“Just a thing I found.” Firmly, I put it down. I pick up the pad of paper and pencil that I’d gotten from the nurses’ station. As she eats, I doodle, using the menu as support for the paper. I draw the motel as I remember it with the desiccated saguaro by the sign, and I draw the diner with all the tacky kitsch in the windows. I then sketch in the rest of the street, the post office with the eagle, the darkened alleys. When I finish, I tape it to the wall.
On a fresh piece of paper, I start to draw Victoria, the harsh lines of her jaw and the severity of her hair. I sketch in her waitress uniform. Taking another sheet, I begin on Tiffany.
Mom finishes every bite of her food.
Chapter Twenty-Five
He chooses a Greek restaurant, which is fine with me. He says he didn’t want to choose Italian because it screams “first date” and “trying too hard.”
“Anything that isn’t a diner,” I tell him. I don’t explain why.
He drives carefully. He’s a safe driver, another reason for my mother to like him. I picture Peter riding the top of the train, wind flapping through his coat, and suddenly I miss him so much that it shocks the breath out of me. Mom is right that a date with William is a good idea. I need to reconnect with reality.
Inside, the restaurant is nice. Very Greece-centric. It’s decorated with murals of pastoral Greek isles on the walls and a stone tile floor with a flower mosaic. The hostess leads us to a table against the wall, near a vase that overflows with lilies. I think the lilies are real. I touch one of the petals to check. Yes, real. The waitress hands us menus. William’s menu has a photo of a Greek island with white plaster houses and brilliant teal-blue water. Mine has a crescent moon. I open it and see the eclipse éclair, the solar flare flounder, the meteor meatloaf...
The waitress plucks the menu out of my hands. “Not sure where that came from.” She tucks it under her elbow, and she hands me a fresh menu with a photo of Greece on the front. “Sorry about that.”
“Wait,” I say. “What was...”
But the waitress whisks away and is at another table across the restaurant, pad and pen in hand. The menu with the moon, if that was indeed what I saw, is tucked between other menus.
William is talking. “...falafel is surprisingly spicy, but their lamb is excellent.” He waves to one of the cooks through a window to the kitchen. “I come here a lot. I’m a lousy cook.”
I watch the waitress stuff the menus under the hostess station, and then I force myself to smile at William. “I would have thought you’d be good at it with the perfectionism and the control thing. It’s usually us artsy types that burn everything in sight.”
The waitress pours water. She sloshes some on my place mat. “Can I get you anything to drink?” Slouching with one hip jutting out, she retrieves a pen from the nest of hair tied behind her head. She’s staring at William as if he’s tasty.
It couldn’t have been the Moonlight Diner menu,I tell myself. I need to stop thinking about it.
William uses his napkin to dab the water spill on my place mat. “Glass of Chardonnay for me. What would you like, Lauren?”
“Iced tea?” Then I remember I promised my mother I’d drink wine. “Scratch that. I’ll have a Chardonnay, too.” I think of Mom and wonder if any of the nurses made her eat dinner. I should be there with her, never mind that she told me to come.
As if he can read my thoughts, he says gently, “She needs time to herself, too. I don’t think this is entirely about matchmaking.”
I nod. That makes sense. She probably does need a break from me. To rest. To collect her thoughts. To... I don’t know. Prepare herself. I swallow hard and look down at the place mat. Its woven fibers, like strips of bamboo. I pick at it, and then I stop myself and take the napkin and lay it on my lap. The waitress delivers a dish of hummus with a wrinkled olive in the middle. She puts a wire bowl of pita bread next to it.
“So...youngest of four,” I prompt.
“They liked to see what they could get me to do.” He dips a pita bread in the hummus, swirls it with a practiced twist, and then curves it up so none drips off. “Once, they convinced me that my Halloween costume granted actual flying powers. My father caught me leaping off the roof of the garage. Another time, they used me as a human basketball. They rationalized that they’d placed pillows underneath the net so it was all safe and good. Plus I’d agreed since it was the only way they’d play with me. I had one brother who was seven years older than me and two that were five years older. I learned to walk at a very young age so that I could flee when necessary. Kind of survival of the fittest at my house.”
“I’m an only child. Always wanted a little sister.” Like Claire.
I shake my head to clear my thoughts away. William wouldn’t want to be on a date with me if he knew how mentally unhinged I am, dwelling on people that my subconscious summoned up while I was in a coma.
The waitress smiles at William as she takes our order, and then she swishes across the restaurant. My eyes drift to the hostess station, where the diner menu may or may not be.
“How was Mom while I was in that coma?” I am derailing whatever it is he’s talking about—Greece, I think. He’d been there. I review the piece of the conversation that my brain must have been listening to. He likes to travel, but he doesn’t have much time for it. “I like to travel, too. But I haven’t done it much. That is, I think I’d like to travel, if I did it.”
“You should try traveling, and your mother was worried, of course. She hated that she couldn’t be with you to talk to you. She wanted you to hear the sound of a familiar voice.” He pauses, looks uncomfortable. He’s wearing a button-down shirt, and it looks stiff after the scrubs. I guess that he’s most comfortable in scrubs with a clipboard in his hand. His pager sounds. He glances at it and then puts it back at his waist. “I talked to you sometimes between shifts.”
I stare at him. “You did?”
“Creepy or nice?” he asks.
I think of the man hunting for pennies in the gutter and the woman planting dead flowers in front of the post office. I’ve seen my fair share of creepy, albeit only in my own imagination. “Nice,” I say firmly.
He relaxes. “Good. You know, you aren’t exactly what I expected.”
