In a Bistro
- Posted on February 14, 2017
- in Uncategorized
- by caseyshuniak@gmail.com
Gravity is nothing but the unavoidable attraction between two distant bodies.
But Tom, who spotted a bistro girl orbiting the atrium of sunlit tables, wasn’t thinking about gravity at all. Still, he charted the way she revolved around the lawyers and bankers, holding their BLTs and Caesar salads in both of her hands.
Tom had no idea what made the world spin around, that gravity was the force that he suddenly felt in his chest. So he made an appointment with his cardiologist for next week. Considered if he ought to order a salad instead.
‘An apron and khakis, how sad,’ Ann started. Because Ann knew, even if Tom didn’t. And she knew that Tom had never felt for her like that. And he never would, but that’s the way gravity goes sometimes.
Yet Ann, months ago, reacted to her husband like any cautious, calculating debutante, weighing each cost in proportion to the lawyer’s alimony estimations. That only gave her reasons to stay, because she couldn’t wrap her head around any world without places like the sunlit bistro. Didn’t even want to try.
Still, feeling stuck with Tom didn’t mean that she needed to be nice to him. So, like other times, her stiletto met his shin and it knocked Tom off his axis, slingshotting him around a reality check.
’Really, Tom?’
And when the girl brought their bill, Ann insisted he stiff her cold. He felt that pull tighten in his chest when they got up to leave. He still managed to finish an entire Monte Cristo, and rushing out the door, realized he didn’t regret it.
The girl never knew what happened. But she’d worked at the bistro long enough to understand that people with money feel better when they’re surrounded by people who are struggling without it. The busboy once told her so. And he comforted her when Ann and Tom were long gone. That was the first night that she and the busboy went home together. They fell in love and had four kids, never knowing that it all happened after a stiletto to Tom’s shin.
Gravity is a grand and complicating, ubiquitous force, connecting bodies across any given oblivion, and slingshotting them back against opposite axises.
Everything else, people and places and all the money in the world, that’s all just something attracted to something by gravity.
The world is spinning. Money is rotating. The bistro girl orbits lawyers and bankers. And the busboy revolves around her. Then there’s Tom and Ann. I guess that’s the way gravity goes sometimes.