Chapter 37
Sitting at the table, Selena and I watched through the restaurant window as they stopped near the street and turned to face each other.
I bit my lip. "They're not really gonna fight, are they?"
Selena gave them a worried glance. "No. Of course not."
I recognized the tone. It was the same one she'd used back in grade school, when she'd assured me that our parents weren't going to get divorced.
A month later, they were living in different houses.
Somehow, the recollection wasn't terribly comforting.
Again, I looked outside. Jake and Bishop were standing within arm's reach of each other, talking, or more likely, arguing. But at least they weren't fighting. Not yet, anyway.
I looked to Selena. "I've gotta ask, do you think Bishop'll hit him?"
"No." She hesitated. "Well, not unless Jake hits him first."
"Oh. That's good."
"Why?
"Because he wouldn’t," I said.
She gave me a dubious look. "You sure about that?"
"Yeah. He never does." I paused. "Or at least, not usually." I tried to laugh. "Usually, what he does is piss-off the other person until they take a swing at him. He's pretty good at it, actually."
"Yeah, I noticed."
Again, we looked outside. They still weren't hitting each other. That was a good sign, right?
Just then, our waitress appeared with a huge tray of food. As she started delivering plates, she paused in mid-motion. She was looking out the window, where Jake and Bishop were still facing off, looking like they wanted to kill each other.
"Don't worry," I told the waitress. "We're pretty sure they're not gonna fight."
"If you say so, honey," she said, delivering the rest of the plates and hustling off to the next table.
I looked at the heaping plates and sighed. "Should we tell them the food's here?"
Selena glanced toward the woman who'd complained earlier. She was sipping her coffee while looking down, reading her newspaper.
On the woman's table, I spotted a couple of dirty plates and a wadded up napkin. The way it looked, her food was gone, but in my experience, that didn't mean she'd be leaving any time soon.
She did, after all, have coffee and a newspaper.
In a hushed voice, I told Selena, "Don’t get your hopes up. She might be there for hours."
Selena turned and glanced toward the parking lot, where Jake and Bishop were still talking. "If we call them in," she said, "do you think Jake can be nice for once?"
I gave her a look. "I dunno. Do you thinkBishopcan be nice for once?"
"Hey," she said, looking almost insulted. "He's always nice."
"He is not," I told her. "He's especially not nice to Jake."
"That's not true," she insisted.
