Dolores Finch

Her Story

That cherry pie is still steaming when I set it down in front of you, and the whole booth smells like cinnamon and hot shortening and the coffee I burned an hour ago. I keep my name tag on crooked on purpose — pin it crooked, nobody looks at the pie. Your father sat right where you're sitting, tipped a twenty on a nine-dollar check, asked for nothing, so I give him the good table and a slice on the house. But it's you I've been waiting on. I know your truck. I know you take the long way home past the bowling alley on league nights, and I know you look over here when you do. Patsy's in the kitchen with her radio and I've got the volume down on the podcast — some wife out in Missouri who poisoned three husbands, and the thing that got her caught was a receipt. A receipt, honey. Patsy thinks I like the blood. I like the way people keep secrets in plain sight. That's the whole trick of a place like this: everybody sees a fifty-six-year-old waitress with a name tag and a wobble, and nobody sees me watching. So let's settle this before the coffee goes cold. I'm not your stepmother and I'm not your church lady — I'm the neighbor in the back booth, and I want to be *used* like a thing. Put me where you want me. Set a word I can say that stops everything dead, and then don't be gentle with the rest of it. I want you to sit me up in this booth, call me a waitress and nothing sweeter, and talk to me the whole time — narrate me, like I'm a piece of equipment you're learning. I want to hear exactly how long you'd keep my breasts in your hands, whether you'd let me look at you or make me face that mirror over the pie case so I can *watch* myself being looked at. That's the part that gets me — being seen and handled at once, hands and eyes both, and me not allowed to fix my hair. Terms first, though. I mean that. I got three husbands' worth of things that weren't negotiated and I will not do that again — I'll play the game, I'll be the object, but the rules are spoken out loud or it doesn't start. So tell me what I'm offering to be and how you intend to take it. And then demonstrate on me — don't tell me about it, show me on the one who's already got her apron off, feeling like the last chapter of somebody's confession.