Perkins #2432

I am sitting at a Perkins, a now-familiar restaurant chain kind of like Denny's; this one in Helena, Montana.

Behind me I hear a couple talking. "I woke up in a hospital bed, and I wasn't supposed to be there. It was supposed to be a day surgery. I woke up and didn't know what had happened." I want to turn around, to talk to this woman, to say that I know & I understand & put my arms around her and grieve what we have lost and gained.

"Why are you frowning?" Renee breaks my concentration. I tell her what the woman has said.

"You know, sometimes it just..."
"--sometimes it just gets to you." She understands, because she almost died once, too.
"Does it still get to you?" I hope she says no, that in a couple of years this will stop bothering me. She's 13 years out, more than enough time to get over it.
"Yes, sometimes it still does." My eyes well up. This was not what I wanted to hear. She goes on about life, and death, and how near-death changes your life. I watch the people over her shoulder. A middle aged man and woman sit across from the woman's parents: small wrinkled man on oxygen and frail woman with a placid, slightly confused look of dementia.
"But I never wanted the plaque at the end of my career. I wanted more. And less," Donna Renee is saying.

A skinny, hunched teenager sits in the corner with his cute round girlfriend.

The waitress comes to take our order. She clears and delivers and writes and repeats mechanically, like she is doing this job for someone else's sake. Her face is tanned and carved and maybe a little bit angry, like she did not choose this life for herself. I wonder if she's a single mother, or if she too has elderly parents at home, or maybe she's just having a bad day.

Four bikers walk in, with chaps and Harley shirts and vests and bandanas on their heads. They are two couples--one in their 40's, the other maybe in their late 50's or 60's. The old oxygen man glares openly at them, full of expired prejudices about rowdy Hell's Angels, I suppose. The couples sit down to the left of us, under a shelf of teapots and dusty fake flowers laced with ribbons and pearls, and a doiley-crocheted doll's hat. The bikers talk quietly and gently. One of the men puts on his reading glasses to skim the menu. Oxygen-man still glares. His daughter ties a bandana over his wife's hair and tries to coax her to the edge of the bench to make her stand.

The teens have not stopped touching each other since they sat down--fingers entwined, or hair brushed gently or playful taps and grins. She looks alternately concerned and reassured. I can't hear what they're saying, but he leans over the table for a peck. She seems pleased.

"And I asked for my doctor, and they said he'd gone home. I told them I needed someone to talk to, someone to explain what had gone wrong--"
"No plaque to gather dust. Makes you want to buy a motorcycle and just ride away--"
"Come on mom, scoot over, so we can go. Mom, MOM, you have to scoot over. Scoot over--"

The waitress lays down the check.
"Thank you so much for lunch," we say.
"Yep," she says and is gone.