Fifteen Minutes

   The diner’s shipment of cream and sugar never came in, so she has to drink her coffee black. Lays her purse in the booth. Takes out her cigarettes and sets the pack on the table. Removes one. Slides the ashtray across the table until it is in front of her. Lights up. Places the lighter on top of the pack.

  Inhales. The index and middle fingers with freshly manicured nails covering the corner of the left side of her mouth. Her unpainted lips as pink as the single rose she received three weeks before last Valentine’s Day.

  They were trying to conceive. Were having no luck. The previous year she had a miscarriage. Their relationship had been on the rocks since.

  People have gotten divorced for less. Wives far more fertile have been left for younger women. Women with curves far more magazine worthy than a stomach inflated by a second pregnancy.

  She watches the patrons at the counter over slightly lowered sunglasses. Some couples. Mostly older men eating alone. She looks at her watch. Her friends are running late as usual. They will gossip about inconsequential things. About who was at yoga class last week. Who was at cycling class. Who had the flu and couldn’t make it to either. About who is seeing who. Who makes a cute couple, and who does not.

  She stretches. Stubs out her cigarette. Taps her pack uncertainly. Thinks about smoking another. Decides against it. Takes a sip of the complimentary water. Twists a swizzle stick. Bends it in half. 

   Listens to a couple of old timers talk golf and senior community rummy. She thinks of what it was like patiently waiting for a proposal that never came. She had imagined what her wedding would be like since she was a little girl. Waiting by the phone for a call that never came. Her friends were the ones the boys always chased. She wanted to be chased too but they never seemed to want her. Yet still she dreamed. Pictured herself lovingly filling a wedding dress. At the altar. He wouldn’t get cold feet. He’d carry her across the threshold to gently make love to her until the sun began to shine through the fog. 

  She chews on an ice cube. Hears her friends outside. They’re always talking about high school and the reunions that followed. Some of their classmates have become unrecognizable. The stoners still smoke. A few teetotalers have turned to drink. A few straight edge kids got hooked on hard drugs. 

  The captain of the football team has a paunch, an ex-cheerleader wife, and three kids. Susan settled for someone she doesn’t love. Emily outgrew her goth stage. Mark is still a punk although he’s nearly thirty six. He still hasn’t found the one. She never thought of him that way. Jack was the one she always dreamt of. 

  She occasionally takes out her senior yearbook from the bottom shelf of her bookcase, and reads what people wrote. The unoriginal “have a good summers,” the “I never really got to know you but you seem cools,” the “let’s stay in touches.” Where are the forwarding addresses? Where did that last summer before college go? Who was there? Who wasn’t? Who was it who stood on the beach in a bikini she was proud of? That she thought made her look sexy, although no one seemed to notice.

  Between the dust coated covers, the pages still hold her adolescent dreams. Most of which have been abandoned. A sacrifice of growing up, and having to take on adult responsibilities. She wonders what may have happened if she hadn’t taken the career counselor’s recommendations so seriously. 

  She decides she will have another cigarette as her friends make their way in to place orders for skillets and cups of coffee without cream and sugar. Of course, they’re disappointed. But they act chipper. She does too. Kissing their cheeks and hugging them. Wishing she could go back in time. Find herself still sitting there on her bed full of youthful aspiration and eyes that looked nowhere but to a future yet to be lived. A future cherished before it even began. A future brimming with possibilities. Of loves that wouldn’t be lost. Of fulfillment. Of actualized potentials. Of coffee so saccharine, it would hurt her teeth to drink.