Girlfriends (Patrick Sanchez) (15 page)

When she got inside the restaurant, the fishy smell was a bit overwhelming. She found it odd that a restaurateur, as Louis had described himself, would want to meet in a chain restaurant famous only for its fried fish. She was about to sit down at one of the benches in the lobby, when she saw Louis approach from outside. She wasn’t sure if the window was somehow distorting him, but something was odd about him—about the way he walked. It almost seemed as if one leg was significantly longer than the other. As she watched him walk through the threshold,
dalump . . . dalump . . . dalump
, she decided it was no big deal and she could just ignore it.

Yeah, she told herself. It’s no big deal. So what if one leg is shorter than the other? He’s still very cute. Maybe his “cuteness factor” has dropped five percent or so, but he really does look fine.

“Cheryl?” Louis asked, recognizing her from the picture she had e-mailed him.

“Yes. Hi. How are . . . ?” Cheryl tried to ask before Louis interrupted her.

“Good, good. Should we get a table? Why don’t we get a table? I like booths. Hopefully, they will give us a booth. Booths are so much more cozy, don’t you think? Better than those tables out in the open. I don’t like being out in the open like that,” Louis said very quickly and with purpose—like getting a booth at Red Lobster was his mission in life.

Cheryl followed him as they approached the hostess,
dalump . . . dalump . . . dalump
.

The hostess seated them and offered the menus, which Louis refused.

“I don’t need a menu. I know exactly what I want. I’ll have the Admiral’s Feast with a baked potato with butter and sour cream, and a garden salad with ranch dressing, and a Coke . . . and lots of croutons on the salad please,” Louis rattled off, his mouth going a mile a minute.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the young woman replied. “I’m just the hostess. Your waiter will be right with you.”

“Oh, okay,” he replied as Cheryl offered a bit of a confused expression at his eagerness to place his order, when she hadn’t even opened her menu. As Cheryl tried to give the menu a quick read, Louis lowered his voice.

“You know what?” he said with a grin.

“What?” Cheryl said, not sure she wanted to know.

“I knew that she was just the hostess, but sometimes I get them to take my order anyway and get my food really fast,” Louis said like a mischievous child. “You know when you have to wait for a waitress it takes so much longer. And some waitresses are so slow. I hate when I get a slow waitress, especially if I need my drink refilled. Ya know?”

“You must really like the food here,” Cheryl said, turned off by his loquacious manner and dropping his cuteness factor a few more percentage points.

“Oh, yeah, man. Have you had their cheddar bay biscuits? I just love their cheddar bay biscuits. And it’s a great value. You get the biscuits for free, and a salad comes with your dinner for no extra charge, and they put salt on the skins of the baked potatoes. Yeah, this is my favorite restaurant . . . and free refills on the drinks too,” Louis added as the waitress approached to take their order. Louis repeated his earlier order, and Cheryl asked for the Mainlander’s Chicken Salad and a Diet Coke.

Okay, what kind of restaurateur held Red Lobster in such high esteem? Cheryl had to ask the question even though she feared the answer. He probably ran a Chuck E. Cheese or something.

“So, you said you’re a restaurateur?”

“That’s right. I like it okay, but getting up so early gets to be a drag, man.”

“Early?”

“Yeah, you got to make the bagels early.”

“Bagels?”

“Yeah. I make a mean cinnamon raisin. It’s a pretty good job, and I get off at noon, in time for my second job.”

Oh, it just keeps getting better. “Really? What do you do for your second job?”

“I . . . where are our biscuits? Excuse me, ma’am?” Louis asked a passing waitress who ignored him. “Miss?” he repeated. “Can you bring us some biscuits? And not just two or three, bring a whole mess of ’em, would ya?”

The waitress agreed, and Louis continued. “I’m sorry. I like to have a biscuit or two before the salad comes. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yeah, my other job. I’m a pharmacy technician.”

A cashier at the CVS? “Really, that must be challenging.” Cheryl replied for lack of anything else to say while Louis’s cuteness factor continued to fall like the stock market on Black Monday. “Two jobs must keep you busy.”

“Yeah, but I got them bills to pay. My parents keep telling me to get a job with benefits, but, you know, what do I really need health insurance for?”

