Tapping Mena

I'd always dreamt of tapping into her.  Every Friday afternoon, when the bank was open late and mother waited on the denizens of paycheck-to-paycheck, chain-smoking, assembly line world, I would spend two hours with Mena.  She was the goddess of thick sweetness, bringing me a slice of cherry pie in the corner booth with the red vinyl seats that would cling to the backs of my legs in the warmer months.  She always followed up with a chocolate milk mixed heavy on the syrup so I could amuse myself trying to make the dark, tiny beads of unabsorbed sweetness blend in with rest through repeated proddings with my straw.  She was Mena, my waitress and unofficial week's end babysitter, and I would have taken her heart home in jugs and bottles if I could.  A cold winter cellar could keep fresh untold gallons of tales of her Grecian childhood and little observational tidbits about each regular customer.

Friday nights were a courtesy, for the diner subsisted on the lunch-time needs of the factory employees.  Dinner there was usually only the occasional worker with no one to go home to, and I would watch them furtively through the tines of my pie fork, a secret spy on a mission to scope out the saboteur.  Mena and Pete the cook would mostly just keep an eye on me and feed the just-paid stragglers who wanted to spend a bit of their earnings on some good hot soup or Pete's town-famous spanakopita.

This was penultimate part of my each and every school week.  There was a genius to each moment there that I could not grasp, but I could admire, inside my eighth year scope of existence.  Pete's meticulous maintenance of the stainless steel cooking gear behind the counter that made me think that only a brilliant man could polish that well; the checker-tiled floor's islands of safety that I would hop to on my way to restroom where the tiles returned to neutral gray and I could walk without setting off booby traps; the underlying aroma of porcelain plates as they came from the washer that made me believe that our plates at home were somehow subpar; and Mena's magical vocal tones as she spoke to me through her thick accent all made me believe that there was a mystery greater than me both inside and outside the plate glass window that always displayed my fingerprint art with unintentional pride on Friday nights.

Stymied underneath the polishing, frying, washing, seating and greeting was a sound that escaped me.  The aluminum frame of the front door, with twenty or thirty years of wear on its hinge pins, uttered a small scrape on the floorplate that never consciously registered through the haze of my corner booth daydreams.  Now, in the amplification of recollection, the scrape that last Friday before summer was a determined, higher pitch.  I chide myself now for not realizing, not taking her hand, not making her sit with me.  

It was the quickest-type of worst moment in life when the horror occurs in not the moment, but the in days, weeks and years after.  There was no clarity then.  After the scrape there was a series of moments I can only place in order by linear logic: a shouted demand, defiance from Pete, a frightening loudness, a clang and then the warmth of her sheltering me.  She spread upon me in the booth, the scent of sweaty polyester and frightened breathing erasing me from the palette of the gunman's sights.  

Breathing slowed, and the noise of the front door whipped in flight reached me under my fortress of her.  I rested in the pie filling that covered me when she covered me, and I didn't want her shelter to end.  With cherry hand, I brushed the mysterious Mediterranean of her cheeks.  It made her shudder, I thought, and in that moment I realized I was holding the last of her.  Pete's pie filling never ran that thin.