I live alone. One night, last week — I think it was Thursday — I was getting hungry and started to look through the cupboards for food. I found a can of vegetable beef soup and started to warm it in a saucepan on the stove. It began to boil and I dished up a bowl. I was standing over the sink still holding the bowl and I decided to taste the soup. I took a spoonful and then another, then another, and another and realized I may as well eat my dinner right here.

Then my girlfriend walked in the door, because we’re in that stage of our relationship now where she keeps a spare key to the apartment. Without so much as even greeting me, the first words that jumped from her mouth were, ‘You’re eating your meal standing over the sink?’

‘So?’

I mean what rule is there that dictates where and in what position one must eat? Right?

- Troy, Sacramento, California

It’s 9:50 on a Sunday night. The restaurant closes at 10. The place is deadsville. We haven’t had a new table come in over 40 minutes. I’ve cut all the servers but Tracy, and she’s spent her last half hour emptying and refilling every last salt and pepper shaker in the building.

I’ve already told the boys and Sharla in the kitchen to break down as much as they can, thinking we’ll get them out a little early. They deserve it.

In walks some middle-aged guy wearing a mustache and a cheap suit attached to a middle-aged blonde girl who looks like she’s been around the ringer a couple of times, and who’s dressed suspiciously like a hooker. Not in the new style, either, where all the girls now are dressing like high-priced hookers in their lingerie shirts, short skirts and leather boots. No, she’s dressed the old way, late eighties or nineties where you could actually tell a hooker by how she was dressed. Like in Pretty Woman. Only this lady’s no Julia Roberts.

The man – Mustache, I’ll call him asks for a table by the window, normally a tough request to grant. But I can get it for them, because the whole restaurant is empty, an obvious fact that one might assume would be just as obvious to these two lovebirds as I bring them to their table.

The problem is it’s my job to keep the posted hours, and turning away customers is not smart business. Still, for the sake of Manny and Jim and Sharla who are working the line and nearly done scouring all that needs scouring and Tracy who is done with the salt and peppers and now talking to her daughter on her cell phone at the corner booth in the bar, telling her she’ll be home soon, and for the dishwashers Luis and Robert who can either catch the bus at 10:15 or have to wait until 11:15 before the next one comes along, I politely remind the pair, “Just so you are aware the kitchen closes at 10 PM.”

Mustache, is looking nowhere near the menu I have just placed directly in front of him, nor his watch, nor the 43 other empty tables around him. No he’s staring right into the eyes of his date, right at the pair of bullseyes between the double bags and wide swaths of dark purple eye make-up.

For a second I doubt he even heard me, until I hear him say it,

‘So?’
- Charles, Chicago, Illinois

There is this homeless black man that I see nearly daily in my neighborhood. I let him use my cell phone to make a call once. He asks me for change whenever I see him. Sometimes he’ll ask me twice, if I pass by him twice on the same walk, not remembering he already hit me up.

The truth is I don’t carry change, or cash for that matter. I mean, my check card is just so convenient.

But for whatever reason, the last two times he’s asked me, I did have change at the bottom of my coat pocket. Probably left over from buying a candy bar or something small. Anyway it must have been 33 cents, because the first time he asked me I gave him two dimes and a penny, thinking I had scooped it all out, only to later that night feel a couple more coins as I was rooting around the same pocket. The next time I saw him, he asked me again. I reached in and pulled out two pennies from the pocket, once again thinking I had grabbed it all. And wouldn’t you know it? Later on I found another dime, when I was emptying my pockets of receipts.

Oh well, what matters is that when I handed him those two pennies the second time, I noticed how leathery and black his hands were. Not the skin color black, which I never really understood, because peoples’ skin aren’t ever really black. I mean, it’s brown isn’t it? No, this was like really black, like charcoal. Like his hands had been on fire and when he put them out they looked identical to charred bits of wood. They were black like bad frostbite is supposed to make your hands. Like they were stained by residue of oil, or dirt, or ash. Whatever it was, I remembered thinking that they must have been like that for years, and that the black is permanent.

And as I’m looking at his hands while I’m giving him those two pennies, I say, just trying to make conversation, ‘Wow, you’re hands are really black.’

Guess what he says?

‘So?’

And, I guess, why wouldn’t he?

- Theresa, Saint Paul, Minnesota

There’s a homeless guy in my neighborhood.

So?

- Pete, Saint Paul, Minnesota