The Girl at the End of the Line by Charles Mathes

demanded.
    Nell pointed to a bottle left by an actor who had paid his check and exited just as they were getting settled.
    â€œRight. Heineken for you.”
    â€œMe, too,” said Molly, happy to see Nell order for herself for a change. Nell hardly ever tried to communicate with waiters or salespeople or anyone else for that matter, preferring to let Molly do it for her. Perhaps it was because when she did try, nobody in Pelletreau seemed to understand her. People here seemed a whole lot quicker.
    â€œTwo Heinekens,” said the waiter, “anything to eat?”
    Nell put her thumb and forefinger together and twisted her hand back and forth.

    â€œScrewdriver,” guessed the waiter not missing a beat, as if customers ordering in pantomime were a regular occurrence at Ralph’s.
    Nell shook her head and repeated the hand motion.
    â€œKey,” said the waiter after a moment and seemed to quiver with delight when Nell nodded her head. Then she touched her ear.
    â€œSounds like.”
    Nell dug into her pocket and went through her change until she found the coin she wanted.
    â€œDime. Sounds like dime. Rhyme. Time. Lime. Lime! Key lime pie!”
    Nell nodded happily. Molly was amazed. And not just by Nell’s sudden talkativeness.
    â€œHow can you want to eat lime pie when you’re drinking beer? What kind of combination is that? You want to get sick?”
    â€œOh, leave her alone,” said waiter. “She’s obviously a very creative person. I suppose you want something conventional.”
    Nell folded her arms in front of her and grinned smugly.
    â€œYes, I do,” said Molly. “Do you have pretzels or something like that?”
    â€œWe do, but you’re an idiot if you have anything but the fried calamari.”
    â€œOf course, she’ll have the calamari,” declared Tuck in a sonorous baritone, returning to his seat next to Nell. “My treat.”
    â€œI don’t even know what calamari is!” said Molly.
    â€œWhere are you from? The moon?” muttered the actor who played Mrs. Lewis, getting up and heading toward a friend at another table.
    â€œNorth Carolina,” murmured Molly. She had always thought of herself as smart and sophisticated. In Pelletreau, where barbecue was considered an art form, she was. Here among this crowd she felt like a hick.

    â€œTrust me, bubee, you’ll love it,” said the waiter and escaped in the direction of the kitchen.
    â€œWhat did I just order?” said Molly.
    â€œFried squid,” said Tuck. “Very delicious. So tell me about Margaret. I truly am very sorry to hear about her passing. We were all so young then, so very young. I was fresh off the farm. Literally. Those were my salad days, and I but a spring lettuce. Tucker Aloysius Wittington, Radicchio theatricalis. The kiss Margaret and I shared in the play was actually my first from a representative of the opposite sex. So what was Margaret up to all these years?”
    Molly explained diplomatically that her grandmother had lived a quiet life in Pelletreau. She told how they had come to New York after finding the program and what they had managed to learn at the library.
    â€œPoor Margaret,” Tuck muttered, remembering. “The critics really destroyed us.”
    With deep sighs and dramatic hand gestures, he recounted how well things had gone on the road for Without Reservations— the changes the playwright had made in Boston, the applause and curtain calls in Philadelphia, and then the silent Broadway audiences, the vicious reviews, the snickering.
    â€œThe producer had seen it coming, of course,” Tuck said with a sigh. “That’s why he opened on Thanksgiving—he knew he had a turkey and just hoped to feed it to a weekend of happy holiday audiences. But one was allowed to fail in those days, not like now when everything costs so much money. It was a truly creative time then, so many more