The Tab

“Well do you or don’t you?” she asked

He drummed his fingers on the table but said nothing. Staring out the window, he thought, Isn’t life like a TV show sometimes? You look through the glass, it’s like a screen, and you’re watching a reality show at its most real.

“Harry, answer me, do you want to go to it or not?”

A woman walked by. She was pushing a stroller. He wondered what the baby might look like. Would it be a boy or a girl? A girl, he thought. I bet it’s a little girl.

“Harry? You know what your problem is? You can never make up your mind about anything.”

Yes, it was a baby girl with chubby pink cheeks. And she’d be wearing a bonnet. A pink one. And a frilly onesie, her best going-out clothes. And her mother would be the kindest mother of all. And her father . . . What sort of man would he be?

The woman stopped right in front of the window. Dead center. He raised himself from the seat a bit and tried to see into the stroller. He couldn’t.

“Harry, if you don’t come with me now, I’m leaving without you.”

The woman was searching in her purse for something. What was it? To stop in the middle of walking her child. Good thing she was on the sidewalk and not in the street. What would you need right at this moment that would make you stop pushing the stroller?

While he was puzzling over this, he noticed that Stella stood up. “You’ll pay for this,” she said, then turned and stormed toward the door.

Harry barely heard her. The woman had taken her hand out of her purse. Her left hand. He saw the diamond ring on her finger.

Then the oddest thing happened. The woman turned to the window and looked at him. It was an odd stare. A blank one. Her eyes glazed. Distant.

She’s staring at me? he thought. Why on earth is she doing that?

The woman turned back to the stroller and began pushing it again. As she moved out of the window frame, he strained to see her. The woman and that stroller, and the little pink-clad girl with the chubby pink cheeks. Now they were gone.

Harry turned back to the table. His stomach churned. The ring was unique. He knew she’d drawn the design herself.

Closing his eyes, he imagined a car speeding down the street, and he saw the woman, pushing the daughter in her stroller, stop for some reason, then turn toward the car, a look of horror on her face as it bore down, slamming into them, and throwing both she and the daughter across the road to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street.

She was gone. The daughter was gone. And now Stella was gone.

“Sir,” asked the server, coming to the table. “Is everything all right?”

Opening his eyes, Harry looked up at her. “I . . . I just saw a mother walk by with her daughter in her stroller. They’re gone now.”

The server gave him an odd look. “Ah, well, that’s really nice,” she said, moving on. “So would you like anything else?”

Harry closed his eyes again. What he didn’t want, he decided, was any more going anywhere with Stella.

“No,” he said, turning toward the empty window. “No, I think I’ll pay for everything now.”