did you?” I asked, unsure of where this was going.
“At first? We got along like oil and water. I was used to things my way, and she was used to things her way. But through determination and a desire to stay warm on cold nights, I took that straight-legged girl and made her bowlegged, and now we’re both a lot happier.”
I nearly spewed the tea I was drinking all over the counter when he said it. Then I laughed.
“Well, I’m glad that’s settled,” he said. He put his hand back out, just like before, “Jesse, it’s been nice meeting you. I look forward to seeing you around more often.”
I shook his hand and said, “We’ll see how it goes, sir.”
As he got to his feet, he called Ashley over again and told her, “Jesse’s lunch is on the house, hon, but he needs you to give him a ticket and a pen.”
“I can do that. Take care, Petey. Wayne says you got to pay him before he’ll send any more of those hams over.” She started to get her order book out of her apron pocket and dig for a pen.
“Come on, Tanya, let’s go pay Wayne for his hams,” he said to the old lady. As they walked out, I saw that she was, indeed, bowlegged. I laughed again.
“So, what did you two boys talk about?” she asked, innocently.
“Don’t give me that look, missy.” I said as kindly as I could, to make sure she knew I was kidding around. Also, I was trying to make it pretty obvious that I was writing my phone number down on the ticket she’d slid to me.
“Ooooo. Listen to the mysterious stranger who walked into my life. Already giving orders.”
But she took the paper and the pen when I slid them back to her. The pen went back into her apron pocket.
The paper went around and into the back pocket of her jeans.
Thanks for reading! Please let me know what you think.