The Pole.
Cara takes two sips of coffee and realizes five things about herself:
- She prefers her coffee lukewarm
- It's her shoulders, not her back, that ache
- She never returned that book to the library
- This job is killing her
- Nathan isn't the one
It’s a Thursday morning in December, her shift starts at noon, and this time she knows she’s going to break down again. She doesn’t know when, if it’ll be when an out-of-towner requests her pancakes to be made with fat free milk, or if a trucker will want another bottle of Tabasco since the lid on his is leaking, she doesn’t know when. But it always happens toward the very middle of her shift, right when her rhythm is back and the doors are swinging just wide enough for her to get through with a full tray in one try. Something inside her will decide that now is a good time to remember everything, and she will.
Last night Cara had a dream about Nathan and in it the two of them lived on a shipping barge in Norway between two icebergs jutting out of the sea and steaming across the water. Nathan was wearing flannel and eating a gyro of some sort, and in her dream just looking at him made her feel that everything was wrong. She woke up with the pace of her heart out of step with her body. She made herself some coffee. She decided it was time to leave.
On her kitchen table lies a book she’s been trying to read for weeks now, one recommended to her by an article in a Ladies Home Journal that she flipped through while getting her hair frosted last week. “Oh, I know that one,” Nancy said to her between folding squares of tin foil over Cara’s frizzy hair. “It’s supposed to interpret dreams or something. But I never remember my dreams, you know?” Cara remembers every dream she’d ever had, especially ones about icebergs, because to her they were prophecy. They were her body declaring what was wrong, and this time it was Nathan.
But it was the gyro that left her confused. Aren't gyros Greek? Will she move to Greece? Or is the whole point of it that Nathan is most recently interested in anything but her. Except her.
On her fridge is a dusty embroidered magnet that screams out to her each time she goes for the milk, "GOD CHANGES LIVES!" She doesn't believe that, she believes people change their lives, God just gives them the green light to do so. She doesn't believe that there's a God holding her hand and yanking her back and forth across some arbitrary timeline of her life, pointing out what she will do and what she won’t do and how she’ll do it and with whom.
She doesn’t even know if she believes in God. But she keeps the magnet up because it’s sturdy, and holds a stack of grocery receipts to her fridge resolutely.
