The Girl from Panama

I'm talking with Mike over coffee. His wife recently left him. He's lonely. We're both carpenters, a couple of old guys in baseball caps plying the trade. We can frame a wall and hang a door, we can read a set of blueprints. But when it comes to women . . . I'm thinking about my mother, who is 91 and very frail. I'm thinking about my wife, my daughters, my granddaughter, my sister, old girlfriends, my ex-wife, and the girl from Panama in the reading room of the New Orleans public library forty-five years ago who slipped a note to me across the table, asking: "Are you a philosophy?" Rain splatters against the storefront of the coffee shop. Mike and I are silent for a long time before going back to work.