Eve

There was nothing soft about the café where Cyndi and I met. The floor was industrial linoleum that we swept and mopped every night at closing and the kitchen red clay tile with grout stained black. The décor was all steel and rusted metal- homage to found objects of the rural south but a rough reminder that even when you run your hands through smooth wet grass in Alabama you are liable to get tangled on a rusty stake from a plow or railroad tie. Eve was the only thing that fluttered through the concrete counters and stainless steel with lightness and grace. She wore white linen everyday back then and her black hair down to her shoulders flowed behind leaving a barrier between her and the world of college students bent over chicken croissants and veggie pitas. I rarely spoke to her then because she seemed too much of an enigma. Sometimes I would look at her and wonder if she were real or some ghost that haunted the space below the stairs and was simply looking at me through some ectoblastic haze. Cyndi and I opened the café in the mornings with Cisco coffee and big pots of boiling water for the sweet tea. I could never get the vegetables cut quick enough before the lunch line was out the door and I was standing over a griddle making a reuben by 11:30 AM. We would go non-stop until 3 pm, dead on our feet with one guy running the dishwasher in the kitchen until the entire back room was like a steam sauna. Cyndi became my best friend and was in my wedding. She just flew down from Colorado to throw me a baby shower this weekend and see me pregnant for the first time. Eve started wearing brown in 1998 around the same time I moved back to Alabama. I’ve never seen her wear white again. Instead of gliding through a room she would waddle with a dark hat on her head and the smile of a witch who knew the spell that would put you down for good. She came to the shower wearing red and is now a therapist. We all stuffed out faces on chicken and veggie pitas that someone else made and propped our feet up at the end of the day laughing at the intertwining of our lives at Behind the Glass.