ALL DAY AT Herbie’s I wore the gun wrapped in a clean side towel, in the middle pocket of my apron. It felt great, hitting against my pubic bone.
Things were slow that day, so by three o’clock Dino and I were taking a break on the back stoop smoking his Kools, which he always pulled upside down from the bottom of the pack. We were talking about what kind of day it was and what those kinds of days reminded us of.
For Dino, it was about remembering being in San Francisco when he was young, “a few years back.”
“It’s the weather,” he said, “that makes them all feel like that. It’s like you’re on vacation everyday and can take a bus in either direction. I had a friend, Max, who worked at the Do-City Barbeque. Eat Your Ass Off was their slogan. Old men be sweeping sidewalks anytime they got around to it because it’s bright morning all day long. There’s nowhere else I’ve ever been where you can take it so easy and still be in the middle of everything, except down south, but that’s another story altogether.”
I looked up, leisurely smoking, when I saw Delores coming down the street. Her eyes were glazed over all fanatic like and she moved as quickly as the Wicked Witch of the West pedaling that bicycle through Kansas. In her left fist, she was clutching my Statue of Liberty postcard.
I jumped up as fast as I could but she still caught me square in the chest.
“Don’t think I care about your fucking postcard,” she said, shoving me again with a strength I remembered immediately. I stood there with no expression and let her shove me all around the back lot of Herbie’s. The gun in my apron was banging back and forth, cracking me in the bone.
“Don’t think I care,” she said. ‘But everyone else is going to care a lot. I have some friends now, you know.”
Well, the truth is, I never felt better. I felt successful. Delores looked so ugly that I didn’t even have to shoot her. For the first time ever, she knew exactly how I felt. I had touched her. Delores finally got the message.
I watched her stalk away and picked up the beat-up old postcard she had discarded on the sidewalk.
“Shit, Dino, I mailed this months ago. God, the mail is slow. Man, it has really gotten out of hand.”
Cocky as all hell, I delicately dropped it into the mailbox that was standing, conveniently, right next to the streetlight.
Dino was blinking, dragging on his cigarette, looking calm and very handsome.
“Funny,” he said. “Funny how sometimes you’re just sitting down having a smoke and all of a sudden you’re in a movie. Right up there on the silver screen. And then, you’re out of it again.”
I was smiling away, feeling that warm spot on my chest where Delores had put her hand.