All We Know of Love by Nora Raleigh Baskin Read Free Book Online

Sarah read over my shoulder.
    Legal fee: $3.00 — Certified Copy
was stamped across the whole thing. I let my eyes wander over the words, the dates, the ages. Maiden name. County of. City of. Education. My mother was twenty-three years old. My dad was thirty-four. They were married May 19th. I guess I knew that. I remembered the anniversary gifts. Flowers. Babysitters. Dinner out. Dinner in.
    It was Sarah who brought it up.
    “Hey, isn’t your birthday in November?” she said.
    “Yeah.”
    “So look, your parents were married only six months before you were born.” And then she stopped, like she had said something wrong. But I still didn’t get it.
    “So?”
    “Nothing.”
    I folded the paper back up and took the whole handful, and I was about to shove it back into the closet. I wanted to get back to the American Revolution and John Paul Jones, who said, “Give me liberty or give me death.” Or maybe he said, “I regret I have but one life to live for my country.” Or maybe he didn’t say anything. Maybe he just dropped dead.
    Oh.
    I got it.
    My mother was three months pregnant when she got married. She had never wanted to get married in the first place. She had to. So much for love. My mother had never wanted me. Maybe that’s what she was trying to tell me that day.
    I was a mistake, one mistake that led to another.
    No wonder she left.
    I finally got it.
    When my grilled cheese comes, there are three crinkle-cut pickle slices on the plate beside it. And the sandwich itself looks a little flatter, a lot greasier than I think I can handle right now. More like a slice of pizza than a sandwich, and I don’t feel the least bit hungry anymore.
    “You don’t like it?” the waitress asks, the way a mother would, which strikes me as sort of funny but nice; she’s just a kid like me. I guess being a waitress is like being a mother, sort of. With tips.
    “Oh, no. I’m just not as hungry as I thought.”
    Then as if my answer were an invitation, the waitress leans back against the sliding-glass doors of the dessert display right behind her. She lets out a long sigh, almost a parody of exhaustion.
    If this girl had a cigarette, I imagine she’d be smoking. She kind of looks like the type of girl who smokes.
    “So,” she says to me. “Where are you going?”
    “Going?” I ask. I turn around to look out the window. I can see the bus and even more passengers lined up along the street.
Maybe nowhere,
I think.
    “Yeah, well, everybody who comes in here is going somewhere. If you lived around here, you’d know better. Plus, I know pretty much everybody from here.”
    “Florida,” I say. “To see my mother.”
    Back at school, there were always those girls who started smoking early, the skinny ones with black eyeliner and belly rings who gathered in the parking lot before first period. The black nail polish type. Although they’d surprise you. Sometimes you’d see a cheerleader out there, or an honor student blackening her lungs with seductive tendrils of smoke. It keeps you skinny, they tell me.
    The waitress smiles. “I wish I could go to Florida.”
    “Yeah?”
    “I’d go anywhere,” she says. “But I can’t.”
    That’s when I notice the ring on her finger, on her third finger, left hand. A wedding band. She walks away to give someone their check, and when she comes back, she returns to the same spot and exact stance, as if she stands there a hundred times a day. Arms folded, ankles crossed, leaning directly in front of the slices of pie, bowls of rice pudding, and half globes of cantaloupe covered in cellophane.
    I still haven’t touched my sandwich, and I don’t want her to ask me about it again. So I say, “Are you married?”
    She looks down at her hand. She spreads her fingers and sort of wiggles them around.
    “Yup.”
    “That’s nice.”
How lame can I be?
    “You don’t mean that,” she says, but she isn’t angry. She steps toward the counter and leans on her elbows. She looks