Fluke (13 page)

“If this girl, Sara, is your idea of ‘it,’ then that’s great, bro.
 
I’m happy for you, and I want it to work for you.
 
I just don’t want you to set yourself up for another heartbreak.”

“This is the real thing, Sean.
 
This is nothing like those women before.
 
That sounds crazy, I know, but I just know it.” I said this while sipping my beer, and I know it’s true, even if Sean chose not to believe me.

“Well, all right then, stud,” he picked up his beer and slugged back a third of it.
 
He set down his mug, wiped his lips, and said, “Now take a fucking shot before I die of old age here.”

By the time the game was over, I had told Sean all about Sara.
 
I told him about our first night together (although, I left out the trance for now), the night at the fair, the beach.
 
The more I told him, the more excited he acted for me.
 
Whether or not it was sincere, I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter.
 
It seemed sincere, and I loved talking about her.
 
Neither of us verbalized it, but I suspected I would
never be that same sidekick for him that I had always been, even though we would always be friends.

Sean did, however, end up beating me mercilessly on the table, and the girls from the bar gave him a phone number on their way out.
 
Some things would never change.

****

It was about thirty minutes after midnight when Sean pulled his Blazer into the parking lot of our favorite late-night eatery and general meeting center, the Waffle House.
 
My friends and I had spent many hours, both drunken and sober, in the Waffle House, eating, drinking coffee, discussing life, liberty, and the pursuit of women.

Of course, there wasn’t a lot of competition for our late-night tummy grumblings, as only one other restaurant in the city stayed open past midnight, Mamie’s Café, and the quality of the food there was questionable.
 
 
My friend Kevin refused to leave his house for three days after eating a giant bowl of Mamie’s chili one night; he claimed he suffered from “diarrhea of Satanic proportions” and if he had ventured more than a hundred feet from his bathroom “hell’s wrath would have been wrought upon the world and my pants.” Once I had ordered a hamburger at Mamie’s at about three a.m., and they served it to me with no meat.
 
A restaurant that couldn’t even master the basic ingredient of the hamburger seemed dubious to me, and the frightening prospect of three days’ worth of diarrhea of “Satanic proportions” sealed our status as permanent patrons of the Waffle House.

I stepped gingerly out of Sean’s passenger seat, carefully working on maintaining my balance.
 
Sean had quit drinking after the first couple of beers; I, on the other hand, had stepped up from beers to Jack Daniel’s and Coke, and I was feeling quite a buzz by the time we hung up our cue sticks and paid the bar tab.

On the drive from the Tap Room to the Waffle House, we were both silent in the car, Sean tapping his fingers on the steering wheel and singing quietly along with the radio, me thinking about Sara.
 
Wanting to see Sara.
 
Wanting to assume the spoon position with Sara and fall into a deep sleep.

“
Gonna
make it, Fluke?” Sean teased as I walked slowly around the front of his truck, resting my hand flat on the warm hood.

“I’m fine, man.
 
I think I’m more tired than drunk.
 
I just need a heap of hash browns to soak up some whiskey.”

We walked in the door to the greeting of three servers, “Top o’ the morning to you!” How on earth these folks could be so cheery, serving food to drunks into the wee hours of the morning, was a mystery to me and often a subject of our conversations.

“I’m
gonna
go take a whiz,” I told Sean, heading for the bathroom.
 
Sean nodded and picked our favorite booth…the last one before the bathrooms.

I stood in the dingy men’s room, handling my business and thinking about Sara.
 
I really wanted to talk to her and to see her.
 
I zipped up, washed my hands, and dug my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed Sara’s number.

After the first ring, I glanced at my watch and briefly worried that I might wake her up, but let it ring anyway.
 
She picked up after the third ring.
 
I mumbled to her, “Hey.”

“That you, Mister Fluke? Are you okay? Need a ride?” She sounded half-awake, but not annoyed.

“No, gorgeous, I’m fine.
 
I just wanted to hear your voice,” I said, trying not to slur my words.
 
I felt like I was doing a good job of not sounding hammered, but I knew better than to trust my own judgment—I always sounded better to myself.

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union…” she laughed.
 
“How’s that?”

“Well, it served the purpose,” I laughed back.
 
She was always on, even when I woke her up.
 
“I said, beautiful lady, that I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“Oh, well, thank you.
 
Where are you? Still off with Sean?”
 
I heard her lighter flick and caught the faint sound of her exhaling.

“Yeah, we just stopped to get some grub at the Waffle House,” I said.
 
“You were sleeping, weren’t you?” I asked, still feeling slightly guilty.

“I nodded off on the couch about fifteen minutes ago, I think.
 
I was watching Letterman.
 
That guy is hilarious, but I fell asleep when some country singer came on,” she said.
 
“Waffle House, huh? That sounds good…I’m hungry.”

My eyes lit up.
 
“Why don’t you come down and meet me and Sean? We’ll have some coffee, a bite to eat, and you can give me a ride home instead of Sean.” I joked, “I’d much rather have a beautiful woman take me home, as opposed to Sean.”

“From the way you talk about Sean, he’d probably much rather be taking a beautiful woman home than you,” she countered, and we laughed.
 
“Okay, I’ll come down.
 
