The woman at the Whole Foods Market café table looks stricken. She also looks like the writer, Anne Lamott, pre-dreadlocks. Her streaky hair is short and pulled back from her face with a wide black band. She has that dull stunned look of someone who has just watched her house burn down. A man comes and sits with her, his back to me. Blue jeans, five o'clock shadow and wire-rimmed glasses. Something about the thrust of his chin bothers me.
Sure enough, before long, she starts to cry, her face tightening to hold back the tears and succeeding, but only just barely. She speaks to him, but I can't quite read her lips. He gets up and I pray for him to leave so I can go over and console her. He comes back with a used copy of The New York Times. She stares at him with her stricken blue eyes, face pale. He shakes out the paper, reads a minute, sets it aside and reaches for the salt. She sits. He eats.
She gets up, says something to him with a hopeless gesture then turns around to fling something in the trash and rushes out the door. He finishes eating, throws out his paper plate and strolls off. Five minutes later he comes through the express lane with one item. Blank-faced, he pays for a bunch of ugly yellow chrysanthemums. I hope it doesn't work. Surely she deserves better.
When I get up I see them at a table outside. They are talking in earnest, leaning in toward each other. She holds the flowers in one fist, drooping and forgotten, still in their plastic. When I look again, they are crossing the parking lot, moving together in awkward fits and starts. I shake my head as I collect my things. Heading for my car, I think of a quote I heard recently, "It's better to be single, than to wish you were."
Beth Browne's creative non-fiction has been published in various journals and her poetry recently appeared in Crucible. Ms. Browne lives on her great grandfather's farm near Raleigh, NC, with her two children and a pair of fancy rats.