NEEDLING

The girl at the diner was working her first evening shift on her first day after training. Or was it the first day of training? She was our waitress. No more than twenty, a big girl with rosy cheeks.

I was edgy, in a bad mood, having relived many unpleasant episodes of my childhood all plumped down within an unpleasant experience of being treated like cattle... the Texas / Mexican border, though I’m now a legal alien, was not pleasant, and the forty minutes spent sitting in the waiting room being at once ignored and grilled by the local border patrol, brought too much back in too little time. I hadn’t planned on stopping for breakfast at five in the afternoon, but now that we had found the correct road after a couple of wrong turns, that I was driving and needing some sort of force as well as calming element before continuing for another hour of driving on those long flat South West Texas roads before arriving to our next stop, upon seeing the truck-stop diner, I decided to drive in needing to fill up the gas tank but also hopping the restaurant would be inviting enough to sit my fat ass down on a comfortable vinyl booth and order some late afternoon breakfast, a meal which any time of day or night seems to relax me and put me in a better mood if served with gallons of burning hot American drip coffee. I filled the gas tank. Clair paid for the gas. I checked out the restaurant from outside, walked into the gas station to ask Claire if she wouldn’t mind stopping for a minute and get some food. She was in the bathroom. The store attendant was busy chewing gum and playing on her computer. Still, I managed to ask her, “have you seen my friend?”
“Who?”
“A young woman with dark hair, she was just in here paying for the gas?”
“She’s in the bathroom,” said the clerk totally un-interested in my person, then she went back to her gum and computer.