White or Wheat?

(This may or may not be the final edited version of a 'mandatory-750-word-or-less' short story submission for a contest in which the entire story takes place in a restaurant or bar.  This is a condensed literary telling of my brother's first public meal upon his release from over 12 years of prison.  We dined at a Mimi's Cafe in California.  And, YES, they do give a customer that many choices!)

“Would you like wheat, white, blueberry, sourdough, or English muffin with that?”  The pretty waitress was young.  She smiled at me.  This was not the blank face of a female guard or barely-there infirmary nurse.  This was a friendly honest-to-God woman. Extending courtesy.  Showing respect.  Asking me to make what should have been a simple choice between the selection of breads served with the bacon and egg breakfast I ordered.

But I was paralyzed.  My tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth as if someone had filled the space between them with denture adhesive cream.  My face flamed.  A creeping warmth flew up the back of my neck before burrowing its way beneath my hair and across my scalp.  If you asked me which was the most agonizing of my dilemmas, I’d be hard pressed to give you a straight-up answer.  It was all bad.

My first encounter as a social peer with a bonafide member of the gentler sex.  My first personal choice in what would be an avalanche of decisions on everything in my life from here on out.  My first sit-down meal in a public place with metal silverware and crockery mugs, hearing the piped-in elevator music pulsating all around me, feeling the eyes of strangers moving across this table overflowing with family, before settling on me with my #2 haircut and tattoos I couldn’t hide beneath my shirt, sensing something different about me, something indefinable in my posture, the tightness of my shoulders, the way I squared off in my chair as if expecting something more troublesome than a glass of ice water to come my way.  Doubtless at least a few of them realized what state-run facility was situated a mere fifteen minutes down the highway.

I looked up at my sister.  Everything around me had taken on that underwater feeling.  Slowed down. Surreal.  It seemed as if the entire establishment had ceased and desisted.  Of course, everyone continued to clank their glasses, and scrape their forks across their plates, and pay their tabs.  Everyone but me.  

Those final months of waiting, the days leading up to this moment, the last hours of trepidation, they were a solid in my gut, a watery foulness in my bowels, a sour backwash in my throat.  They were a presence suspended in the space between me and this long-suffering sister who chose to have my back for well over two decades. She knew I was stuck.  She knew our doubtful brother observed, weighing it all over his cup of morning brew.  She knew our mother could sense my discomfort and probably felt we should have bypassed this outing so close on the heels of my reemergence.  She knew the kids were awash in the excitement of me and the promise of restaurant food -- what kid doesn’t love eating out, the whole thing of ordering too much, guzzling the chocolate milk, asking for extra syrup?  

“Help me!” my eyes screamed to my sister, my lifeline of the meandering letters and chock full-o-stuff packages.  She of the sustained hope in the face of every uncertainty my entire adult life cast upon her responsible shoulders.  I was every old dog given a shotgun escort behind the barn.  I was the trapped fox ready to gnaw off its foreleg.  Once again, I needed to her to drag me to shore before I sank myself; fear and doubt threatened to shove me under before I could even begin to float.  Here in this bright, clean, totally safe eatery, I was as desperate as I’d ever been as the punk kid on the cell block with unsettled debt hanging over my head and the promise of a knife in the back.  

With a quick smile and an assurance I hoped one day to possess, my big sis grabbed for me.  The waters parted.  My lungs reacquainted themselves with oxygen. “You know,” she said to the cheerful waitress at my side -- a girl so close I could see the fine hairs curling around her ears, could detect the faintest scent of an unfamiliar perfume -- “he’s never eaten here before and the music is rather loud.  What were those choices again?”  The waitress nodded.  For a second time, that crazy long list of breads was recited.  And I took my first wobbly baby step into this new world, “White.  White toast would be good.  Real good.  Th-thanks.”