Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls(45)

I’d later learn that her name was Mrs. Dunston, a towering, dough-colored pyramid of a woman wearing oversize glasses and a short-sleeved linen blazer. Behind her came a man I guessed to be her husband, and after looking up at the menu board, she turned to him. “A latte,” she said. “Now is that the thing that Barbara likes to get, the one with whipped cream, or is that called something else?”

Oh f*ck, I thought.

“I can do a latte with whipped cream on top,” the young woman behind the counter said. She was fair and wore her shoulder-length hair pushed behind her ears. Tiny moles were scattered like buckshot across her face, which was bare but for a bit of eyeliner. “I can do one with flavors too.”

“Really?” Mrs. Dunston said. “What sorts of flavors?”

In the end she settled on caramel. Then her husband squinted up at the board, deciding after a good long while that he’d try one of those mocha something or others. And could he get that iced?

As I groaned into my palm, he wandered off. His wife, meanwhile, leaned her bulk against the counter and began her genial interrogation. “Are you from this area?” she asked. “No? From Vermont? Well, that’s interesting. What brought you here?”

I learned that the coffee person used to work at the town’s other hotel, which had recently closed for remodeling. “So after it’s done, will you stay put or go back over there?” Mrs. Dunston asked. “Me, I have a son at the college, so that’s what I’m doing, just checking in. He’s my second boy, actually. The first one went here too. He’s not working in his field yet, but with unemployment as high as it is, he’s lucky to have anything at all. If I’ve told him that once, I’ve told him a hundred times, but, of course, being young, he’s impatient, which is natural. Wants to set the world on fire, and if it can’t happen by tomorrow morning at nine a.m., then life’s just unfair and hardly worth living. What about you? Did you go to college?”

It’s one thing to be jolly and talkative—my mother was that way. A dry cleaner, a gas-station attendant: no one behind a counter or cash register was spared the full force of her personality. The difference between her and Mrs. Dunston is that my mother had a sense of her audience—not just the person she was talking to but others around her who were listening in. “I can see you’ve got a line,” she’d have said at some point, or, “Look at me, monopolizing all your time.”

She’d also have made her chatter more compelling. In my mother’s version, the underemployed son would sleep each day until dusk, possibly in a dank basement, with the leg of a dismembered child in his mouth. She spoke in a voice that addressed everyone and invited them to join in. Mrs. Dunston, on the other hand, was simply loud. Loud and just as dull as she could be.





After what felt like weeks, the young woman finished with the orders. Two cups the size of wastepaper baskets were placed upon the counter, and then Mr. Dunston reappeared and pointed out the plate-glass window toward a cluster of grim buildings on the other side of the parking lot. “What are those?” he asked.

The young woman said that they used to belong to the college. “Of course, that was before they expanded the west side of the campus.”

“And when was that?” Mr. Dunston asked. He was a good ten years older than his wife, midsixties, maybe, and he wore a baseball cap with a tattered brim.

“I beg your pardon?” the young woman said.

“I said, when did they expand the west side of the campus? Was it recently or did they do it a long time ago?”

WHO THE HELL CARES? I wanted to shout. WHAT ARE YOU, THE OFFICIAL HISTORIAN OF WHO-GIVES-A-FUCK COLLEGE? DO YOU NOT NOTICE THAT THERE’S SOMEONE IN LINE BEHIND YOU? SOMEONE WHO’S BEEN STANDING HERE ROCKING BACK AND FORTH ON HIS GODDAMNED HEELS FOR THE LAST TEN MINUTES WHILE YOU AND THAT BRONTOSAURUS RUN YOUR STUPID MOUTHS ABOUT NOTHING?

I was this close to walking away, to marching off in a huff, but then Mrs. Dunston would have turned to her husband and the girl behind the counter, saying, “Some people!” I’d gotten a similar reaction the previous morning, when I’d squeezed past a couple standing side by side on the moving walkway connecting concourses A and B. “In a great big hurry to meet that heart attack!” the man had called after me.

I wanted to remind him that this was an airport and that some of us had a tight connection, if that was okay. But, of course, I had no connection, tight or otherwise. I just couldn’t bear to see him and his wife standing side by side, blocking the way of someone who might have a tight connection.

The Dunstons’ bill came to eight dollars, which, everyone agreed, was a lot to pay for two cups of coffee. But they were large ones, and this was a vacation, sort of. Not like a trip to Florida, but you certainly couldn’t do that at the drop of a hat, especially with gas prices the way they are and looking to go even higher.

While talking, Mrs. Dunston rummaged through her tremendous purse. Her wallet was eventually located, but then it seemed that the register was locked, so the best solution was to put the coffees on her bill. That’s how I discovered her name and her room number: 302.

My only question then was what time I should arrange her wake-up call for. Let’s see how chatty you feel at four a.m., I thought.

Then it was all about returning the wallet to the purse and getting that safely zipped up before taking her drink off the counter and starting in on her long good-bye.