One Foot In The Gravy by Delia Rosen Page A

thought this was more.
    Brain: No, I think. You feel. You felt this was more. I knew what it was.
    Heart: Really, hotshot? What was it? Just a skinny dip? I’ll show you mine if—
    Brain : Something like that.
    Heart: I don’t believe it. You saw how he was acting.
    Brain: He was uncertain—
    Heart : Not during.
    Brain: Of course ‘not during’! Before.
    Heart: He didn’t know how to approach me, how to broach how he felt.
    Brain: Uh-uh. He wasn’t sure how he felt. Probably still isn’t, which is as good as a loss.
    Heart: What are you talking about?
    Brain: He likes you enough to have wanted a return visit, but not enough to want you to think it’s anything more than a visit.
    Heart: You don’t know that. He may have had to get to work.
    Brain: You’re an idiot and you’re blind.
    Eyes: Hey, I saw!
    Brain: What did you see?
    Eyes: How he was behaving. And you’re both wrong.
    Heart and Brain: Oh?
    Eyes: He came here to stop thinking of the chick he was with. Eyes know eyes, and I could see he was looking backward, not ahead.
    Gwen: Shut up, all of you.
     
     
    I beat Thom to the restaurant by forty-five minutes. The place smelled of the floor-washing Luke had given it and I left the door open. I turned on the grill, made the coffee, and pulled the chairs from the tables. It felt good to be active, distracted from Grant and Hoppy. I was just about to open the cash register to make sure we had enough change when my manager clunked in the door. It wasn’t that she had a heavy tread; it was that she was always burdened with bags. One for her stuff—mail-order catalogues, water bottle, Bible, breath mints, keys, wallet, pepper spray, brush, and hair clips, which she was always breaking—and one for her clothes, which she changed when she got here. Thom did not like to go home in her work outfit, “Smelling like a sa-lami,” as she put it.
    “You think this is gonna get you extra points with the boss for missin’ mosta yesterday?” she asked.
    “The boss is a jerk. I don’t care what she thinks.”
    “Oooooh. That sounds like—”
    “It is. I don’t want to discuss it.”
    Thom thunked her bags on the counter. “You can’t just drop that egg and not expect me to call you butterfingers. What up? And you might as well tell me because I ain’t leavin’ it alone till you do.”
    I caved. I hadn’t wanted to whine, but I had to talk to someone. Now, Thom had her puritan side, but she wasn’t naive or judgmental. She had that side for a reason.
    “Men,” she said and collected her bags. She shook her head. “Oh, man.” She went into the back to change.
    That was it. That was the extent of her advice, her strong shoulder, her compassion. But the effort wasn’t wasted: all the thinking I had done had brought me to the same conclusion. Maybe that was as far as the equation could be reduced. They were what they were and you couldn’t expect them to be more. If they were, then they ceased becoming pronouns. They became Clark or Bruce or Peter. They became a boyfriend or husband. Until then, they were just guys.
    I had thought Grant Daniels was more than that. My brain interrupted to tell me that she had nothing to do with it: the heart had been doing the thinking, which was the problem. I couldn’t argue with that.
    I was curious about something, though, and I grabbed Thom when she returned to set out the napkins.
    “Was my uncle happy?” I asked.
    She stopped and gave me a hand-on-the-hip look. “You got some kinda MapQuest I don’t know about?”
    My look told her I didn’t follow.
    “How the heck you get to that, girl?”
    I saw her point. Two minutes before, we were talking about my broken-hearted fling with Grant Daniels.
    “Two things,” I said. “First, I see his keyboard a couple of times a day. He ended up being a dilettante—”
    “A who?”
    “A dabbler,” I explained. “He never really made music work as a career. Second, as far as I know, he was alone all his life except