She Wants the Table on the Side of the Road

It’s child-sized and made of that chunky blue 90s plastic, she discovers when she pulls her car over, and covered in the wild scribbles of markers leaving paper just the way hers had when she drew her own smile into a juicy watermelon slice, no seeds, and her hands so large they’d be able to pluck her favorite tree, her mom’s minivan, the seven dogs she’d been sure her mom would agree to, high over her head. She turns the table over and sees that this one, too, has the mysterious cylindrical hole in the middle that doesn’t go all the way through, the hole that she found when she was eight, sitting underneath, probing the smooth edges with her fingers, back when everything she didn’t understand felt magical, discoverable. Now, she is 33 and already divorced from the man whose forgotten T-shirts she left on the porch this morning for him to pick up, all but the one with Yoda in sunglasses, which she put on. She twisted the hem around her thumb while she watched him gather the rest, watched him not look up, not see her. This was how it had always been with them, one or the other – probably mostly her, really – missing the cues so they were never seeing the same thing at the same time. She’s still wearing the Yoda shirt as she stands alone on the shoulder of this road on the way to buy pasta only she will eat and she feels so small, so very, very small that she thinks she might fit into this hole in the table, that she could shimmy through, one piece at a time, until she comes out on the other side the girl she used to be.