“Can you see if she’ll eat more rice?”  Lori stands and brushes bits of food from the front of her skirt.  “I’m going to the ladies’ room.”

            
            He watches her leave the table.  She complains a lot about the weight she’s gained, but she still looks good.  She’s a woman who can carry extra pounds.  When he had first laid eyes on her, perusing the Radiohead selection of Cat’s Records, it was the curves he had admired most.

            Groans rise from the opposite direction of Lori’s trajectory.  On the big television, a score has been earned or an advantage lost.

            “Somebody’s got to lose,” he hears a young man in a suit jacket say, pouring beer down a grin as he speaks.

            “That’s not right.  They should all be winners,” says a female member of the group in mock heartache.

            
            “Daddy, look.”  Kyle wears a ring of ketchup on his face.  “I can put a whole fry in my mouth.”

            
            “Good job.”  Then, a second thought, “Don’t cram your mouth full, buddy.  Okay?”

            
            They say Kyle resembles him.  “Dug him right out of your hind-end,” Lori’s brother says.  He had never been able to judge his own appearance from mirrors or photographs, so he’s grateful for the comparison.  At least, it gives him a boost of confidence.

            
            A server walks by, and she catches his attention.  She’s a redhead, hair long and straight.  When she turns from the table she’s working, he notices a diamond stud in her nose.  He’s sure he’s seen her before.

            
            Lori smirks when she returns.

            
            “What’s your problem?” he wants to know.

            
            “What’s yours?”

            
            Lori folds one of the large cloth napkins across her lap and looks hard at her husband.  “Why don’t you shave tonight?”

            
            “Nah.”

            
            “Oh my God!  I see – three, four, five – five white hairs in your beard!”

            
            “You’re just trying to get me to shave it off.”

            
            “You really do have white in it.  I’m not kidding.  But I do like your clean baby face better.”  She repeats the cheek pinch and kissing sound.

            
            He studies his reflection in a spoon but is unable to see the whiteness in such a small picture.

            
            “You know my track record with my winter beard.  Every time I shave it off, we get a snow.  That’s happened three times since we’ve been married.”

            
            Lori throws a look over her shoulder, in the direction of the kitchen.  “Well, the low tonight is supposed to be in the mid-forties.  If anything falls from the sky, it’ll be rain – a cold, miserable rain.”

            
            The redhaired server returns with a ticket to the nearby table.  When she smiles and thanks them, he thinks of the girl from the orchard.  This one looks like her.  She was – what? – ten years younger then.  Her hair was shorter.  Her face wasn’t as gaunt.  She didn’t have any piercings he could remember. 

            
            A synchronized rhythm of handclaps erupts from the kitchen and grows closer, and he realizes the reason for Lori’s earlier slyness.  As the clappers get closer, Lori’s smile stretches larger.  It’s a song about a birthday but with Clara’s Steakhouse mentioned, too, just so no marketing angle is overlooked.

            
            “You know how much I hate this kind of thing,” he tells her.

            
            “Well, it wouldn’t be any fun for me if you didn’t hate it.”

            
            A waiter slides a gooey dish in front of him, and he drops his head and puts on a polite smile.  He raises his eyes a couple of times and sees Lori’s amused expression.

            
            When the song ends, he gives a grateful bow to the staff and sweeps his gaze across the faces of the singers.  It’s then that he realizes the server he had noticed earlier could be the girl from the orchard, though the resemblance isn’t strong enough to give him certainty.

            
            As the singers disburse from his table, he hears the redhead tell someone she’s taking a break, and he watches her exit through the front.  He takes a few bites from the dessert and leaves the remainder for the kids.  He excuses himself as Lori finishes her meal.

            
            “I’ll be back soon.  Help you get the kids together.”

            
            “That’d be mighty gentlemanly of you.”

            
            He finds the server on the unpopulated patio, sitting on the edge of a wrought-iron table, smoking a cigarette.  She says into a cell phone, “The U-haul place said we can pick up the trailer by seven thirty.”

            
            He keeps a respectable distance from her, waiting in an awkward stance.

            
            “Yeah,” she says into phone.  “Yeah.  Okay.  Bye.”

            
            She raises her eyes to him and draws on the cigarette.  “Can I help you?”

            
            He halves the distance between them.  “Um, yeah, I was just wondering, did you ever work at an orchard in Missouri?”

            
            A cloud of smoke falls from her mouth as she regards him in the red neon Clara’s sign.

            
            She narrows her eyes, and a second later, her mouth opens to almost its full range.  “Oh, shit!”  She shakes her head in disbelief, then laughs.  “I just sang the birthday song to you and didn’t even recognize you!”

            
            Neither says anything for a moment, then he says, “What are the chances?  How have you been?”

            
            “Good.  You?”

            
            “Good.”

            “You got married and had some pretty kids, I see.”  She nods her head in the direction of the table where he had been sitting.

            “Yeah.  A five-year-old and a two-year-old.”

            “Holy shit,” she says again after another pause.

            She drops the cigarette on the patio and stands to crush it out.  When she straightens, his eyes drop down her front, more involuntarily than anything.  He hopes she hasn’t caught this.  But he sees she’s gotten very thin, compared to her teenage self.

            She grips her elbows and pulls her arms close to her torso, against the chill.  The jacket she wears is too thin for the weather, but he realizes just now that he’s left his own coat draped over the back of his chair.

            “You live here or just passing through?” she asks.

            “I’ve been here nine years now.  What about you?”

            “Little over a year.”  She crinkles her brow with a new thought and adds, “But I’m moving.  Tomorrow.  So, it’s kind of lucky you came in here tonight.”

            He blows out a white puff of breath, and he observes it isn’t as crisp a white as her cigarette smoke had been.

            “I can’t believe I didn’t recognize you,” she says.

            He pats his belly and smiles.  “I look a lot different, I know.”

            “No, it’s not that.  It’s the shorter hair and the glasses, and” – she scratches at her chin – “you didn’t have any facial hair then.”

            “Oh, yeah.”

            She offers a slow, rhythmic nod and pulls another cigarette from a Marlboro pack in her apron. 

            “You have a beautiful family,” she says.  “Your wife is really pretty.  Those kids look healthy and happy.”

            “Thanks.  They’re great.  They can be a handful, though.”

            “I know.  I’ve got a three-year-old myself.  A little girl.”