A Little Love Story by Roland Merullo Page B

about how best to live out a human life. On that canvas I was trying to show that I loved this blond woman, and admired her, and I think I had accomplished that, or was beginning to accomplish it.
    What probably did not show was that the woman was my mother.
    I studied the canvas for some time, then went into the kitchen intending to clean up the spilled cereal. Janet had cleaned up the cereal and washed the bucket and leaned it in the sink to dry, and, behind the faucet, left a note in a precise printed hand.
Dear Joe Date. I’m sleeping with the governor. Safest sex only. My insistence on that makes him angry. I’ll stop if you ask me out again. If not, then thanks for a kind of weird but nice night. Janet. P.S. The painting is nice. The woman is beautiful .

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    I DON’T HAVE ANY Greek blood that I know of, but I seem to have some mysterious connection to Greek Americans. I don’t know why this is. The ones I’m friendly with have a real appreciation for food and friendship and loyalty, which strikes me as a healthy set of appreciations. Gerard was Greek. And Carmine Asalapolous, my doughnut-making friend. And half a block from my apartment was a loud little breakfast place I liked, Flash-in-the-Pan, which was run by Maria and Aristotle Reginidis, who probably had a few drops of Greek blood in them somewhere.
    I went there that morning, with Janet’s note folded in my back pocket next to my still-damp wallet. For $3.99 you could get two sunny-side eggs with real home fries—the kind with a patchy soft frosting of paprika and oil and browned potato flesh—link sausages you could cut through with the edge of your fork, rye toast with butter, and with marmalade that came, not in plastic packets, but in a glass jar. Good coffee in heavy, thick-lipped cups. The silverware was also heavy, scarred with a million silvery scratches, and if you wanted, you could order a grilled bran muffin on the side, for your health … with a quarter-cup of whipped butter on top of it.
    I liked the cheap framed photos of Greek temples on the walls, and the clean bathroom with un-painted-over graffiti (“U.S. Out of North America Now!” was my all-time favorite) and the fact that Maria and Ari’s beautiful green-eyed nine-year-old girl, Giana, sat at the cash register on days when she didn’t have school, making change with a serious face, like an adult. I liked, too, that Maria and Ari weren’t afraid to have the occasional little marital spat there behind the counter, as if they didn’t need to prove to each other that they had a good thing going on between them. It was the kind of marriage, and the kind of child, I’d hoped to have someday, when I had been planning for a marriage and children.
    “The eggshill bucket is full! But why why why can’t you tik out the eggshill bucket when is full? Why?”
    “See this!” Maria would yell back, decaf pot in one hand, regular in the other. “This is why. What’s more important, eggshell bucket or they get their coffee hot when the cup is empty?”
    “My other wife could do both!”
    Ari had not had any other wife, except in his imagination. They’d shake their heads, mutter in some ancient Kalamata dialect, fuss and fume for a while. Sometimes, rather than sitting there in polite embarrassment, one of the regular customers at the counter would take sides and say something like, “My wife can do both, you know, Maria.”
    “Good,” Maria would say. “Send her in.”
    Half an hour later she’d squeeze past Aristotle at the grill and lay a hand on his aproned ass.
    It was not the kind of food, or the kind of show, you could get in the hotel restaurants, or the chains, where the first commandment was never to seem actually human. Thou shalt not offend the customer’s sensibilities under any circumstances. Thou shalt not laugh or shout.
    The country was going that way, it seemed to me. Political figures got hundred-dollar haircuts and e-mailed their spin doctors to find out how