Free Free to Insert Your Own Title ________________________________

I checked the caller ID and I was surprised, I thought it was going to be from someone else.

“Hello.”

“Hey.”

“How are things?”

“Things are fine. Thanks for coming, when you don’t show up, they start asking, “Where’s Tim?””

“No. I liked being there.”

The day before, we were sitting at the end of four small pushed together tables, once we were all there, we numbered twelve. I was sitting at one of the ends, she was at my left. We were kind of quiet, her reason was she was a little hung-over, my reason was because I’m usually quiet. I respond to things, I don’t initiate. I’m a counter puncher and it’s an uneventful match if someone doesn’t make that first punch but I’ve never been afraid of the quiet.

I have been afraid of stillness which I called quiet but that was/is a different story.

I ordered pancakes, staying away from eggs because I know she doesn’t like eggs and I didn’t want to add to any of her already stated queasiness. She asked me what she could eat to help her get over the night before and offered suggestions which I either approved or disapproved. She ordered hashbrowns, crispy bacon and white toast.

“You alright?”

She has seen me when I wasn’t alright and recent events were typical of when I would normally not be alright but lately things haven’t been typical. I glanced over at her, to show her that my next words were going to be quite truthful, but she didn’t meet my gaze, she just scrolled through her emails, which might seem rude but she was scrolling so she didn’t have to look me in the eye. I smiled, lowered my gaze, and I truthfully said “Yeah. I’m alright.”

“I’m sorry about the other day. I was out the night before and I was on my period.”

“I know you’ve been busy.”

“How was it?”

“It was alright.” I said nodding my head so that ‘alright’ wouldn’t be interpreted as just so-so but somewhere in the range of ‘good’.

“It couldn’t have been too good without the life of the party,” she said as she dramatically tossed some hair over her left shoulder.

I smiled. “Yeah, it would have been better if you were there but it was nice. I set my mom up with Clara, got her a ginger ale and then I went to the kitchen and watched football, in that space off the kitchen.”

“Yeah, you would like that.”

I think it’s funny that I want to fix the dialog to more proper English but that’s the way the talk went.