The Whistler's Café

           “I know I’m a real jerk,” he says. “But I adore you.”  Sunday morning at The Whistler’s Café  –– a bar that’s like it decides to become a breakfast joint last minute.  Bad coffee, bad country music, waitresses with bad teeth, and stiff home fries.

            “I can’t eat these,” he says, flicking one of the square–shaped fries at me. “I’ll have a blueberry muffin,” he calls to the waitress with the snake of long, raven–colored hair down her back and serpent tattoo up her arm.

            “We’re out,” she says without turning around.

            “Fucking junkies can’t get their shit together to make it decent,” he says.

            I say nothing because I almost never say anything to him anymore. It’s not like I’m trying to sit silent and pretty the way he likes it. I’ve just got nothing to say. Not to him. Not anymore. 

            We’re down to the dregs of a bad cup of coffee we started sharing here four months ago. We met at this sullen place on his way down the mountain from fishing and my way up for no good reason. January. I’d lost one mitten maybe at a general store early on, and what good’s one mitten? Demanding tea, I’d whisked into this yellow, box-shaped building. “Please,” I added.

            “We’ve got Lipton,” said the bartender with the face like it needed dry cleaning and shoelaces untied. He sat on a stool. I looked to my right where a halfway handsome jerk sat eating a sandwich at a booth. I slid onto the bench across from him and told him some outdated story I can't remember about my life. What makes me so bold at first I don’t know.

            No sugar, no milk, no nothing in the coffee we shared. He liked it that way when he shared, and I didn’t. I didn’t like coffee period. But there’s lots of things I say I don’t like and then I do. Couldn’t hurt to try, right? He was halfway handsome and had dirt under his fingernails. What makes me like men with dirt under their fingernails I don’t know.

            Now we’re sitting at a table that wobbles up in a town that wobbles in the vision of mountain folks still drunk from last night. Now he dumps a whole packet of raw sugar in his own warmish coffee and drinks it in one gulp. Now he rolls a fat spliff he puts behind his ear to smoke immediately once outside. Now he looks up at me like he’s just remembered I’m there. It’s the last time he’ll look at me this way. It’s the last time he’ll look at me period.

            “I adore you,” he says again. “In small doses.”