“Young man?” called a lady patron at the table with the Italian soda and perfectly ringletted child. Who me, thought Squirley to himself, I’m like twenty-eight, lady. But he responded sincerely, “Yes?”
“My Cindy here is complaining that the soda isn’t sweet enough.”
“Well, let me get you another one right away Ma’am.”
Ryan reached for the Italian soda. It’s cream had begun to separate from the watery liquid of the soda water, forming what looked like a sour layer of milk gone bad. On the bottom, a layer of thick raspberry syrup loomed; all three layers had separated and Ryan realized that the concoction needed merely to be stirred again. Shegently took hold of his wrist as he reached for it and eyed him up and down breaking him with a scowl, “Next time, add more syrup.” With total seriousness, she moved not a muscle in her tightened face and looked him directly into his eyes. “You got that?”
A pause. The hate welled up in him. “Yes Ma’am.”
He thus imagined a game show as he took the drink in question to the kitchen, with a skinny bronzed aged man in a preened black suit and striped red and blue tie. He held a thin microphone with a bulbous piece of felt at the top and reminded the audience to “spay and neuter you animals.” Squirley often imagined this show, the set embellished with browns and mauves and oranges and turquoise; the set was right from the seventies. Big blocks of color and straight edges formed the furniture and the prizes behind a wheel-of-fortune type deal. The audience cheered for Squirley as he took the pegs in his hands and swayed his body, using all the force he could possible muster, and spun the wheel. The cheering grew louder and louder and he raised his eyes towards the contraption’s title: The Tip-O-Meter. The wheel kept spinning and spinning, and finally began to slow, but the clapping never ceased, the cheering only roared like waves crashing against some sublime cliff. The skinny man with the microphone became larger and larger, and the audience cheered and the wheel’s colors were spinning too fast. As the wheel began to seriously slow, he saw his demise, the flapping peg landed on a “$0” sign and the audience booed, and the announcer sang, “Too bad for Mr. Squirley! Too bad for Mr. Squirley! Too bad, too bad.”
He sprang out of his thought as Amanda raised her voice to him, “You gonna move or sit there all day?”
Squirley stirred the same drink without adding anything to it, and sped out of the kitchen through the white flapping doors that shut tightly behind him.
“Here you are Little Lady,” he set the same drink (though now stirred for the second time) in front of the child. He caught the eyes of her mother and his heart had begun to beat furiously – he feared the beating beneath his tie would give him away.
“Much better, mommy.” She wiped her mouth with her sleeve leaving a frothy stain.
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