Meals on Wheels Month Ten

“Who are you!?” the small, furiously smoking woman in a red windbreaker shouted at me just as I sat back in the open hatch of the Prius.  She had been pacing along the edge of the lot when I pulled in and froze, fixing a tilted stare at me as I double parked and prepared the car for the food containers.  She had the aspect of a strange, frothing dog as it stares at you just before charging.  Had I invaded her territory?  Why was she now sallying across the lot, arms pumping akimbo, like a billowing Mississippi steamboat reaching upriver at flood-tide through the Cairo bend?

“Who are you!?” she shouted out again, now in mid-stream.

“Meals on Wheels,” I answered with my best non-threatening tone.

“Oh, ah, yes, eh? - meals on wheels? – well, what the hell are you doing here?” she asked as she hove to squarely in front of me, the glowing ember depending from her thin, tight blue lips measuring the degree of exertion during the crossing; her face surrounded by the resultant blue haze.

 
“I’m waiting for the van that brings the food here so I can load it into my car and deliver it.  You’ve seen that white church van here before, no?”

“Oh, ah, yeah, I seen it here.  So what are you doing sitting here like that?” 

“Thinking and waiting,” I said softly, in my best hostage negotiating voice.  “Thinking and waiting.”

I was thinking of being double parked, assailed by an apparition and breathing the same smoke that just issued from the creature’s palsied lungs.  I was thinking about why I am here still doing this project every first Thursday of the month.  I don’t need this.  I don’t need to interact with this wasted person with her squeaky rasp and unattractive face and her gross pollution of my aesthetic.  Why should I care about some ugly, smelly, shuffling, bent old piece of human garbage like this?

“Oh!, right! yeah, Meals on Wheels, yeah, that’s a real good thing – my mom used to get that before she died of emphysema,” she said softly, her entire persona changed.  “It really made her feel good to see you guys come by – made her so as not to feel so lonely – took some of her pain away.  Yer a good guy for doin’ that, ya know.”

“Oh, ah, yeah, thanks,” was all I could stammer back.
 
She smiled a dark tooth at me, turned and shoved off slowly, the steam all out of her.  As she joined the others walking and smoking the lot, I thought about what an ass I was to think I could make a judgment about someone’s depth based on appearance alone.  You’d think I’d learn by now, so I hereby firmly resolve not to do it again until next time.
 
The white church van came in.  I’ll wait for it here next month, too.