I just need to put on some pants.”

“Ah,
pantsless
, are we?” I said in a mock suave voice.

“Well, I am.
 
We
hopefully aren’t, however, since you’re out in public,” she laughed again.

“But the night is young, Miss
DuBeau
,” I responded.
 
“There are plenty of opportunities for me to get
pantsless
.”

“Yeah, like when I give you a ride home,” she said coyly.
 
Wow.
 
“In about fifteen minutes, order me a cheese omelet and a big old cup of coffee.
 
See you soon.”

I hung up and slid into the booth across from Sean, feeling invincible.
 
I rested my hands on the table, feeling tiny sticky spots.
 
The hard wood of the booth was uncomfortable immediately, and the shiny silver ashtray was nearly full already.
 
It was exactly as I expected it, and just how I wanted my Waffle House booth.
 
Sean stared at me as I lit a cigarette and picked up a giant plastic combination placemat/menu.

“What’d you do? Take another famous Fluke dump in a public bathroom?” he joked, sipping a glass of iced tea.

“I called Sara,” I told him.
 
“She’s going to meet up with us and have a bite to eat.”

He raised an eyebrow and said, “Ah, so I can meet the lovely Sara, huh? Well, that’s good.
 
You’ve been talking about her so much, my curiosity meter is redlined.”

The waitress came to the table and looked at me, as if annoyed.
 
She wore the trademark brown, orange, and yellow polyester of the Waffle House employee, and the trademark surliness of a tired, tired woman forced to serve food to drunken idiots in order to survive.
 
Her nametag read “Yvonne,” and I ordered in as nice a way as possible.

“Well, Yvonne, I’ll take a cup of coffee and a glass of water to drink, and a double order of hash browns, scattered, covered, smothered, chunked, and topped.” I smiled sweetly at her.

“Sure, just a minute,” she said after jotting our orders down on a yellow pad.
 
She walked away, and I heard her call the order out to the cook.

The food and drinks came, and Sean and I ate hungrily.
 
I watched Sean and thought back to the multiple occasions he and I had ended up at Waffle House with some woman he had met, some stranger who wanted nothing more than to get into bed with Sean.
 
Tonight was my turn to have the woman on my side of the booth, and it wasn’t some nameless drunk floozy.
 
It was Sara.

Yvonne wandered by, and I ordered the food that Sara had asked for to a puzzled look from Yvonne.
 
She glanced at Sean’s empty plate, then at mine, and asked, “Are you still hungry?”

“No,” I laughed.
 
“A friend is joining us any time now, and I figured I’d have her food waiting for her.”

Yvonne, the cynic, nodded her head slightly and said, “Sure thing.”

I was tidying up my mess when I heard Sean say, “Shit, Fluke, is that Sara?”

I looked out the big plate glass windows, and saw Sara, locking the door on her Golf.
 
She had on a lavender-colored, flowery-print skirt and a white sleeveless T-shirt, and she looked beautiful.
 
I looked at Sean, who was staring out the window at her.

“Hey, there she is,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.
 
The truth was, however, that I was as struck by her beauty now as I had been the night I handed her a medium cheese pizza.
 
A brief thought passed through my head, but was short-lived: it’s a fluke for you, Fluke.
 
Just a fluke.

“Wow.
 
She’s hot, man.
 
If that’s really her and not some chick you paid to hang out with you, I’m impressed,” he laughed.

She came in the door, smiled at the workers who shouted out the greeting, and looked at me.
 
I stood and met her beside the booth, wrapping my arms around her waist and giving her a small kiss.
 
She returned the kiss and turned towards Sean.

“You must be the infamous Sean,” she said, holding her hand out.
 
“I’m Sara.”

Sean smiled and shook her hand and said, “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Sara.”

We all sat down and she told me about her night, rearranging furniture in her apartment, doing laundry, cleaning.

“I washed some of your clothes, too.
 
Hope you don’t mind,” she said.

“Not at all,” I said, and Sean just smiled at me.
 
“Thank you.”

“You wash Fluke’s clothes? Oh, man, it must be love,” Sean said.
 
This brought a slightly uncomfortable chuckle from both Sara and I.
 
That was a word I had flirted with in my mind recently, but hadn’t wanted to consider seriously due to my prior track record, and how quickly this had all come about.
 
I had resolved myself to just go with the flow until more time had passed, and this had indeed proved itself to not be just a fluke.

Sean gulped down the last of his tea and started crunching the ice in his mouth.
 
He stared at me intently, as though trying to place me, and I responded with a confused look at him.
 
Sara watched Sean and I, and said, “What are you guys doing? Staring contest?”

“Nah.
 
It’s just that Fluke over there reminds me of an actor.
 
That guy…shit, what’s his name?” Sean sat back and appeared to give up.
 
“I can’t think of his name.”

I glanced over at Sara, and saw her staring at Sean.
 
“He’s kind of a nut, in case you hadn’t noticed,” I told her.

She didn’t respond.
 
She didn’t look at me.
 
I followed her gaze and realized that she wasn’t staring at Sean.
 
She wasn’t staring at anything; she was just staring.
 
Statue-like.
 
In one hand she held a napkin, and with the other hand she tore small pieces of the napkin off and let them drop onto her plate.