Through the Heart (9 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I took him to Joe’s Diner. I had promised Neil I wouldn’t, but what was I going to do? There was no place else to take him, not at three o’clock in the afternoon anyway, unless we went to one of the fast-food places out near the highway.

Starbox was always empty, and Joe’s was always crowded. Maybe it was because Joe’s diner made sense. It belonged to Joe. It was a diner. There were no sizes for coffee in the diner, because they would refill your cup till you burst.

We slid into a booth at the back, and the busboy came over with menus and water.

We both opened our menus and looked, even though I knew exactly what was on it. Nothing had changed in all the years I had been coming to Joe’s. Not even the prices. Joe didn’t like changes. He was always complaining about how the prices everywhere went up so much. So he decided not to raise the prices in his diner—as if he thought that somehow other people would take a cue from him and do the same. As a result, for the last ten years the town had had to hold a raffle to raise money to save Joe’s from foreclosure. But every year the raffle managed to scrape together enough money, and Joe’s kept on serving a meat-loaf dinner for $2.50.

Timothy looked at the menu, and I looked at him.

“What’s good here?” he asked. Then he looked up and grinned. “Oh, wait. Forget I asked. I’ve discovered your recommendations aren’t exactly trustworthy.”

“I can’t be held responsible for the pumpkin disaster,” I said. “You can’t ask an employee their opinion on the things they’re selling. Half the time, if they told you the truth they’d lose their jobs.”

“So who’s responsible?” he asked me.

I raised my eyebrows at him. “Well, who’s left?”

Our waitress came over to our booth. It was Jeanette, who had been in my class in high school. She’d been working at Joe’s since she graduated, and she was a terrible waitress—well, whenever I came here with Tammy or my sister or my mother, she was a terrible waitress. She took the job description literally, at least the part that had the word “wait” in it; we always had to wait for at least fifteen or twenty minutes before she even came over to take our order.

It was different this time though. I knew immediately that something was up when she appeared within three minutes of our sitting down and said perkily, “Hey there, Nora. How are you?”

“I’m good, Jeanette. Thanks. How are you?”

“I’ll be better when you introduce me to your friend here,” she said. She sure didn’t waste any time, I thought.

“Jeanette, this is Timothy. Timothy, this is Jeanette.”

“Timothy, a pleasure. How did you all meet? Are you together?” she asked suggestively, looking from me to Timothy.

Jeanette was not a subtle person.

I opened my mouth to answer her, when Timothy beat me to it.

He looked up at her and smiled. “You want to know how Nora and I met? It was fate, Jeanette. That’s the only way I can explain it. Do you believe in fate?”

Jeanette seemed dazzled by him, standing there staring at him and clutching her pad to her chest. I didn’t blame her. He had turned the full force of his attention and charm on her, and she was like a deer in the headlights.

“Yes, I do,” she said.

“I thought you might,” he said, nodding approvingly.

I wondered what he would say to me if I told him that I thought fate was a bunch of baloney. It’s true, I did. Isn’t that funny? Even with Tammy’s predictions, I believed firmly and completely in the randomness of events. Now that I look back, it doesn’t make any sense at all. But at the time I thought it was just logical and practical—hardheaded of me.

Jeanette hesitated, then said to Timothy, “Can I ask you a question?”

“Sure thing. Shoot.”

“Do you ever worry that you might miss it? That you have to keep an eye out or fate might just keep right on going by?”

“Miss it? Not possible. If it’s supposed to happen, there’s nothing in the world you can do to stop it. Like what happened with me and Nora,” and he reached over and took my hand from where it had been lying on the table between us.

And then, oh, the look that Jeanette turned on me. As if she were starving and I had a feast in front of me and wouldn’t share. It was a relief when she looked back at Timothy and I was able to quietly pull away my hand. I didn’t like what he was doing; he seemed to be both mocking her and flirting with her at the same time.

“Do you have any friends who believe in fate?” Jeanette asked. “A twin brother maybe?”

“You don’t need to find someone who believes in it; you’re still ruled by it whether you believe in it or not. And you wouldn’t want either of my brothers. Trust me on that one.”

“I’m not so sure,” she said. “I’d like to check that out myself.”

“They don’t live around here. But listen, I have a question for you.”

“Yes?”

The way she said it, she probably would have told him anything. Her darkest secret even. But all he said was, “Do you have any specials that you’d recommend?”

