I had gone to the kitchen for some napkins when she came into Henry’s Eatery for the first time. The moment I saw her standing by the front door, I dropped the napkins to the floor in a blizzard of paper. I continued staring at her as I gathered the napkins up, hoping she hadn’t noticed my blunder.
I made my way over to her slowly, feasting on every detail. She had milky white skin, honey-toned eyes, and carrot-orange hair. She wore a white blouse that bulged unobtrusively in the bosom and a pair of gray slacks that encircled a wide set of hips. Over her right shoulder she carried a tote bag that might have been white at one time, but had become a mangy tan. With some relief, I skimmed over her slender fingers and saw no rings. “Just one?” I asked, my voice cracking like a schoolboy’s. “Smoking or non?”
She spoke for the first time, her voice husky like a jazz singer’s. “Nonsmoking,” she said.
“This way.” At three o’clock the only other people in the restaurant were Mr. Henry in the office and Miguel the busboy doing the dishes in the kitchen.
She ordered an iced tea with lemon and then hid her face behind the menu. I filled a glass behind the counter, but couldn’t find any lemon wedges. In a panic, I dashed back to the kitchen to find a lemon. Miguel the busboy watched me uncomprehendingly as I flung open the door to the refrigerator and tore through the shelves in search of citrus fruit.
When I couldn’t find anything resembling a lemon, I knocked on the door to Mr. Henry’s office. My employer and landlord looked up from an issue of Playboy he kept wrapped in a catalog. None of his employees had the heart to tell him we knew he wasn’t reading that catalog for its articles. “Are we out of lemons?” I asked.
“Lemons? We don’t have any lemons. This isn’t the Ritz.”
I trudged out of the kitchen in defeat, returning to her table with the tea sans lemon. “I’m sorry, we don’t have any lemons,” I said.
“Oh, that’s all right,” she said. She flashed a smile as white as her blouse, with every tooth straight and in precise order like an aspiring actress.
“Are you ready to order?” She pointed to the grilled cheese platter and asked for a salad instead of French fries. I wanted to tell her she didn’t need to watch her figure, but instead only nodded and promised to return shortly.
While I waited for Mr. Henry to make the grilled cheese and salad, the Sheltons came in for their daily cups of coffee. Mr. Shelton always took his black and Mrs. Shelton with one sugar; both ordered decaffeinated because regular coffee would keep them up all night. I thought Mr. Henry’s coffee tasted like axle grease, but the Sheltons didn’t seem to mind. It might have had something to do with the policy of free coffee for senior citizens.
As I filled the coffee cups, I saw the woman take a hardcover book from the tote bag, followed by a pair of plastic reading glasses she balanced expertly on the bridge of her nose. I squinted behind my own horned-rims to see what she was reading, but I couldn’t make out a title. Then I pulled my hand back with a wince from coffee spilling over the top of Mr. Shelton’s cup. I cursed under my breath while I cleaned up the mess and then tried to smile as I brought the elderly couple their drinks.
“Keeping busy?” Mr. Shelton asked as he always did.
“Just barely,” I said. I looked out of the corner of my eye to see the woman lick the tip of her index finger before turning a page. When I turned my attention back to the Sheltons, I found Mrs. Shelton engaged in a story about the new man her fifty-something daughter had shacked up with.
“I told her, ‘Debbie, the boy is half your age. What’s Tammy supposed to think about you bringing home a boy younger than her?’ She won’t listen, though.”
“He can’t be any worse than Roger,” Mr. Shelton grumbled over the rim of his cup. Roger was Debbie’s ex-husband who’d abandoned her at a performance of Hamlet to run off with Ophelia’s understudy. He sent divorce papers two weeks later from Las Vegas, where he’d taken up gambling as a full-time job while his new fiancée performed as a background dancer for Celine Dion.
“He hasn’t even graduated from college yet. How is he supposed to support her?”
I was spared listening to the rest of their disagreement when Mr. Henry signaled he had the woman’s order ready. I took the plate of salad—nothing more than the lettuce, tomato slices, and pickles used for hamburgers—and the one of grilled cheese to her table. When she snapped the book shut I saw she was reading a biography of Franklin Roosevelt.