In case you get sick, you moron. “I don’t know,” Cheryl said with a smile, resigning herself to just get through the date, hoping the food would arrive soon.

“I’ve actually been thinking about going to Japan and getting a job there.”

“Oh? You speak Japanese?” Cheryl asked.

“Nah, but I hear Americans can go there and make lots of money.”

“Really? Doing what?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t investigated it thoroughly yet. It’s just something I heard. At least it would get my mother off my back. Last night me and Ma were watching
That 70’s Show . . .
have you seen it? It’s a riot . . . anyway, Ma keeps pestering me to look for another job, you know, just one job instead of two, but I like my jobs. Plus, I need jobs that are close to home, since my car got repossessed last year.”

“Well, I’m sure your mother wants the best for you. Do you see her often?”

“Every day. I live in her basement. She doesn’t even charge me any rent, and I have my own sofa and television and everything down there.”

Cuteness factor just dropped off the chart. “Sounds like a great setup,” Cheryl said, patronizing him.

“Yeah, it is. Sometimes it gets old ’cause Ma gets all caught up in my business and pesters me when I’m trying to play my computer games. But, for the most part, it works out okay for me and Juniper.”

Oh, God! What the hell is a Juniper? “Juniper?”

“That’s my cat. She’s sixteen.”

“Sixteen? That’s old for a cat, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but she’s in pretty good health. Although she had to have a kitty colonoscopy a few months ago. You know, she was having diarrhea all the time. It was gross. They took this camera and shoved it up her—”

“Oh, please! I don’t want to hear the rest, we’re about to eat,” Cheryl said as politely as she possibly could.

“Yummy!” Louis said as the waitress slapped down a big plate of fried seafood in front of him.

The two of them ate their meals as Louis rambled on about his collection of Disney snow globes and the intricacies of bagel-making while Cheryl spent the bulk of her meal nodding and forcing herself to pretend she was remotely interested in anything he said. When the check arrived, Louis asked if she wanted to split it. Cheryl agreed, and the two of them got up from the table and headed toward the lobby,
dalump . . . dalump . . . dalump
.

Before they got to the door, Louis stopped. “So what do you think? Do you like me?” he asked Cheryl point-blank.

No. “Oh, I think you’re lots of fun and very interesting,” Cheryl lied before adding, “but, honestly, I’m not sensing any real chemistry.”

Generally, Cheryl would just say yes and give the guy a wrong phone number or something, but she didn’t want this guy thinking she was even remotely interested in him.

His faced dropped a bit. “That’s okay. I wasn’t sensing any either,” he said, obviously disappointed.

“Well, maybe our paths will cross again,” Cheryl said, praying that they never would. She extended her hand and Louis gave it a polite shake.

“Yeah, come by the CVS on Broad Street sometime. If you want, you can come to my register, and I’ll forget to ring up some of your items. I do that for my friends,” he said with the same grin he held when he shot his order at the hostess.

“Okay, maybe I’ll do that,” Cheryl lied again, and pushed the door open to head to her car.

Restaurateur! How did he even know how to spell restaurateur? Cheryl thought to herself as she put the key in the car door and watched Louis walk across the highway,
dalump . . . dalump . . . dalump
.

Cheryl got in the car and closed the door. The day was taking its toll. She had really had high hopes for Louis. He looked like such a cutie in his picture, and his e-mails were so nice. She even turned down Peter’s invitation to come over the week before, thinking that maybe she would be able to get out of her dysfunctional relationship with him. She was already on edge from her encounter with Gina a couple of hours earlier, and the disastrous date with Louis was all she could take.

Thinking about the evening, she had such a strange feeling. One part of her wanted to laugh about her dinner with Louis, the first real-live moron she had ever met, and another part of her was so overwhelmed with sadness that she just wanted to cry. She looked in the rearview mirror at herself and let out a little smirk about how ridiculous the evening had been. Then she put her hand to her head and let the smirk fade into a steady stream of tears.

A Family That Eats Together . . .

