PANES
G.W. Cox

The signal's red light glowed, outshone the yellow and green, but unlit it was only slightly larger. Ben closed an eye and composed the stoplight's sequence as a cinematic shot out of a windowpane of the café. He'd never been there before. He waited for the waitress.

Two adjoining walls of the restaurant comprised a hundred or so framed panes, all rectangles inside greater rectangles. The frames were made of a dark wood polished to a shine without a fleck of dust. There was nothing cluttering the counters, no pie growing unsavory and no cardboard props selling sunglasses, Chapstick or ear plugs.

The window banks fronted an intersection, the busiest in town. From his vantage at the center of the lunch counter, the street to his left paralleled the commuter train tracks. At five after twelve in the middle of the day in the middle of the summer, the corner was dead, and Ben was the lone customer at Stroesser's café.

The waitress, gray hair pulled into a bun circled by a braid behind her compacted head, slapped a menu to the right of napkin-wrapped utensils. On the left side was his clipboard with a dozen computer cards under its clamp. She resumed her station at the far end of the counter.

The typewritten menu explained the lack of customers. Ben pulled the watch he'd just bought from his shirt pocket and fastened its black plastic band around his wrist. He set its time to ten after twelve.

The watch was the second acquisition from his summer job's wages. The first was a Bolex sixteen-millimeter motion picture camera. He bought it for a hundred dollars three weeks ago when he walked a town block like this. From the day he bought the camera, he composed imaginary shots.

A few panes up from the bottom right side, a head popped up. He noticed its crewcut as it moved from frame to frame, and below a red and white striped T-shirt. Above and behind it, bobbed another head with wet hair in a ponytail, a young girl. Below that, a black llama embroidered against a field of bright horizontal colors loped across the panes. Besides the static motion of the stoplight, this was the first movement in the montage.

"All right, waddaya have?" the waitress asked, splashing a blue translucent plastic glass of ice water in front of him. She spoke with flat vowels.

Ben ordered, picked up the napkin, and drew it across his forehead. A line of grime on it marked the day's progress. Two stools to his left, he saw the red and white stripes of the boy's shirt out of the corner of his eye.

"You kids want the usual?" the waitress said. The windows ahead of Ben reflected the nodding faces of the profiles he'd seen outside.

A white plate circumscribed by two blue pinstripes clanked in front of him. The sandwich was on Wonder Bread and the pickle, hamburger dill. The top piece of bread hid cold cuts. He slipped the Eucharist of a potato chip onto his tongue. Stale but salty.

He hadn't had a chance to study the kids and looked over the head of the boy. The girl had sun-streaked brown hair and a Madison Avenue tan, a small, straight nose, even cheekbones and medium lips with a kiss of coloring. The boy, maybe seven, was perfect. Perfect people in the perfect place, and the natural selection of money.

"Is that a skin diver's watch you've got on?" the boy asked, spinning his stool toward him.

Ben nodded in affirmation.

"Black. That's really neat. Do the numbers glow in the dark and what's that other stuff for?"

Ben examined the watch closely. "It says Radillumination. I guess that means you can see it in the dark. It's a cheap watch. I bought it down the street. I thought it might be sturdy." He tried the ring around the dial. "You set it and you can tell how much time you have left in your scuba tank."

"Uh huh," the kid said.

"And here it says it's good for depths up to sixty feet."

"My father's watch was still ticking. They said they found him in the lake at two hundred feet."

Ben's mouth went dry. He focused on chewing and looked forward at nothing.

"His watch was still on time," the little boy said with bravado. "I have it in my top dresser drawer."

Ben sipped his water letting the light shine blue through it and onto his hand. The kids were whispering. He was incapable of eavesdropping.

The girl swiveled to face him. "Our father drowned a month ago last Sunday. We're really not quite over it yet. The funeral services didn't help." Her voice was deliberate and each sound precise. As she spoke, she seemed to cross the Ts and draw circles above the Is.

"I'm sorry."

"People said they were sorry at the funeral but they didn't really know him."

The three took refuge in their food. The boy had lost his spark, methodically jamming French fries end to end into his mouth. Ben had never felt what the kids were feeling. This had started as light conversation, a diversion during the usual lonely lunch. It was ending on a morbid note.

From beside the plate with its half-eaten sandwich, Ben took his straw, still wearing its thin paper wrapper. He slid it down from one end to the other and crimped it like an accordion at the bottom. He pulled the neat wad off the straw, put it in the empty counter space between him and the boy. The wrapper relaxed but remained a compacted tube.

He sensed the boy look over at it and noticed the blankness had left his face. Ben dipped one end of the straw into a glass and held his finger over the other, trapping a few drops. He allowed a drop to fall on the wrapper, which began to expand in length like the snakes on the Fourth of July that spring from a fiery pellet.

