Late. Date. Wait.

It's not like she owed him anything. Why had she said Yes to this invitation?

Her grams would call it “having a crick in your neck.” The nagging but subtle pain that was developing in the crook where the base of her neck and her shoulder met was a reminder of how long she had been twisting her neck toward the entrance of the restaurant. He was late. Fifteen minutes by her phone. She wasn’t even for certain at this point if he was still going to show up. She finally returned her head to its naturally front-facing position to release the strain in her neck. She picked up her glass of water and took a sip.

She leaned her head backw ards to stretch out those contracted muscles, raising her gaze to the ceiling. The dark wooden beams above were comforting, in a strange sort of way. She lowered her head so that her chin could touch her chest, and felt the stretch of muscles in the back of her neck. Ah, that felt good. She observed the bundled cloth napkins on the table each swaddling their trio of flatware. She raised her head and twisted it to the right, towards the rear of the room where the servers, carrying trays of food, traveled easily back and forth through the swinging kitchen door.

She looked back down at her phone. Seventeen minutes late. “Why didn’t I put on a watch?” she wondered to herself. She contemplated momentarily the current trend of using the mobile phone as a timepiece instead of a regular watch, and she had collected a nice grouping of fashionable watches, but none of them were “smart watches”, like many of her friends had purchased. She allowed these trivialities to momentarily distract her from her current situation – waiting for a man who had walked out of she and her mother’s lives more than 20 years ago.

She suddenly became aware of the aromas smell of other people’s food from the tables around her, the aromas almost dizzying in its affect, and the faint noises that traveled from the kitchen with every swing of the door. Her stomach growled. She was hungry, but she had been too nervous about this meeting to eat anything.

Twenty-plus years. Was it that she had been waiting that long, or had he kept her waiting that long? And here he was, now 20 minutes late, and she was still waiting on him, without him sending so much as a text message to alert her of his delay. Not a text message. Not a letter or a birthday card or a postcard – or an email for that matter. For 20+ years. Then a month ago, suddenly, completely out of the blue, she received a message via FB Messenger. The message was rather short, but it was from this man who identified himself as her estranged father. The message said that he’d recently discovered her profile online, but he had been reluctant to reach out to her. He was filled with regret about his absence from her life, and he wanted to get together with her for dinner. Pending her acceptance of his invitation – an opportunity to reconnect with her, he had selected a restaurant and named a date and time that might be convenient for her. All she needed to say was either Yes or No.

The IM stirred up a number of her emotions. She felt surprise (“Daddy?”), shock (“Is this for real?”, confusion (“Where have you been all of this time?”), bewilderment (“What did I do to make you leave?”), anger (“Who the hell do you think you are?”) and frustration (“What makes you think that you can just walk back into my life?”). These emotions continued to swirl around within her, all while she consented to meet him for dinner and cleared her schedule to do so. They threatened to bubble up to the surface even as she sat at the table waiting for him. However, the predominant thing she was experiencing was curiosity and intrigue, as in “What do you want? And, Why now?”

The pain in her neck had only slightly lessened, but was still present. She also felt the hunger, the pangs growing more insistent for nourishment.

Twenty-five minutes. And, Nothing.

She asked herself again why she had said Yes to this date in the first place.

“Ma’am?” The soft, Southern drawl of the server's voice cut through her ruminations. “Would you like something to drink while you're waiting on your friend? Might suggest a glass of wine? We have an excellent selection of wines to possibly accompany any item on our menu.”

She got ready to refuse, but a light “ding” on her phone drew her attention a new message. The message said that he had gotten held up by a train, but he was in the parking lot now looking for a place to park. In that moment, she decided that she did need a drink. And she definitely needed something that was stronger than the water she was sipping.

“Do you have any Merlot?” she asked? Wine became her mother’s choice of beverage after his departure, but especially Merlot. Now she herself wasn’t anything more than a social drinker – she infrequently drank a glass of champagne at a wedding, or a mimosa with brunch, but tonight, she would take a cue from her mother and use some alcohol to steel her nerves and give her the proverbial “liquid courage.” That was another expression that her grandmother used to say.

It seemed like an eternity, the time between the Facebook Messenger’s “ding” and his entrance into the restaurant – and back into her life. It was enough time for the server to reappear with a bottle, to open it up at the table, to turn over the upside-down wineglass that was a part of the place setting, and to fill her glass about 2/3 of the way with the Merlot. She absently thanked the server, who made a swift disappearance, and then turned her head to the left, back towards the restaurant entrance. It was only then that her eyes found the stranger coming through the front door, her estranged father for whom her heart had been looking for 20-plus years. And as he stood still in the restaurant foyer, and as her fingers slid across the tablecloth to touch the cool stem of the wineglass in front of her, a daughter’s eyes locked with her father’s, both sets of eyes filled with pain, regret and questions.