The phone rings at 7:10 and I know it’s him because no one else has the courage to call me that early. I answer a groggy hello.
“Get up,” he says. “I’m taking you to breakfast.”
“What?” I try to make my voice soft and high to compensate for its newly-roused gruffness, but I sound like Tallulah Bankhead nonetheless.
It doesn’t seem to faze him. “Meet me at Charlie’s in five minutes,” he says. “Be there or be square.” Something about someone like him using that phrase makes my mouth divide into a smile and I agree to meet him in five minutes, which he knows means twenty.
I walk into the diner on the corner. It smells, in its familiar way, like grease and old tile. There are a half-dozen empty tables, but unsurprisingly, I spot him sitting at the counter. This has become a fixture of him. I can’t recall a bar or restaurant I’ve met him in where he hasn’t been hunched over the countertop, checking his phone and looking up at the TV between plays if the Virginia game is on, like he’s a regular, like he’s been there a million times. I’m not quite as natural as he is. A table service kind of girl at heart, I’ve learned to adapt. So I slide up in the seat next to him.
“Good morning,” he smiles, and looks me over. My hair is a roost of matted curls, my apartment having run humid the night before, and I’m wearing a tongue-in-cheek shirt that reads Don’t Fornicate in a Victorian script font with a green cardigan that’s missing the second button. My mascara is smeared where I’ve managed to inadvertently rub it on the drive over. He’s wearing a shirt from the academy, business as usual. We both wear rings on our left hands, though neither of us is married, and I question whether that’s a comfort thing or we both just enjoy throwing people off.
A man in a red ballcap behind the counter comes up. “Drink for you?”
“Coffee,” I say weakly. It’s 7:32 by the clock on the wall.
I yawn, focusing on the yellow of the laminated menu taped to the counter. My dining partner chuckles. “Thank you for meeting me,” he says, and takes a sip of his water.
“Sorry I’m so tired, I picked my parents up from the airport last night,” I say, and the man in the red hat, sensing my alertness is steadily waning, clinks a heavy white mug down in front of me and fills it up to the brim with black Columbian. “Their plane landed around midnight.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he responds. “If I’d have known that, I would have told you to go right back to sleep.” I look at him and smirk. We both know full well I would have come no matter what.
“My mom was doped up on Xanax,” I tell him. “You should have seen her hobbling through the airport.”
“Yeah?” he says, and when I bring myself to look at his eyes, I’m staggered by their clearness. I immediately look down at the menu, pretending to look it over, even though I get the same thing every time. “Yeah,” I say, dragging my finger along the breakfast specials. “She told me that she and my dad were in a hotel room next to a bunch of college guys, and she thinks one of them brought a hooker home, because, and I’m quoting her here – ‘No one moans like that unless they’re getting paid.’”
He lowers his head and laughs, his shoulders moving up and down, and that’s how I know it’s genuine. “I love your parents,” he sighs, and with that admission my heart splits in two a little.
The man in the red hat comes back up to us and asks, “Ready to order?”
We both nod, and I ask him to go first. “Two eggs over easy with the biscuits and gravy, and a side of grits,” he says, and then adds, “Let me get a side of American with the grits, please.” I’m always amazed at how seamless his ordering is.
The man in the red hat looks at me. “Um,” I start, “scrapple, please? With an egg.”
“How do you want that cooked?” the man in the red hat asks me, and I feel a little stab that I’ve already fallen behind at ordering, which is undoubtedly staccato and sounds as though I’m asking a question with each decision. Um, scrapple? Well, is that what you want? Um, yes?
“Uh, scrambled,” I say, and feel a little asinine in what feels like an admission that ordering my eggs scrambled is the only way I know how to eat them. A specialty in Romantic-era British poetry and a basic understanding of Rococo doesn’t mean that I’ve branched out to poached eggs or sunny side up, whatever the hell that is. I feel like a phony, picking and choosing what I’m good at, whatever sounds best, a pseudo-cultured snake charmer. Let me electrify you with my witty banter and views on imperialism in Victorian literature and my interest in Blake, but eggs over easy? What the fuck is that?
The order isn’t even over. Worse, the man in the red hat feels like he has to guide me now, my personal breakfast sherpa. “And do you want home fries or grits?”
“…Home fries…” I say cautiously.
“Okay,” the man in the red hat says, so encouragingly I want to implode. I look to the next decision I have to make, biscuit or toast, and I’m about to answer, With a biscuit, please, but the man in the red hat says, “And biscuit or toast?”
“Biscuit,” I say, and by this time, my cheeks are burning because it sounds like a lot of food for one person and how many questions does it take to get one person’s order in and why does my brain trip over itself like that when I just want to seem like I have my shit together but the man in the red hat is long gone and it’s just me and the person that counts the most sitting next to me.
Conversation isn’t forced, but I’m feeling too inhibited to be much good at a tête-à-tête, especially when all I want to do is take his face in my hands and feel his forehead against mine, like Sunday mornings all over again. He leads us, though, into various topics, like plans for the weekend and how he’s going to a concert that night, and his meeting with a supervisor from work that could lead to what sounds like a promotion, and I sit and listen, trying not to look rigid and occasionally stirring more cream into my coffee.
