Francine Witte ~ Who Among Us Doesn’t Need a Table?

I get us a booth at Gracie’s Diner. Fourth one from the back. Our favorite, mine and Lootie’s. It’s ten o’clock on a Wednesday, one of those weath­er­less days, not too cloudy, not too hot. Not too crowd­ed at this time of day, a cou­ple of guys with news­pa­pers, stroller moms look­ing at their phones. I called in sick for the fifth time this month. I fig­ured my news was important.

Lootie is late again, of course. But I know he’ll be a few min­utes and so I order his usu­al, scram­bled eggs and near-burnt toast.

He ate that on our first break­fast. Six months ago, now.

Me, I order cot­tage cheese and peach­es. Dieter’s spe­cial that’s been on every menu in the his­to­ry of menus. The vinyl menu, all lam­i­nate and fin­ger­prints, has pho­tos of food for peo­ple who have nev­er eaten.

My big news is that I have bought a din­ing room table. I found it on Facebook Marketplace. Round brown oak. All pol­ished up and set with a bowl of oranges to make it look deli­cious. Four Windsor chairs with pil­lowy seat­pads. It’s just the right size for me and Lootie and the two kids we will have, even though the chairs don’t look kid-friend­ly, but we will fig­ure that out. Together, Lootie and I can fig­ure out anything.

I met Lootie in a Facebook group for peo­ple who col­lect state quar­ters. He was look­ing for a Utah, and I had two. He came to my apart­ment and I served him tea on a tray table.

After a few weeks of non-stop Lootie, I guess he fig­ured he knew me well enough to tell me I need­ed a real table. Something to per­ma­nent up the place. “After all,” he said, “who among us doesn’t need a table?” He laughed at his own joke and gave me a hug. That’s when I knew Lootie was there to per­ma­nent up my life.

That was, of course, before the affair he had with Jeannette, the serv­er who used to work right here at Gracie’s. Who quit right after Lootie told me about her.

See, I’m the kind of girl who will keep doing one thing until there’s rea­son to do anoth­er. I will order the dieter’s spe­cial till I die, and I would have eat­en off of tray tables like that, too.

So here I am and it’s 10:15, and I have the pic­ture of the table all ready on my phone. My boss keeps leav­ing voice mails that show up and I keep ignor­ing them. I know I have been out past my num­ber of sick and per­son­al days. How do I explain that I can’t work with love being so unsteady like it is.

I can’t help but won­der who is sell­ing this table and why. I can’t help but won­der what might hap­pen if I open the door when the per­son deliv­er­ing it walks in like Lootie did and I can’t help but fall in love.

But I won’t know that till lat­er. And lat­er is when I will get the text that tells me why Lootie nev­er did show up and is leav­ing me with a scram­bled heart. Or how I will lis­ten to all the voice­mails my boss left me, the last of which is where he tells me not to both­er com­ing in any­more, or how I will sit there for hours on the space in my din­ing room carved out for this table I am about to receive and I won­der if I will have any­thing left to put on it to make it delicious.

~

Francine Witte is a flash fic­tion writer and poet, and the author of the flash col­lec­tion Radio Water. Her newest poet­ry book, Some Distant Pin of Light, was pub­lished by Cervena Barva Press. Her sto­ry “Plate Spinner” won a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New York City. Please vis­it her web­site francinewitte.com. She can be found on social media @francinewitte.