She entered the restaurant flanked by two very pretty, dark-haired little girls. Davis couldn’t guess her age but if he had to guess he would say she was either a youngish forty or a well-used thirty. She wore a jacket that looked like an oversized version of a little girl’s jacket, black and pink with that pink you only see little girls wearing, that washed-out Barbie pink. Her hair was cut short above the shoulder and rather curly, brunette with auburn highlights. PTA pretty. The kind of woman he might see at the PTA meeting and decide she was the prettiest woman in the room, though certainly not the prettiest woman he had ever seen.
As she seated her girls, she glanced at him for the first time and he knew—thirty years had crept by her on swift silent pads and here she was with two girls, suddenly wondering if she had grown old while waiting for the clothes to dry, dinner to cook.
After she got the girls settled and their jackets off and hung over the backs of their chairs, she removed her own jacket. Davis noticed her hips—broadened by childbirth but not entirely ruining her figure. Tight faded jeans and a gray knit sweater that zipped up the front. She wore the zipper low between her breasts, and when she bent over the table to pick up a mitten, he could see down her sweater almost to her belly.
Davis knew that all he needed was to smile, be nice to her, let her go first at the salad bar and he would comment on how pretty her girls were and ask their ages and where they went to school and he would mention his own kids and their ages, and he’d surprise and flatter her by asking for her phone number, and at first she wouldn’t give it to him, but later, if he waited long enough, she would gather up her girls and put on their jackets and bend over the table writing something on a napkin and when they passed his table, she would set the napkin on the table without stopping. And there would be her phone number on the napkin, with her first name and a warning not to call after six.
But for now, he watched and occasionally glanced at his book. Her girls were near enough in age to be friends rather than sisters. They talked constantly. She had to interrupt them to ask what they wanted for lunch, and while they agonized over chicken fingers or cheeseburgers, she looked at him and rolled her eyes. Davis imagined her in bed, her enthusiasm, her abandon. He wouldn’t even have to try very hard—a twenty dollar bottle of French wine, some Godiva chocolate, then a story about the time he was lost in Panama and rescued from the crooked cops by the daughter of a drug lord.
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That had never really happened, but he could make it happen for her and she would believe him because she would want desperately to believe. They’d be in some hotel room, not too expensive but just expensive enough, and when she came, she’d really let herself go for the first time in her life, nothing to hold her back, no kids to overhear, no expectations or reservations, nothing to be embarrassed about. And she would think he had given that to her without really understanding that he had only brought her to it.
She rose and headed for the salad bar and he knew this was his chance. Davis noticed then how she walked slightly bent at the hips, as though she were used to stopping every second step to pick up something from the floor. Davis could see her house, the floor cluttered with Barbie shit and piles of unwashed laundry and piles of washed laundry waiting to be folded or ironed, and her sitting in the midst of it, lost and alone, clutching a delicate pair of toe shoes that she’d dragged in her overwhelming self-pity from some bottom drawer while she confronted the fact that she would never, ever catch up with the housework until her children were grown and she was old, old, old as her mother and as dead inside as a frozen bag of giblets and neck bones. As she walked to the salad bar with that humped over stride, she looked back at him and smiled.
Davis closed his book. He had already paid his bill and he was late getting back to work. He couldn’t rescue her. He could fuck her. Sure, he could do that. Who couldn’t do that? But he couldn’t be an ongoing part of her life. He couldn’t take her away from having to stop every second step to pick up a toy or a dirty sock. He couldn’t take her out of that little girl jacket. And he couldn’t pretend to rescue her just to get her into bed.
So he stood and left without looking back, because if he looked back, he knew he would be as lost as she.
