AS THE WAITRESS arrived with their next round, Maggie and Robert both drained their drinks, making a sucking sound as the last of the gin-soaked cocktails flew up their straws. Maggie rattled her straw around the ice. The waitress, who was wearing a skimpy terrycloth tank top and shorts and a pin that said, “Ask me about our appetizers!” dipped and swiveled gracefully as she served their drinks. Robert smiled at her and said, “What about ’em?”
“What about what?” said the waitress.
Robert pointed to her chest. “Your appetizers.”
“Oh,” she said, as if he were the first person to ever respond to that particular call to action, but Maggie knew that couldn’t be true, that people probably asked about her appetizers all the time. She’s probably drunk, like we are. Maggie had decided, as the noise on the patio heightened with the bellows and cackles of local young singles, that everyone around them was drunk, and that life was comprised solely of periods of sobriety and inebriation, and when you were young and single and, especially, alone in a new town as she was, there were bound to be more periods of inebriation. So she was only abiding by the rules.
“…Jalape?o poppers, mozzarella sticks, spicy mozzarella sticks, fried cheese bread, and nachos. You can get those nachos with beef, chicken, or vegetarian style. It has a name. Um, Macho Nachos. All of the appetizers have names. You don’t need the names, though, do you?”
“How about nachos? With chicken. That’ll hit the spot, huh?” said Robert. He leaned back in his chair, crooked his arm over the top of his head, and then slapped his lean belly with the palm of his hand. “We need a little something to take the edge off.” He leaned into Maggie as the waitress walked away, and said, voice lowered, “I hope you don’t mind me ordering for you. You look like you could use some food. No offense.”
“None taken.” Maggie looked down at her drink. She didn’t want it anymore, but you shouldn’t waste a drink, should you? She burped quietly and tasted gin mixed with an acidic flavor.
“Should I…? Yes? All right, well, I couldn’t just leave her there without checking on her, could I? The poor woman looked so sad when the truck took off. She pulled all of her boxes close around her. I thought she was going to cry. Hoo boy, that would have been a mess. Grandma’s crying out in front of the 7-Eleven again. Anyway I went up to her and asked her if she was doing OK, and she looked up at me with such soft, I don’t know, grateful eyes, I damn near melted inside.”
A busboy stopped by with place settings for their table. He looked at Maggie, and she gave him a shaky smile. Then she rested her hand on her heart, as if she were about to do the pledge of allegiance. “Thank you,” she said to him, with complete sincerity. She ran her fingers over the knife, which was spotted with small bubbles of dishwashing liquid. She stuck her thumb in her mouth, wet it, and then rubbed it on the knife.
Robert watched her. “You all right there, kiddo?”
“I’m fine. I’m just drunk.” She looked down at the knife. She rubbed it some more. “I want you to shut up and keep talking.”
Robert put his hand on hers and she let him keep it there.
“Turns out she’s got a place nearby. She was going to call a cab to help her get the rest of the stuff home, but she was taking a little rest first. She doesn’t say who the kid was, where she was coming from, why he didn’t just take her home, nothing. I don’t know if it was pride or maybe she had a touch of the crazy and it just didn’t seem weird to her at all. I got the feeling, though, that if I left her there she might forget to call that cab and just keep on sitting there through the day and night. This little old lady and her boxes.”
Boxes, she thought. She remembered something, then—a box from her childhood, and a flash of her mother’s voice, panicked. (Her mother was usually either panicked or angry.) And her chest tightened, as if someone had taken a hold of her insides with their hand, finger by finger, until there was a clench of a fist.