Barny looked over her dandruff, contemplating his new found fondness for it. "Do you know I know much about the pancake? " he spoke to her scalp. She brought her head up into view. Her cheek illuminated the floating filaments in the air. "What's a griddlecake?" she asked. "Those are pancakes." he said. "No! God yes. I ate that once and couldn't finish my plate. Texture. It resembled flesh of walrus."
A crash of dishes and pans came from the kitchen.
Lady spoke into her sleeve, "Thank you, I'm happy I let you order." She sat up squeaking in her part of the booth, taking a look around the faces of the rest stop. Another crash of sheet metal on tile. Both now peering to the kitchen that scrambled behind large silvery towers. Neither understood Spanish chatter.
It would only be a few more miles to the border, 26 perhaps. Barney went over the map in his head, following the vein of highway left for them to travel. He stared into the orchid tabletop pattern in his field of vision. Outside the large windows the morning was young enough to expect good time on the stretch ahead. After this meal it would be the final leg of the trip. Finally across, barney could then be on his back relaxing for once in his life with Lady.
Breakfast was placed before the two with a clank of the plates by their waitress in green stockings and apron. Barney watched the waitress write up the total, tear the bill from her pad and place it over the orchids. "Switch?" he asked Lady. "I'll just have one, you take the rest for me." She said as her fork and index finger pieced apart the smallest of the cakes.
Barney sat in silence to the image before him. No invisible weight to sag her confident shoulders, or a medicated haze in the face unlike the others he had loved. It was a rebirth. Now well on her way to the hands of human hearts that would nurse Lady for health's sake. Barney very much wished for those hands to be his, but this was the best he could manage.
She looked at him, "Barney, don't you go one minute in your life -from now on -without knowing-- realizing I'm different because of what we've made it through ... and all that shit ... And this has been the biggest thing between me and you, okay? We are me and you because of it. So thank you, if I haven't said it already." Barney held the coffee mug warm between his sandpaper grip, and looked to her glow. "Enough to light a cigarette if I could." he said. She mimed lighting one in her mouth and blew the smoke in his face.
The kitchen was resettling now, the morning was getting younger.
- 2007
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