Mozzarella Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
Paulette Palmer was late. Tim wasn’t worried. Paulette was almost
always late. That was part of her charm – she was an absolute failure when it
came to checking the time or being prepared. Plans would be made, plans would
be started, and then Paulette would come running in five or ten minutes late.
She’d look rushed. She’d act rushed. She was consistently rushed. The fact that
it was all the time was a pretty good sign that in actuality she wasn’t rushed
at all. She just knew how to put on a very good show. When she sat down, it was
clear that it was a well-planned and executed ploy. Her hair was messy, yet
perfectly in place to appear messy, her makeup appeared like it wasn’t there at
all, and her clothes were always flawless, tailored for the occasion and
somehow matched the mood of the evening on an emotional level. Everything she
did gave the illusion that it was thrown together at the last moment, and yet
it would have been impossible for her to do any of the things she did without
large amounts of effort and quality pre-planning. Paulette never admitted to
anything, but she would offer a wink and a smile sometimes, which gave
everything away.
Tim sat in the booth at the back of the diner and watched the
front door. He drank his coffee and stared at a basket of deep-fried mozzarella
sticks. He had gotten to the diner too quickly. He had more time on his hands
than he expected and Paulette was running later than he thought she would be.
He had ordered the appetizer thinking it would arrive around the same time she
got there. Instead, it was getting cold and Paulette was missing. Sharing a
basket of mozzarella sticks was their unofficial thing. One time sophomore year
they had been out alone together and shared a basket. They talked and laughed
and got to actually know each other. Before then, they had just been part of
the same group of friends, but they really hadn’t been close with each other. That
night, over a basket of fried cheese, they had become friends. One week later,
the group was hanging out at the same 24-hour diner after a party ended. Tim
had gone to the bathroom and when he came back he found an empty seat at the
table next to Paulette and a basket of mozzarella sticks waiting. They didn’t
speak about it, but they had shared dozens of baskets of mozzarella sticks over
the last two and a half years.
Tonight Paulette was late and the mozzarella sticks were getting
cold. It had rained all day Thursday and Friday, but it wasn’t supposed to rain
Saturday. Which of course meant that it had. Tim thought about calling her, but
she absolutely hated when people called her because she was running late. She
was known for being fashionably late and expected all of her friends to allow
her this honor without calling and bugging her about it. It was unrealistic to
expect everybody every time to let her tardiness slide, but that was what she
expected. Tim usually allowed for this idiosyncrasy. But tonight she was really
late and he was really starting to get worried. She drove a car that was too
old and too worn down and it had really been raining far too much. The roads
would be slick. Visibility was low. Tim was genuinely concerned. The friend in
him didn’t want to call her and ruin her little game. But the other side of
their relationship, the side they didn’t talk about, the side that shared
hundreds of mozzarella sticks, made him want to break the tacit agreement and
make sure she was okay.
He walked the tightrope of emotion and reason, trust and
friendship and that murky grey area of something else. He was torn.
Then the door opened and Paulette came in from the rain. There was
no illusion of perfection tonight – everything was out of place and her mystique
was ruined. She looked frazzled and frustrated. Her shirt was soaking wet and
sticking to her body. He pretended not to notice. It was the least he could do.
He wouldn’t tell her and she wouldn’t believe him if he had, but she looked so
much better in that moment of honesty than she ever looked with all her
meticulousness and careful execution.
An intersection had flooded and she foolishly had driven into it
and her car had stalled. She sat in the middle of the intersection for ten
minutes considering her options before she finally decided to walk through the
flood water and walk the remaining two blocks to the diner.
“You should have called me.”
“No. I said I’d meet you and that’s what I was going to do.”
Somehow that was perfectly logical to her. Tim shook his head, and
yet fully expected her reason to be something like that.
“The night’s ruined,” she stated as a fact.
“No it’s not.”
“I’m soaking wet. Everything is ruined. I look terrible. I’m
freezing. We were going to hang out and talk and now you have to help me push
my car. You’ll get soaked and probably ruin your shoes.”
“Who cares? Let’s go.”
Without a moment of hesitation, Tim got up to leave, pulling some
money from his wallet. He began to walk away from the table when he realized
that Paulette hadn’t moved. He turned to look at her.
She stood there thinking. She looked at him as if a piece of a
puzzle had just fallen into place. She didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Get it to go.”
“Get what?”
“The mozz sticks.”
He had forgotten all about them. Apparently she hadn’t.
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