TAMPA, Dec 27, 2000}
48 hours ago, the social dynamic wasn't flowing. There were frowns. There were unappreciated meals that had taken hours to prepare. There were negative stories drawn out and repeated due to lack of anything else to talk about, and there were three loads of my laundry.

When I brought the laundry in the door, I kissed my mom on the cheek, staying clear of the freshly stitched scar running six inches, from behind her ear to down her neck. She'd had a cancer removed. Just like me. Just like dad. My sister was first to notice the coincidence. "You have all had cancer removed in the last couple months!" She noted out loud at frowny Christmas dinner.

Before dinner, I'd watched a television program with my father, about the recent death of a 108-year-old man: 46-years my father's senior. As we lay, lumps on our respective couches, I did the math and realized it's very feasible that they will be alive when I am 60, though they seem so close to death now.

With nothing to say, he brings me up to the moment in regards to my stepbrother, Kevin, my dad's son, who I never see. He's is a skinny truck driver. He lives in Iowa.

"You know Kevin is really bad now?" My dad said, looking at the TV.

"Yeah, you told me before."

"Yeah, well, now his mother is having the trucking company send her his checks so he doesn't go spend it on dope." He said exasperated, but still aimed at the television. "He's forty years old!"

The number did surprise me.

"Yeah, his mother gets all his money, they send his whole paycheck to her. He's not even allowed to pump his own gas." My dad said. "When he needs to fill up his 18-wheeler, he has to call his mother and she comes down and pumps it for him. Can you imagine? Being 40-years-old and having your mother pump your gas?"

Meanwhile my mother is up two flights of pale teal-green carpeting, washing my clothes, folding my underwear and all I can think of is getting back to Tampa, sleeping, waking up alone, and going to work at 5 p.m., and seeing Alana.

Alana falls into me when she laughs, and the rest of the waiters stand around bug-eyed. She has her cheek to my diaphragm and her cold, soft hands cupped around my neck and my heart has a paper cut because she's getting married. The waiters feel their mere pangs of jealousy at her displays of affection toward me, but I suffer the paper cut spreading open, that cold air sting when she laughs and lays her head into my chest. And I can't help but tell her to fuck her marriage and run away with me, cause I'm gonna be a famous writer you know, and does this guy you're marring, does he make you laugh? Is he smart? Do you have good conversations with him the way you do with me? I'm leaving soon, you should run away with me.

She does not see that I have a coffee creamer in my left hand, as I grab a fork from the counter with my right and ask her, "Would your fiancée do THIS for you?" And I stand so that she sees my profile from the right. I take a deep dramatic breath; bringing my left hand to my eye, like looking into an imaginary telescope, so that the coffee creamer is hidden in my fist. Then I swing the fork into my eye, white creamer bursting forth as she is once again a puddle of laughs on my chest, resting in the trail of white liquid running down my server's apron.

I feel my eye throb and slide away to the bathroom. In the mirror I see blood on my eyelid just above my eyeball, and I shudder hard and run out.

"Look what I did to myself." I showed her. She put her hand over her mouth. I continued. "Man, one centimeter down and I'd have accidentally stabbed my eye." She grabbed my arm and I added the kicker. " I almost lost my eye trying to make you laugh. Would your boyfriend do that for you?"

Her cheeks rise; belying that her covered mouth is smiling, and I become more real. When I began spouting my run-away-with-me nonsense, I was not behind my words. I was picturing her older, meaner, wider, yelling at me loud because she's afraid she won't be heard over the baby crying. And she's screaming at me in Portuguese and I feel extra far from her because I don't understand her. And while I'm making her laugh, and half-seriously trying to woo her away from marriage, I study her sexy face, and take the numerical value of her sexiness, and divide that by the length of time she will stay sexy, then multiply that figure by the number of times I can make her laugh per hour, then subtract the number representing the difference between how old I am and the age level at which my brain functions (27-21? 27-19?). That equals the time we would have together until implosion, if she took me up on my offer. And it seems like long enough. So I say again to her, "You should dump that guy and take off with me." And I fucking mean it.

Without a lilt, she answers my bold offer by placing her hand on mine as it rests on the false wood counter by the pizza stands. "Michael, I like you." She says. And she almost leaves it at that, but runs her hand across my stomach as she walks away to check on her tables.

"Dude, you need to tag her." One of the other waiters says to me, walking up as he's folding a pizza box, inserting the slats in the slots, nodding his head. He waits for me to agree that I should 'tag' her. When I don't answer, he goes on. "You know she's only marrying that guy to stay in the country." He finished the box, set it aside and picked up a flat sheet of cardboard and proceeded to work its pre-programmed origami. "She just wants to be a citizen. She's only known him for a month." He said. "You should tag her."

On the strength of that, I carried her with me the next day at THE PAPER as I wrote obituaries, sorted mail, and distributed faxes to the empty desks of reporters. I was alone in the newsroom, but in my head I was kissing her and then we would stop kissing and talk about art and books and languages, the way we do at the restaurant. And throughout my day, alone in the newsroom, she would back away from my mouth and repeat what she said last week, when we first realized we had a vague connection: "God, it's been such a long time since I've had an intellectual conversation." And then I kiss her again, while I'm faxing some papers to the courthouse.

I leave the newsroom at 3 p.m., knowing she will be at PIZZA DIVE when I arrive for work, and we will flirt for five hours. When I walk in she will kiss me hello, Brazilian style, with feeling, but without misrepresentation, though she doesn't do it to anyone else in the restaurant and it always excites me to have someone like me better than they do other people. And because of this, I think of her when I'm getting ready for the PIZZA DIVE, leaving my apartment, strapping on my apron, adjusting the plastic drinking straws, picking out reading material for when the customers thin out. And I grab Richard Braughtigan, The Abortion, for Alana, because she wants to learn English, and she loves literature she says, breaking the word up into small pretty bits: "li, chre, choor."

But I leave The Abortion in my truck when I go in, thinking that later, as we're folding boxes I might mention, "Oh yeah, I have a book in my truck you could read. You would like it."

But I'm hit with the news as I come in the door smiling. "Alana's not working tonight." TONY says from the kitchen.

I duck and peak at him through the service window. "Aw man, why am I even here then? Where is she?" I ask to anybody listening.

"She's not feeling well. She's pregnant." He announced, waving a knife. "She won't be in tonight."

And I was glad I had left the book out in my truck.

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