S
hirley had gotten held up at work and was running late as usual. She was currently working as a waitress at the T.G.I. Friday’s in D.C. She couldn’t remember the name of the play, but some musical about a French guy who got caught stealing bread was playing at the Warner Theater nearby. The matinee let out just before she was due to get off, and a bunch of foo-foo suburbanites who were too cheap to pay for the evening show crowded into the restaurant. The manager asked Shirley to stick around and help with the crowd. She needed the tips, so she agreed to stay for a few hours, but she made sure the manager knew she was doing him a favor.

She had planned to take the subway to meet Gina and her friends for dinner but decided to drive since she was already late and had to swing by her apartment to pick up some Ziploc bags. She usually kept her eyes straight ahead when she was driving to avoid the nasty snarls she often got from people in passing cars. Her car emitted a foul-smelling white smoke when she accelerated, much to the disgust of the motorists behind her.

As she crossed the bridge into Virginia, she caught a glimpse of a state cop in her rearview mirror. She decided to take the first available exit rather than risk getting stopped because of her expired tags—the ones she should have renewed six months earlier. She let the tags slide because she didn’t have enough money set aside to pay for the new registration. Besides, if she did go to get the license plates renewed, she wasn’t sure if the clerks at the Motor Vehicle Administration would want proof of insurance, which she hadn’t set aside money for either. Next month she’d ask Gina or her mother to help her meet these expenses, but Gina had just helped her make this month’s rent, and Gina’s grandmother was already footing the bill for all of Shirley’s medications—medications Shirley probably wouldn’t even need if she would just quit smoking.

Shirley had very slight asthma as a child. It was so mild that it wasn’t even diagnosed until she was an adult, and years of smoking had exacerbated it to a point where she would have frequent attacks. It had been so bad lately that Shirley had to keep switching medications to head off the attacks and keep her asthma at bay. Doctor after doctor told her she absolutely had to quit smoking. Sometimes Shirley would be honest and say she just couldn’t. Other times, she’d just lie and say she had quit smoking or was going to right away. It was the way Shirley handled things—whatever way seemed easiest at the time, no matter what the long-term consequences were.

By the time Shirley got to the Kentucky Buffet and Salad Bar, Gina, Linda, and Peter were already seated and munching on some salads. Gina, as always, was trying not to watch Peter eat. She absolutely abhorred the way he ate. He insisted on eating only one item of food at a time. He had to finish all his mashed potatoes before he could eat his steak or scarf down an entire hamburger before he would even touch his french fries—and oh, God! The french fries! She couldn’t stand the way he consumed french fries, the way he kept biting them continually as he propelled them into his mouth. It was like watching a tree go through a wood chipper. And the sound was worse,
CHOMP, CHOMP, CHOMP
. Gina had to listen to
CHOMP, CHOMP, CHOMP
for every single fry. Damn McDonald’s and their stupid super sizes! If Peter hadn’t been the one to break it off with Gina years ago, she may have had to dump him. How could she continue to date someone who drove her crazy at every meal?

Gina didn’t particularly care for the Kentucky Buffet, one of those all-you-can-eat buffets filled with vats of lukewarm foods like mayonnaise salads, fish sticks, canned soup, and macaroni and cheese. It wasn’t really the food that bothered her so much as the customers. Her stomach turned as grossly overweight people in polyester slacks and tight frocks slopped mounds of sloppy joe and fried fish on their plates—still chewing the food from their last round as they returned to the buffet to go at it again. It was like feeding time at the hog house. The only reason she agreed to come was that she felt a little guilty about snapping at her mother at the bank a few days earlier. Linda and Peter were happy to join in. They actually enjoyed Shirley’s company. Truth was, Gina enjoyed her company too, when she could get over the fact that it was her own mother sitting with her friends, talking about the guy with the severely curved dick she went home with the night before, or the time she spent the better part of a Sunday sitting in a tub of vinegar because someone told her it would make her vagina tight again.

“Hi, gang,” Shirley said with a smile before sliding into the booth next to Gina. “How are ya, sweetie? You seemed to be in a bit of a huff the last time I saw you.”

“I’m okay. I had just had a rough day at work. They don’t feel I’m performing up to speed, so now I have to come up with a written plan with goals for improving and things like that. It’s due on Monday. Guess I’d better get started, huh?”