After setting down the plates in front of her, I gestured to the book. “Are you a history teacher?”
“Librarian, actually.”
“That must be interesting,” I said for lack of anything better to say.
“It certainly is.” From the tone of her voice, I knew I’d overstayed my welcome.
“Just let me know if you need anything.” I kept a distance from her table, occupying myself by listening to the Sheltons complain about prescription drug costs and checking the levels on the ketchup bottles at every table. As the woman ate, she continued reading her book on FDR, pausing in mid-bite to lick her finger and turn a page.
I did my duty as waiter to brush past her every few minutes to ask if she needed anything, but by the time she’d finished her sandwich and salad, she’d only drank half her tea. “Any dessert today?” I asked.
“No thanks.” I slipped the bill onto the table and she immediately produced a Visa card from the tote bag. Melanie MacLean was the name on the card. I returned a few minutes later with her card and receipt. With a curt nod, she let me know I was dismissed.
I took it as a sign of hope later to find two one-dollar bills on the table. More than a twenty-five percent tip for lemonless tea, a dismal salad, and a bland sandwich. Then again, maybe as a librarian she enjoyed the quiet atmosphere. Either way, I hoped she would come back again.
That night I sat in my room above Mr. Henry’s garage, staring at a piece of blank paper in the hope of ending my two-year period of songwriter’s block. Ever since Cathy had left me I hadn’t been able to put words to paper. Stacks of demo tapes surrounded me, each one reminding me of her. Whenever I tried to sing any of the songs on those tapes, I remembered the night she left me in the parking lot of the International Waffle House in Roscoe, Texas.
“Josh, we’re almost thirty years old and we’re still pushing this same van around,” she told me that night.
Despite my best efforts to convince her, she gave me one last kiss for the road and then disappeared like Ingrid Bergman at the end of Casablanca. I stood there mutely like Bogart, without even a Claude Rains to cheer me up. Instead, I got into the van and three weeks later wound up at Henry’s Eatery with no money and no prospects. He took me in, gave me a job, and a place to lick my wounds. We both thought it would be a brief stay, but here I was at thirty still taking advantage of his generosity.
I fell asleep with only one word on the paper—Melanie. Even Philip Glass would find that a little too minimalist. In the morning I wadded up the paper and rode with Mr. Henry to the restaurant. While he opened, I went down the road to a supermarket and searched the citrus fruits for the biggest, most yellow lemon I could find. I spent twenty minutes pawing through the bin until I found one worthy of Melanie MacLean’s tea. Then I hurried back to the store and shoved it into a corner of the fridge where no one would see it.
The day went by as usual until a quarter to three. By then the lunch crowd had petered out and I had nothing else to do but watch the hands of the clock move towards my destiny. I started to sweat at two-fifty and by two-fifty-five I looked as if I’d spent an hour in the sauna. Much longer and the store might start to flood.
When the clock struck three I waited for the door to open, but it didn’t. She was gone, just like that. I’d never get to serve her the lemon I’d worked so hard to find.
I had started to wipe off the tables when the door opened and there she stood. I resisted the urge to race into her arms, doing my best to maintain my dignity as I showed her to a table. “Grilled cheese and iced tea?” I asked.
Her cheeks reddened and she said, “Yes, that would be wonderful. Thank you.” I gave Mr. Henry the order and then skipped back to the fridge for the precious lemon. I’d never worked with lemons before—except for my old van—and stared at it for a minute to decide how to divide it up. In the end I managed to hack off a slice that more or less resembled a wedge and impaled it against the edge of Melanie’s glass.
I triumphantly swept the tea onto her table. She looked up from a book on Chinese currency valuation to study the glass. Then a smile crept across her face. “You have a lemon today.”
“We do indeed,” I said. I glanced at her book and tried to come up with something intelligent-sounding. “Are you planning a trip?” I asked with an inward groan.
“No, I just pick books at random off the shelf to read.”
“That must keep things interesting. I played a little theatre once in Chinatown in San Francisco.”
“Oh, are you an actor?”
“A singer. Or I was. I’ve sort of got out of the business to start a career as a restaurateur.”
“You own this place?”
