What in the world was I thinking?
Teaching a biker how to shake hands. Critiquing a stranger’s posture. Getting into a public argument over menu grammar. The grammar still bothers me. I can’t lie.
I was not thinking. That was the problem.
I was reacting, falling back on the only skills I really have, trying to impose order on a world that does not want or need my brand of order.
All I can hear is my mother’s voice echoing in my head.
Presentation matters, Eleanor. First impressions matter. If you can’t control your environment, you can’t control anything.
But this is not my environment.
This is Mavis’s, and Wyatt’s, and Dolly’s, and anyone else who has built a life here. I am the interloper. The outsider. The prissy city princess who does not know how to exist in a world where people do not care about grammar, posture, or the proper way to shake hands.
Tears fall down my face before I can stop them.
And I do not cry prettily. I never have. My face gets all blotchy. My nose runs like a faucet, and I make these embarrassing hiccuping sounds that I cannot seem to control.
I am in the middle of this humiliating display when the office door opens.
“Hey, so the biker situation is—” Wyatt stops mid-sentence.“Oh.”
I try to pull myself together, wiping frantically at my face with the back of my sleeve. Lovely.
“I’m fine. I’m just, it’s been a long night and I?—”
“You’re crying.”
“I’m not crying. I’m just—” A hiccup escapes me, undermining my denial. “Okay, so I’m crying. A little. It’s fine. You can go back to the bar.”
But he doesn’t go.
Instead, he closes the door behind him, moves to the filing cabinet in the corner, and pulls out a bottle of bourbon and two glasses.
“Mavis kept this here for emergencies,” he says, pouring a measure into each glass. “I’d say this qualifies.”
He hands me a glass and settles into the worn armchair across from the desk, the same chair he sat in the other night when he told me about Mavis and her cheating at poker.
“The biker is fine,” he says. “His name is Dave. He’s actually a pretty nice guy once you get past his tough exterior. I bought him a beer, told him that you’re new and still adjusting to the place, and he agreed to just let it go.”
“I made a fool of myself.”
“A little bit, yeah.”
I take a sip of bourbon. It burns going down, but it’s a good burn. Warm and grounding.
“I don’t know what I was thinking. I was just, I just saw things were wrong, things I know how to fix, and I couldn’t stop myself for some reason.”
“Things that were wrong by your standards,” he says gently, “not by ours.”
“Wyatt, the grammar on the menus is objectively wrong.”
“Maybe, but nobody here cares. They come here for food and drinks and company, not grammatically correct descriptions of mozzarella sticks.”
I know he’s right, of course. I have known it all along, really. But admitting it feels like everything I’ve built my life on, the rules, the standards, the careful cultivation of proper behavior, is just meaningless.
“I don’t know how to be here,” I say, my voice small. “I don’t know how to exist in a place where all the things that I know don’t even matter.”
