Fowl Weather by Bob Tarte Page A

tuna.
    â€œWe want to be up there,” said Linda, indicating a raised area. I settled in facing Linda and a pair of televisions above the waitress station, and Linda sat facing me and a pair of televisions above the windows. One TV in each pair had the sound turned on. The other used closed captioning, allowing me to read the text of an Aleve commercial while I picked at bamboo shoots.
    When Linda returned to our table from the buffet, I noticed that she listed slightly to one side, and I didn’t think it was simply the weight of her plate. Her back pain had flared up again, though she didn’t complain. “Henry Murphy called with the soil test results this morning,” she told me as I marveled at the sheer amount of food on her dish.
    â€œYou know, they let you go back as many times as you want.”
    â€œEverything looks so good,” she said, picking up her corn on the cob. “Anyway, he was quite proud of the results. He said that our soil contained zero amount of phosphorus, zero amount of nitrogen, and zero amount of potash.”
    â€œThat sounds pretty low.”
    Problems with the closed-captioning software caused Tom Brokaw to spew a stream of asterisks, percentage signs, and exclamation points. The glitch matched the language of a heavy man in a tight fitting T-shirt one table away, who indelicately dressed down his grade school son for stuffing himself on desserts rather than entrées.
    â€œHe was quite triumphant about it. I said I didn’t think it was possible to have zero phosphorus, zero nitrogen, and zero potash—my gardens wouldn’t be so lush. But he was very insistent that his results were correct.”
    â€œDid you ask him about the blood-alcohol test results?”
    Reaching behind her back, Linda extracted an object resembling a serving of uncooked calf’s liver. The gel pack hadn’t come from the store in this distended condition, but it had earned its amorphous shape by being repeatedly plopped down upon, stepped on, and, from all appearances, run over by a school bus. Its original plastic envelope had burst long ago, and Linda had encased it in a series of sandwich bags. She squeezed it a couple of times and announced, “I’ve got to zap my heat pack.”
    I was happy that the restaurant offered a self-serve microwave, or she might have had to explain to our four-year-old hostess that she wasn’t smuggling in a bizarre food item that somehow hadn’t made it into the buffet. Too many times I had witnessed Linda handing the visceral-looking pouch to a terrified teenager behind a fast-food restaurant counter and asking him or her to please warm it up.
    â€œI got quite the phone call today while you were at the grocery store,” I said after she’d returned with the gel pack, knocked her lumbar cushion to the floor, dropped the gel pack while picking up the cushion, and finally managed to arrange them both behind her. “My mom called. She lost her purse.”
    â€œAgain?”
    â€œShe claimed that somebody had come into her house and taken it. When I told her I’d be right over to help her find it, she said, ‘Joan’s here already. I was just wondering if you knew anything about it disappearing.’ “
    A large, white, inoffensive non-Muscovy duck appeared on a commercial. “That looks just like Lulu,” Linda pointed out. “She thinks you took her purse?”
    â€œI’ll bet she doesn’t bite people,” I said. “I’m talking about the duck. Joan came on the phone and said she’d found the purse stuck under the couch cushion. Same place she found it the other week.” I gestured toward the thickset man whose sulking son refused to lift his fork. “How’d you like to have that for a family?”
    â€œDid you tell her she needs to keep it in one place?”
    â€œI told her, ‘I’ll put a hook in the front vestibule for your purse, and