"Snake!" he hissed.

The boy stifled giggles.

"Try it," Ben said, extending the straw to the boy.

"What is it?" the girl asked. She'd carried her oversized, color-striped llama bag to stand behind the empty stool between the two. He read "expensive" printed in dark blue where the T-shirt pocket would be. The tan of her legs matched the even tint of her face. Like her brother, she wore khaki hiking shorts.

"It's a snake," the boy said.

She nudged the wrapper toward the boy and, while moving herself and the bag in front of the empty stool, asked, "Do you mind?"

"Go right ahead." She eased onto the stool with a certain grace.

"You should have never showed him that," she said as though to a confidant. The boy grabbed his sister's straw and started crimping its wrapper.

She lightly ran her fingers down the side of Ben's clipboard, testing the texture. She looked toward the wet smear on the counter. "He hasn't been the same since the funeral. None of us have, especially our mother." Then she looked up at him. "That's a nice tie you're wearing." She bent the first joint of her right index finger back slightly on the clipboard. "What is this?" emphasizing the last word.

He moved it toward her. "It's my job this summer."

"May I?" she flexed the finger on his laminated ID atop the stack of computer cards. "Benjamin Sandlin. Market Research Department. What's that mean?"

"My summer job. It means I'm interviewing every grocery store manager and drug store owner in every suburb." He took another bite of his sandwich to try to keep the subject short.

"Why?"

"It's for a route list for salesmen. They sell it for fifty dollars."

Chuck leaned over his sister's arm, jerked his head and widened his eyes. "Fifty dollars!"

She spun toward Ben and offered her hand. "We know your name now so let me formally introduce us. I'm Lisette and this is Chuck." He heard the sound of a slap when her other hand met the boy's thigh.

"Ow. Charles Perkins the Fourth," Chuck said. "Do you get the fifty dollars?"

Ben missed the question when his hand met Lisette's, and then he let her go. She tucked a stray strand of hair into the ponytail. "Pleased to meet you. In fact, charmed." He never said things like "charmed."

She looked lost in thought for a minute then smiled. "Do you think I am pretty?"

Ben considered the question but only how he would answer. He couldn't dissemble. He frowned in mock judgment. "Yes. You are a very pretty girl." He told himself this was crazy. She's too young.

"You should see our mother. She's very pretty. Much more than I. She's beautiful." Her smile vanished. "But she hasn't looked her best since the funeral. She sleeps a lot.

"Is that your green car out there?"

He nodded."

"What kind is it? It's so cute."

He looked toward the street and framed her face and the car in the panes. "It's a '67 MGB, two years old."

"Our mother has a white Volvo. It's so comfortable."

Chuck interrupted. "Dad's got a Porsche. It's black." His enthusiasm died. "Dad had a Porsche. Or I guess we still have it. It's in the garage."

Conversation stopped until Lisette said, "Mother will be coming to pick us up."

From the waitress corner came a harsh voice, "You kids shouldn't ought to be talking to strangers."

Lisette said, "He's no stranger," and recited the facts she had just learned. She stood and braced her hips on the counter, leaned to look toward the waitress. Ben couldn't avoid studying the flex and lines of her back. He knew she must be conscious of her effect.

"I'll tell your mother."

Lisette sat again. "You know Mother isn't that small-minded."

When Chuck went to the restroom, she said, "I think it is hardest on him though Mother's been so depressed."

"How did it happen?"

She inhaled and pulled back her shoulders, then squeezed a stream of breath through tight lips. "They found him in the lake a day after he went missing. They had been searching for seventeen hours. He was on a forty-two foot Chris Craft with some friends. They said that he was there one moment and gone the next."

Ben tried to imagine what it was like, how it felt for her. He wished he could give real comfort.

When Chuck reappeared, she changed the subject, "How old are you, Benjamin Sandlin?"

"I'm twenty-one."

"Chuck's six and I'm fourteen. Our mother is only thirty-three. She wasn't much older than a girl when they married. She's French, had finished translator school and was working in Brussels when she met Father. She was only nineteen when she had me."

"Charles Robert Perkins the Fourth," Chuck said into his glass.

She swung her seat toward Ben again. "You're old enough to be Chuck's father. Well, not realistically, but physically it would have been possible. And, of course, you're too young to be my father." She looked down toward his watch. "Plenty of men marry women who are much younger than they are."

Blood surged to his skin; air filled his lungs and every nerve poise. She must have meant that she was his junior by seven years. Seven years wasn't too much. But she's only fourteen.

"Then should I come see you in about four years?" His question might unlatch a door in the future.

Her face went slack, mouth loose. Her muscles gave way to thoughts. "On the other hand, older women marry younger men all the time."