“We have specials,” Jeanette said, “but nothin’ I’d recommend. They’re always some mess Joe puts together with the ingredients that are about to go bad, or what’s worse, something he makes up when he’s feeling artistic. Stick to the menu, and you’ll be just fine.”

“Hamburgers?”

“Delicious,” Jeanette assured him. “Bloody?”

“Perfect.”

Jeanette turned to me. “Nora?”

At this point I was annoyed with both of them.

“Coffee and a piece of apple pie,” I said.

Jeanette didn’t write it down. Instead she said, “You sure about that pie? You know how much Crisco Joe puts in the crust?”

“I’m sure about the pie,” I told her.

I wasn’t so sure about anything else though. I was feeling more and more uncomfortable every moment the little show went on between Timothy and Jeanette. I felt like the intruder, as if I were sitting and watching someone else’s date.

“Okeydoke.” She pivoted, and the way she walked away was just an invitation to watch her backside.

I watched for a second, then turned back to Timothy, sure I would find him still watching her.

But he was watching me. And laughing.

“I didn’t take you for the jealous type,” he said.

“That’s not jealousy,” I told him. “That’s disgust.”

“Oh, bringing out the big guns.”

“Were you trying to prove something?”

“No, of course not.”

There was something in the way he said it. Dismissive. Condescending. Just shy of rude.

I slid out of the booth and stood up.

“I think I’d better go,” I said. “I thought you were . . . I don’t know. Anyway, I should probably get back to work.”

Still, I waited a moment for what he would say.

“You’re going to leave me to eat my hamburger alone?” he said, but he said it in that same voice he’d used to talk to Jeanette. It was mocking, slick banter. That was all.

“I have a feeling you’re almost never alone. I think you’ll be fine.”

And I left.

Did I come close to escaping fate that Monday afternoon when I walked out of Joe’s Diner?

You can play “what if?” games until the Resurrection, but how can you escape fate? Maybe you don’t believe in fate. But fate doesn’t require belief. As Timothy said, you’re ruled by it whether you believe in it or not. If it exists. I’d say it’s up to you to decide, but you don’t even need to decide. Just live your life, and when it’s over, then tell me. Do you believe?

 

 

 

 

 

I’ll admit it. I was sure she would come back.

I sat there. I sipped from my water glass. It was barely an inch below the lip, but that waitress came back with the water jug to fill it up. And she bent over to show me her tits. They weren’t bad, not great either, but there was something sexy about the pride she had in showing them.

I flirted with her and waited for the other one to come back. That’s how I thought of her—as the other one.

There was no strike of lightning for me. It might have seemed like it, but there wasn’t. I was just bullshitting about fate. I’d been in the habit of talking that way to women for years. They loved it, and it kept me from having to answer questions. They just went off into their dream world; I could see them construct the image right before my eyes. “This is the guy who believes in fate.” “This is the guy who believes in love.” “This might be the guy I’ve been waiting for all my life.” And then they don’t even bother to get to know me. They think they know already, and then they just look for evidence to back it up.

So at the time I was sure it was just more of my bullshit. But later I looked back and asked myself, why did I get off the highway? And why there? I wasn’t really hungry. I didn’t need gas. I wasn’t in the mood to explore. There was no reason. I just did it. And when I was driving through town, I saw the sign for Starbucks, though it wasn’t a Starbucks, and I just thought I’d get myself a coffee.

I walked in and there was that girl. I found out later that she was over thirty, but there are some women who are women and some women who are girls. One isn’t better than the other. They’re just different. This one was a girl.

Anyway, she was just a girl with beautiful hair. I couldn’t really see it well, but I could imagine what it looked like down. It was the kind of hair that when you see it down, it’s almost like seeing the girl undressed.

I have to admit, it annoyed me that she didn’t even seem to notice me. Oh, I suppose she did notice in a way, but she looked at me like you’d look at something through a window. That was why I asked her to come get a coffee. I wanted to crack the glass. And I thought I had shattered it pretty good when she came running out of the coffee shop after me. It was the kind of thing I was used to. That proved to me she was just an ordinary girl—a girl with beautiful hair and a mysterious look but underneath that obviously the same as all the others.

So when we got to the diner, I acted with her the way I acted with all women: never awful but just rude enough that they knew exactly what the deal was. Yet they always chose to ignore my clear signals. They saw what they wanted to see.

Until now.

This was the first one who watched me, listened, and got it. And walked out. Not because she wasn’t interested. Not because she was playing a game. It was because she understood me.

She was the only one.