Inappropriate Levity

Another contest entry that didn't win...

The window pops like a distant gunshot. Shan ducks behind the salad bar, grazing the legs of the guy who’s been replacing the melon cubes. Fortunately the tray in his hands was empty and stays on top of the salad bar. Standing upright, she sees the front end of a dented white 2015 Prius inside the front window, splintered wood and smashed glass covering the red-black-and-gold pattern on the carpet, bench seats and tables for four shoved into each other. A woman in a black blouse is inspecting the face of a child who squirms away, protesting, “I’m fine.” Another woman, less lucky, clutches her arm above a surface wound near the elbow, pressing to stop the trickle of blood. A man, looking sheepish, emerges from under a broken table, straightens his tie and retucks his shirt. The young man picks Shan’s clean salad plate off the floor. Her seat at one of the tables near the side wall is undisturbed. Jon is watching her, anxiety showing on his face. The restaurant staff huddle around the counter while someone in an apron steps forward to confront the driver. Everyone else seems to be chattering at once. Shan can’t hear what the manager, or acting manager, and the trembling old man who opens the door have to say.

The restaurant is obviously not going to be a quiet place to eat and chat. She waves her hand, beckoning Jon, and walks to the counter. “Could I have a takeout box, please.”

“On the house!” a woman giggles, moving behind the cash register. “The cash register went down!”

What a lot of buffet food will go to waste. Shan loads the box with enough food for two meals.

While she’s loading Jon joins her, loading a box too. Great minds think alike. The young man, who has removed the dropped plate and tray from the salad bar area, wipes a dribble of congealing sauce from between trays on the buffet bar and tells them that the driver was “just overmedicated,” but “They’re taking him back to the hospital. He had just come from a clinic, had some tests done. An ambulance is on the way. If you don’t mind, could you exit through the back door. When you’re ready, I mean.”

They take their boxes to a picnic table near the river. “Should have done this in the first place,” Jon says. “It’s turning into a beautiful afternoon.”

“Perfect,” Shan agrees.

“Did you see the look on that man’s face when he rolled in,” Jon says, dipping a piece of fish in sauce. “Like he’d been asleep behind the wheel. Well, he woke up!”

“I wonder what he was being tested for,” Shan says. “I know, for some of those tests, people get sedated.”

“I wanna be sedated!” Jon sings. “Let me have a colon-oscopy,” he improvises. “After that a, a...an ocul-oscopy. After that I might need an autopsy...”

“I hope not,” Shan chortles. “That’s what they do with dead bodies, y’know.”

“Then I want a tonsillectomy,” Jon continues, “and after that an appendectomy. Oh, I just wanna be sedated...”

Shan is thinking that hospitals really ought to provide taxi service, not allow people to drive themselves home when they’ve been sedated. There’s nothing funny about it. Both of them had trouble with wisdom teeth. Did Jon not fall asleep in the back of the car, on the way home from the dental surgery? Is that possible? What if the frail old man had been driving in traffic?

“And then give me a lobotomy!” Jon shifts into a higher key, clutching at the edge of her attention. “Maybe an episiotomy...”

Shan does giggle at that. “Sounds painful. I didn’t know you were all that much into pain.”

Maybe he is, though, she thinks. Maybe that will help if he ever gets one of those yucky diseases the advertisers always nag older men about.

Maybe he’s on to the right idea. Maybe inappropriate levity does help. You can’t do much about some things you’d like to change, but you might as well laugh as cry.