“No, but I’m next in line for the throne. If aliens beam Mr. Henry up tonight, it’s all mine.”
She laughed at my idiotic statement, which I took as another hopeful sign. Before I could put my foot into my mouth any farther, the Sheltons came in for their free coffees. “I guess I better get back to work and leave you to the Chinese currency.”
For the next two weeks we got into a pattern where she came in at three o’clock every afternoon for a grilled cheese and iced tea. I always had a lemon ready for her—I even figured out how to cut them into neat wedges—and after bringing the tea out, we chatted about her book of the day.
I even used some secret agent cunning to pry loose a few details about her personal life. Melanie lived in an apartment across town that she shared with her books. Her family owned a chain of fried chicken restaurants in Alabama, which provided the money to send her to Vassar. She had been married once, but wouldn’t mention anything more than she’d come here after the divorce.
I told her about my ten years crossing the country as an aspiring folk singer. I described playing smoky coffeehouses in New York where the audiences paid more attention to their cell phones than me, a Seattle park where it rained for two straight days, and the Rib Festival in Amarillo where they heckled me off the stage with a barrage of pig bones. I didn’t mention I’d seen all those places with Cathy at my side.
After two weeks she surprised me by producing a pen from her tote bag and scribbling her telephone number on the back of the receipt. “I really enjoy talking to you. I thought maybe we could talk sometime after work,” she said. “If you want to.”
“Of course I would,” I stammered with some effort. She smiled and waved to me on the way out while I stood there as if posing for a painting.
I kept the precious slip of paper in my pocket all day, checking every twenty seconds to make sure it hadn’t somehow decomposed inside my army surplus pants.
“What’s wrong with you?” Mr. Henry asked me on the way home. “You win the lottery or something?”
“Not yet,” I said. I planned to strike it rich in a different kind of lottery just as soon as I got to the phone.
“You coming in for supper?”
“No, I’m tired. I think I’ll just go up to my room. See you tomorrow.” I feigned a sleepwalking shamble up the steps to my room over the garage so Mr. Henry wouldn’t suspect anything. As soon as I closed the door, I eased the slip of paper from my pocket and gently set it on a milk crate I used for a coffee table. At last I could dial those seven precious digits to reach out and touch Melanie MacLean.
I listened to the phone ring, hoping I didn’t get her machine. Then I heard her pick up and croon, “Hello?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but felt as if the air had been sucked from my lungs. All around me I saw the demo tapes and sheets of lyrics I’d written with Cathy as my muse. I saw her leaving me in the parking lot of the waffle house, our love disappearing with her.
This was a big step in my relationship with Melanie. All our chatting and flirting in Henry’s Eatery had only been the first move in a much larger game. Looking around at the testaments to my professional and romantic failures, I knew how this game would end. I was a thirty-year-old waiter with nothing more to offer her than boxes of songs no one else would ever hear.
“Hello? Is anyone there?” she asked.
No words would come from my lips. I finally hung up the phone and rested my head against the milk crate. I sat there for hours, feeling hollowed-out and cold.
Replays of my cowardice keeping me from closing my eyes until I eventually succumbed to my body’s need for sleep. Two hours later, Mr. Henry knocked on my door. “You look like shit,” he said without preamble. “Are you sick?”
“I’ll be fine.” I followed him down to the truck and went back to work. Instead of fetching a fresh lemon for Melanie, I went to the greeting card aisle and searched for one that might somehow explain the situation. Hallmark hadn’t gotten around to creating an “I like you but I’m a miserable failure” card yet so I left empty-handed.
Melanie didn’t come in that day, or the day after, or the day after. A week dragged by without a sighting, a telephone call, or even a letter. On the seventh day, I finally threw her number away. I’d blown it. The best thing to happen to me since Cathy and I’d driven her away.
The next day I leaned against the front counter, absently flicking a ketchup packet, when Mr. Shelton toddled up to me with his cup outstretched. “Can I get a refill?”
“Sure thing,” I said. Lost in my post-Melanie haze I’d neglected the Sheltons.
As I scrambled for the coffee pot, Mr. Shelton said, “I haven’t seen that young lady you’re so fond of in here for a while. You two have a falling out?”
