Table for Two

“She said she had to use the bathroom.” Rorie’s father said, plainly. He reached forward with two fingers and plucked the roll of mints from her hand.

She knew he was lying. Myrna had been insistent that they use the bathroom before they left home, and then try again at a restaurant before they arrived. She said she wasn’t going to be “fooling around in a toilet with no room to wipe your own behind.”

He cleared his throat. “These--” he paused, peeling the foil off one end “--are the wrong mints.”

Rorie was mortified. “But I pressed the right button, just like you said! I pressed EE!” Rorie sputtered, already on the verge of tears because of Myrna’s mysterious absence.

“Yeah...” he trailed off.

She watched in uncomfortable silence as he struggled to open the paper around the foil, his fingers too plump to grip the tab.

“Sometimes they switch stuff around in there.” He continued. “I don’t know why. They never change what’s in there, only where it is.” He tilted his head back, dumping half the pack into his mouth.

Rorie sat down on the edge of her cold seat, looking again to the windows and the door behind her, wondering where Myrna really was.

“She was lying.” Rorie’s father said, finally, before crunching down on a jaw full of mints. “She hates to see me here, but she feels guilty when she doesn’t visit.”

He stared at the top of her head until she lifted it and met his eyes with hers.

“Do you know what it means to feel guilty?” he asked, holding her gaze.

Rorie knew he was guilty. She had played 'detective’ with her friends before and someone was always either guilty or not guilty. Guilty people were bad. They went to jail. Myrna wasn’t bad. How could he call her that?

“Sometimes we feel bad about doing something wrong, or not doing something right. It’s just a feeling though. People think there’s a feeling you’re supposed to have when you do something wrong. Some of the guys here did very bad things and they don’t feel even a little guilty—even though they are!” He chuckled, covering his mouth with his hand.

Rorie watched incredulous as his chuckle became a loud laugh. He laughed harder and began to rock back and forth with tears in his eyes. Thinking there must be something funny she couldn’t see, she turned in her seat, searching for the object of his amusement, but nothing extraordinary was happening in the seats behind them. A family was walking towards the canvas mural and a man stood nearby holding a camera, but they were doing it in a very normal way. She faced him again and narrowed her eyes.

“Are you?” Rorie asked, snapping him out of his fit of laughter.

“What?” he asked, his smile completely faded away.

“Are you guilty?” She asked.

Her father stared at her, startled. He dropped his eyes and rubbed his shiny, bald head. “Yeah.” he sighed.

“I did bad things and I’m guilty because I broke the rules.” He trailed.

As they sat in silence, Rorie’s mind raced. She had always thought her father was the exception.

Once, when Rorie was over her aunt’s house, her cousin Benny snuck in late through the dining room window, knocking over a very pretty platter. Auntie Lynn had received many compliments on the platter that she thrifted and later found out was worth hundreds of dollars. It was pastel yellow with detailed lilacs painted in purples, pinks, and blues. Every holiday, the platter would be laden with pieces of cake, pie, and coconut candies. The platter was a hallmark of every gathering Auntie Lynn hosted.

Benny all but begged Rorie to stay silent.

“If you tell Mama you saw me coming in the window, she gonna beat me with a broom. If you don’t say nothing, nobody gets in trouble. She knows you didn’t break it.”

But that’s not what happened. When Auntie Lynn interrogated Rorie about the platter, Rorie had said she didn’t know how it broke but she didn’t do it. Since no one else was an obvious suspect, not only did Rorie get punished for breaking the platter, but she also got in trouble again when she got home, for lying—even though she hadn’t. Not about breaking the platter, at least.

She had always thought something like this must have happened to her father. He was her father, after all. How could her father be a bad guy?

When Rorie went to Myrna’s, she would sit on the porch and watch the city buses at the stop across the street. On weekdays, sometimes a cousin would appear at the stop as the bus pulled away, hoping to get a meal at Myrna’s before riding the rest of the way home. Sometimes Rorie would watch the buses and imagine them pulling away and her father standing there with a duffel over his shoulder. She would know exactly who he was and would run into his arms as he hugged her and explained that it was all a big mistake. But now, he was telling her he was a bad guy.

Rorie stared at this strange man. The father she had always imagined was very lean. He had a head full of short hair that nearly grew into his eyebrows, and his face was smooth except for a patch of hair on his chin. That’s who was posing on Myrna’s mantle with an arm draped over Auntie Lynn’s shoulders and holding bunny ears behind their younger brother’s head. Rorie was crushed.

“Why do you want to be bad?” she asked.

“No.” Rorie’s father cleared his throat. “I never said I’m bad. I said I’m guilty.”

“But when you do bad things, that makes you bad.” Rorie responded slowly.

“Well then,” He cleared his throat again and crossed his arms. “How many bad things do you have to do before you’re bad?”

“Huh?”

“I’m sure you did some bad things before.” he shrugged. “Are you bad?”

“I don’t do bad things!” Rorie yelled, catching the attention of the guard behind her father whose head snapped in her direction. She pushed herself back into the seat until she felt the cool plastic on her shoulders. She said it lower this time, “I don’t do bad things.”

“So... you’ve never done something Myrna told you not to do or lied to get out of trouble?” he smirked.

Rorie jerked her head back in surprise. She had eaten the frosting off the back of a cake in the refrigerator and blamed it on Myrna’s cat. But there was no way he would know about that. Before she could answer, he replied,

“You know Myrna told me all about how you lied that Bunny opened the refrigerator and ate the icing off the back of her cake.” His smirk started to widen, but he quickly wiped it away when he noticed Rorie was embarrassed. He studied her, reaching into his beard to rub his chin.

“Ok.” He pointed at her. “Tell me this: How many good things do you have to do before you’re good?”