She changed the subject to their routine. Every morning they'd go to the pool at the rec center across the street. Afterwards they come to Stroesser's for a snack.

"We haven't varied since the tragedy. I think it important that he have consistency. But he used to play catch with Father hours on end. Now there's no one to..."

Then she recounted the fatal evening and the specters of her father's fellow sailors. How they had come to her house that night to explain what had happened to the husband and father. "They had searched for him until it was dark, and they looked terrible."

He looked at his watch, good for depths up to sixty feet—ten minutes left. He told her of his uncertain future as draft bait.

Lisette studied his lips. She clasped her hands in her lap like she was cracking a walnut. "Our mother has been so sad and lonely. Chuck and I have her while she has no one, no one in this country. I do wish you would meet her. If older men can have relationships with younger women, I don't know why older women... my mother is in her prime."

Ben understood. She wasn't speaking for herself, but for her mother.

She trapped the large bag between her knees and the counter and rummaged through it. "Oh, and you should see our house. It's a block from the lake and quite wonderful." She withdrew a coin purse, a dark pink plastic oval about palm size with a slit bisecting its length.

"If you need help with the check," he said, reaching into his pocket.

"No, no. Like I said, we do the same thing every day. Mother pretends she doesn't know we come here, but every morning she gives me enough money. We meet her across the street in front of the rec center." She produced a dollar that had been folded until it was smaller than a quarter.

The waitress appeared with a wet white rag gone to gray. "This is a fine mess you've left me with." She dabbed at the straw wrappers limp in a puddle on the counter.

"Oh, Anna," Lisette said, "I'll take care of it." She leaned forward, gathered their napkins and soaked up the mess. Ben absorbed this movement like it was intimacy. His lunch ended as they shuffled to the door in a ragged dance for polite exits.

Outside the restaurant door, at the corner, they paused for good-byes. Ben clasped the clipboard against his chest. Lisette hugged the bulging bag. Chuck held its side and looked down the street into the distance.

She squinted in the sunlight and faced Ben. "Mother is not here yet. You really really should stay and meet her. I know she would like you. And she's so beautiful, I'm sure you'd love her."

He nodded and thought he'd better let it alone. At best her mother would smile, brush him off and tell the kids to get into the car. But there was a good chance she would think him strange. Either way it would spoil the enchantment.

I have to be in Libertyville in ten minutes," he said.

She relaxed her shoulders, frowned in frustration. She held her right arm straight out and bent the hand slightly to receive a handshake. Then unconsciously he cupped his hand under hers and touched it to his lips. He caught a quick breath of lotion and catsup. He glanced at Chuck who was still staring down the street.

"No one has ever done that to me before," she said, squeezing the bag in front of her.

Ben backed away, flipped the clipboard outward to wave goodbye, turned and walked to his car. The MG's seats scorched the back of his thighs. His first thought was to get some breeze. The exhaust's resonator barely had a chance to rumble, and the car was into the road.

In the rear-view mirror, he framed the image of a little boy and teenage girl crossing the street at the stoplight.

After a few minutes driving, the manicured landscaping deteriorated into roadside detritus and distraction. A montage of the lunch encounter flickered through Ben's mind. "No one's ever done..." Then he considered the mother. Maybe she is as nice as her daughter. Why not? He could picture the four of them having lunch in their kitchen nook one day, maybe next summer. Afternoons playing catch with Chuck for hours on end. All of them walking by the lake just a block away; their mother, beautiful.

At the stoplight before the underpass for the state highway, he made a U-turn. His mind emptied, save for his destination.

The small green car glided to a stop at the beginning of the block that held the rec center. There was no one, only parked cars. No cars double-parked, no traffic. Again Ben pulled into the street, disengaging and engaging the clutch. When he was even with the entrance to the center, he still saw nothing, no kids, no Volvo, no mother.

Then the car crept to the red light of the traffic signal. He considered driving around the block a few times, just on the off chance. But he could come back tomorrow. They would be at the restaurant at noon. He'd gather guts to meet the mother, the beautiful, sad mother. He could bide his time with them, help out while the pall of their tragedy passed. There were no real obstacles.

The light turned green and he eased the car into a U-turn, letting its momentum carry it forward slowly as the engine idled.

As a last resort, Ben checked the café's windowpanes. In one of them the framed reflection of the red stoplight glowed, and behind it, was the glower of the square-faced waitress who labeled him stranger. Her image was frozen, staring back at him in contempt.

© G.W. Cox 2005

Late of the fourth estate, Jerry Cox (gwcox2@comcast.net) now submits and is accepted or rejected—the story of his life, an ongoing fiction not to be missed or messed with.

on to page 9   

back to the front page