“You could say that,” I said. Against my better judgment, I spilled the contents of my disastrous break-up with Melanie to the old man. I paused at key intervals to keep from sobbing like a reality TV show contestant.
When I finished, Mr. Shelton said, “That’s it? Why haven’t you called her back?”
“It’s probably too late by now.”
“You young people today are such quitters. If we were like you during the war, the whole country would be speaking German.”
“What do you want me to do? Paratroop onto her lawn?”
He grabbed my hand in his liver-spotted kung-fu grip, refusing to let me go. “Don’t get smart with me, boy. Now, sit down.” I took a seat on the stool next to him. He adjusted his glasses and then glanced over to make sure the missus wasn’t watching us.
“There was once another Mrs. Shelton. Her name was Connie Rheem. We’d grown up right next door to each other. She was the only girl I’d ever dated. We got hitched before I shipped out for Europe. She told me if anything happened to me, she wouldn’t be able to bear it.”
“Fate has a lousy sense of humor. I survived the entire war and on the day I get into town, I see her mother waiting for me at the train station. She’d come down with some kind of fever. I went straight to the hospital, but it was already too late. Her mind had gone by then to the point where she didn’t recognize me. She kept calling out my name and I kept telling her I was right there, but she couldn’t hear me.”
Mr. Shelton swallowed the contents of his cup before saying, “She died two days later. I didn’t think I’d ever get over it. I spent the next year drinking and fighting until I woke up in the gutter one morning and there was Leanne, asking me if I was all right. I think you know the rest.”
“And you got over Connie, the love of your life, just like that? How?”
“It took a little while, but I finally had to come with grips with it: she was dead. I could wallow around, feeling sorry for myself forever, or I could move on with this girl I was crazy about.”
“But weren’t you scared about losing her the same way?”
“I still am. Every morning I wake up, I’m always afraid I’ll reach over and she’ll be cold and stiff like Connie after she went. But what else can I do? Go live up on some mountain like a hermit? That ain’t living, boy.”
“Thanks Mr. Shelton,” I said. I knew right then what I had to do. I asked Mr. Henry if I could leave early and ran the three miles back home in world record time.
I threw open the door to my room and emptied my laundry bag onto the floor. Then I whirled around the room like the Tazmanian Devil, dumping every reminder of Cathy into the bag. By the time I finished, only a few scraps of paper and a pile of dirty clothes littered the floor. I patted the bag one last time with affection and then pitched it onto the lawn. The demo tapes reminding me of Cathy shattered with a crack like thunder, freeing me at last.
I used a pen that had survived the purge and a blank piece of paper to set to work on ending my two-year songwriting drought. Words appeared on the page without any conscious thought. In minutes I had an entirely new song written. Now I just needed a melody to go with it. From the closet I took out my battered guitar case and spent the rest of the night on what I hoped would be my greatest performance.
I asked Mr. Henry for the day off and I must have looked so frazzled after a night of feverish songwriting that he agreed without hesitation. After he left for work, I slung the guitar case over my shoulder and took a bus to the library. I paused on the front steps for a moment, and then opened the door.
A withered crone sat at the front desk. She stared at the guitar on my back and then pointed with a wizened claw when I asked about Melanie. I found Melanie among a stack of poetry books in need of reorganization. She looked up from a book with a face as sour as if someone had told her the Dewey Decimal system was a load of hooey. “What do you want?” she asked in a librarian’s hiss.
In response I opened the guitar case and began plucking out the melody to my new song. I called it “Love’s Captive Fool.” The song dealt with a fool—myself—who passed up a great gal—Melanie—because he couldn’t let go of the past and wanted to make a new start with her. I closed with the chorus:
Here I Am
Love’s Captive Fool
Hoping That You’ll
Come Back to Me
I closed by whispering the last line of the chorus without any musical accompaniment. I’d kept my eyes closed the entire time so I wouldn’t have to see her reaction. When I repeated the line for the final time, I opened my eyes and saw her wiping tears from hers.
She lunged forward to kiss me while the crowd attracted by my performance applauded loud enough to bring down the house. Here we stood in the center of it all, two fools in love.