The Cafe Suite: Order # 76

The Cafe Suite

Order # 76

Cold.
Wet winter rain and Ted Peuterman, fourty three, as tarnished as his name suggests, has one hand on car-keys, one hand in pocket, and makes sound.
Christ aloud and with that epithetical plea, the keys work free.
Hand rummaging, his walk begins. Over three potholes, around a faded give-way sign, across double lines, over asphalt, up the concrete grey gutter, a dirty sidewalk and into a cafe. Onto a chair and the preoccupied hand changes occupation. It steadies a table, shivering in the wind and begins to make good work of a cigarette. Two short breaths in – one long, out.
Ted Peuterman is not a liberated soul. He is not free from guilt, nor is he freed by the complexity of his thoughts. Ted Peuterman is free in the short period between two breaths in and one long, out.
The chair creeks. It is under strain. The sound acts as warning of an impending collapse. Ted likes this chair. It’s cold, hard, stiff and well worn. He finds comfort in the familiarity of that which so easily echoes his own dispositions.
He doesn’t say anything. His soundless complaints about life, whatever that means, are masked by the rain. There are three drops. They follow one another, driving down his face, as if following a map. They are brushed away by one gesture of Ted Peuterman’s tobacco tallowed hands.
Suddenly from a place outside of Ted’s mind moves a waitress. Quicker than usual, she has pounced on his table. For him, her movements are cat like.
He is annoyed by the celerity of her approach and the amount of feeling in her gait; more bubbly than a cake of soap.
Poised and collected, ready to take his order, table three’s order, order #76 of the day, she asks Ted Peuterman, the regular... Latte? She uses inflection.
Ted replies flatly, Bitter. Bitter as you can make it.
The waitress is employed by order #76 for seven and a half minutes, the time it takes to brew a cup of coffee on a Tuesday afternoon. Bitter. She’s gone. One breath warmer than the winter; a winter which encroaches him, creeping to linger in every crevasse, pit, pore and orifice of his worn form.
He watches her.
He wishes for her to fall, to fail. Lips, tongue and teeth mutter, Bitch.
Ted Peuterman thinks in his thoughts that if she were to trip this would be his recompense for a long, cold day. She owes him. She trips and he laughs out loud. One grunt. He owns her.
Ted sits. Waits another seven and a half minutes. Seven and a half-hand-burnt-minutes later, the waitress returns. She clutches a bitter cup of coffee and a burnt hand. Interrupted, a brief dialogue is exchanged, sorry about the delay.
He grunts, you earnt it. The waitress doesn’t understand.
Peuterman goes on living in his own mind. His escape is the newspaper in hand, he begins to read. Back to front the news becomes increasingly dramatic, dark. Purposefully he ignores the western reading path and a creation seeking to satisfy the most cynical of minds is the product. Peuterman flicks past the sports uninterested and removed.
Twenty three year old man driven down by drunk driver, reads the newspaper. One long sip of his bitter coffee is drunk down and he feels a sense of caffeinated satisfaction.
Blind child fatally slain, is the next title. No empathy stands apparent in the fourty three year olds milky eyes. Eyes not moist, but whet to his desire for macabre sombre-sense news.
Public health sector strike in size 42 Times New Roman font.
Another cigarette is found by Peuterman’s ruminant hand. Match struck and he senses the synergy between match head and box. Three headlines later and three pages on, the orotund sounds of the cafe are interrupted.
A ringing. The sound resonates, weaving its way through the bodies and tables, encircles Ted Peuterman, enters and then starts over again. Once, twice and a fifth time.
Closing time. 5 o’clock.
Coffee is cold and Ted too. He works his way toward an end. Through the
upside-down tables, beside a stack of chairs, a pile of swept mess lies slovenly on the floor. He makes sure he walks it back through the cafe. A cavort, dancing to the disorder he so effortlessly composes.
Waitress is nowhere to be seen and Ted Peuterman smiles for the first time that day. The burnt hand seemed to stunt her persistent sense of readiness and now she is nowhere but in Ted’s thoughts.
This thought bubble bursts. Quickly it is replaced by more bubbles, that is the waitress. She came up from behind like a spontaneous case of indigestion. The waitress, from nowhere produces a bill. Three ninety nine plus a thirty cent tip. He gives her three ninety nine, an absence of a tip, and neither smile nor good form. Waitress smiles curtly, unimpressed, pirouettes.
Interrupted by dialogue once more, the waitress hears, Receipt. expenses to account for. Inflection noted.
Ted Peuterman leaves the cafe with a lit cigarette and a receipt. Smoke and ash conspire. He coughs, but maintains eye contact with his receipt.
Ted walks. He walks. Ted Peuterman walks, with a course set. He is the three drops following a map. He is three wet, winter, rain drops.
Ted Peuterman doesn’t see the car. He doesn’t feel it. But he knows it is fast. Suddenly he and the car are one. Then he is none. He is three drops wiped away by the gesture of a hand.
Waitress from the cafe sees him bounce. He owes her. One grunt.
Cold.
Order #76. Done.