Our food comes. His consists of beige gravy, pale liquid eggs and grits like plastic snow. “Colorful meal you have there,” I say, and he swallows a satisfied bite of biscuit.
“So, fishing,” he says.
“Fishing,” I say.
“Might go this Sunday,” he says. “Probably in the evening.”
“Where?” My voice sounds weak, typical of when I don’t want to assume that I’m invited.
“Shore,” he says. “You know that little shopping center in Exmore off the main drag?”
“No,” I admit, and smear cheap Strawberry jelly on my biscuit.
“Well, it’s a little ways up the road, but they have this fully stocked little pond behind it.”
“A pond – that’s going to make it hard to pull seaweed off your hook,” I say. When we went fishing together last summer, he would pull his line up and if there was seaweed impaled on the lure, he would swing it over for me to unhook and throw back in the water, since me touching an actual fish was out of the realm of possibility. But this job I could handle, and after I took the seaweed off the hook I liked to examine the tiny bubbles and holes in the strands of forest green, the slickness and the gritty consistency. He grins and I know he’s caught the reference.
Our plates are cleared and the man in the red hat goes to total up the check. We sit in silence, he, leaning on his arms and watching the grill sizzle with oil, and me, stirring my coffee for no apparent reason because it’s lukewarm now anyway. I glance at him frequently, trying to translate what the hell we’re doing here together, and why it feels so good to sit next to him.
“Lot of heart attacks started on that grill,” he says suddenly, and when he turns to me, I break into a smile and I wish I could think of something clever to say back. I drink my coffee, which even though it has turned cold serves as a convenient prop. The weight of the mug feels good under my hands, gives the illusion that I’m more interested in sipping at my two-sugar, one-cream house blend, when in fact all I can think about is his sleeve touching my arm.
“Thank you for breakfast,” I tell him.
“Thank you for being here,” he says.
I’m reminded of our first breakfast together, downtown at D’Egg diner. Typical first-month-of-meeting conversation, odds and ends, housekeeping questions, really, and novelty ones too, like what kind of animal best embodies your personality? That was one that, predictably, I brought up.
“Hound,” he answered. “Just an old country hound.”
“And that entails?” I asked. I was drinking coffee then, too, and the bells of city traffic rang faintly outside. I examined him closely. His hands were big and capable and they clutched his fork with sturdy poise.
“Like a hunting dog,” he said.
“Oh.”
“Used to have hounds,” he told me. “Hunting dogs, not pets. You can’t let ‘em in the house or they get spoiled.” I looked at him as he sips his orange juice and thought, Well, that explains a lot.
He put his fork down. “And you?”
I paused, and tried to think of animal that is hyper-sensitive and neurotic and completely anxious but still fairly loveable and irritable without coffee. When nothing came to mind, I said, “I think a city sparrow,” and he nodded gravely.
I had ordered oatmeal, mostly because it came with milk and raisins and that meant I had something to do with my hands while we sat there together, and that would help dull my anxiety about having him next to me. As the conversation lulled, I poured milk into my oatmeal and then pinched solitary raisins from their white ceramic bowl to add along.
“I observe more than you might think,” he said suddenly. “You know you look into my right eye when you talk to me? You do. Just my right one. But sometimes you look at my left one, like, is he bullshitting me?”
I was so surprised that I stopped adding the individual raisins to my oatmeal and when I looked at him, he laughed. “Why are you so nervous?”
I had no answer, so I lied. “I’m not nervous.”
He grinned and continued to sip his orange juice and I felt exposed. I couldn’t think of a new subject so I continued to add raisins and observed the world around our two seats at the countertop. Waitresses wore Pepto-colored uniforms that were supposed to look cheerful and old-fashioned but had started to dull into a sad salmon color, and the clanging of coffee mugs into the brown plastic bins that busboys carried from table to table resounded throughout the diner. The sun poured down through the windows, illuminating the sugar I had spilled on the countertop like diamonds.
Two summers later, we are sitting here in another diner, and I have asked him everything – what animal he is, his feelings on abortion, what toppings he likes on his ice cream, why he got divorced, his seating preference on an airplane – everything except for the one thing I really want to know.
I finish my coffee and he slips the check into his pocket, since I am infamous for stealing it and he apparently owes me for cigars I picked up for him the day before. He pays at the register, and I stand next to him, feeling like a side-kick, listening to the sizzle of grill and the dull blur of conversation that goes on between people sitting at the tables who sitting face to face and have nothing to discuss except for how they want the bill split.
He holds the door open for me and we walk outside into the sunlight. His sunglasses immediately go down over his eyes and he reaches out for me. “Have a good day,” he says, and hugs me.
“Thank you again,” I say. “For breakfast.”
I never fool him. “Call you later,” he says.
His arms are wrapped around me and we stand on the sidewalk and I find myself thinking, Yes or no, yes or no, yes or no, and the cars pass without noticing us at all and the sunlight is gushing down on the freshly-painted trim of Charlie’s and on the sidewalk in front of it, illuminating the fragments of shimmering rocks caked inside of it like diamonds.
