Late for Switch Board Lessons

My Indian mother cut her braids in the kitchen sink. She collected strainers. They hung on the walls. She couldn't read, but knew how to listen.

Bobby told you I was a switch board once in a Pizzeria, and laughed so I laughed.
You wanted make-up sex even then, didn't you? 

I lay naked on the basement carpet when I'm not on the road. It is scratchy. My thighs have stretch marks. I use nails to scratch ledgers down my arm. I become satisfied with my diligence, perfectly spaced lines. There is much work to be done here.

I drive these roads, these Mississippi bridges and for what?
Tonight, at a truck stop, a Japanese kid tells me to stop wearing make up. She plays with toothpicks. I don't say anything back.

Bobby is a person, I promise you. He likes you. And believe me, I'll mention your teeth. How big and flat they are. You bow your head, and your hair falls forward. I leave.

 The echoes of what things could be sit in the back seat on the way home. It slobbers. It looks at me too much in the eye. Every time I look back, it looks hungrier, increasingly feral. I tell it to stop. It cocks its head and the movement breaks my collarbone. 

Two years later, Bobby will say to me, what a symphony, what a gig you've got here and sit my novel back down.You will be in a coffee shop across town ordering a Latte, killing time before Bobby's  pleated slacks are ready to pick up from the dry cleaners. I will be standing in by foyer, a window shade cutting half my body in the dusk light. Bobby will unzip his fly, invite me into the half bath off the first floor kitchen.

I am looking at my wrist. I was late for something long ago.