Wedding bands

Wow it was actually really good. I really liked the one below a lot better because it has more detail and explains this more. But a couple of things were kind or confusing. I think you should reword or find another way to transition certain parts. The part about the broken glass and Sylvia was kind of confusing. I thought Sylvia was Grey's mother, and I didn't see how there broken glass fit in that scene either. I would just reread it and change a couple things, but other than that it is a really nice story. I felt kind of sad for Sylvia at the end.

Here's the original version of the story. Again, don't feel obligated to read it. It's over about 4 times longer than the other. But if you're curious and want to compare the two, go right ahead.



Every morning was the same. Nine in the morning, black coffee and waffles with fresh strawberries. Same faces behind the counter, same corner booth, sun glinting on the daily newspaper she pretended to read. Sometimes she did read it, if she had nothing better to do. When Grey asked her why she even bought the paper she always said,
“I get more information from the customers, but they won’t tell me anything if they know I’m listening.”
Clover had been with him for five years. His name was Adam Grey and he liked to tell people they were “high school sweethearts” but only when Clover wasn’t listening. The first time he said it in front of her, she stayed at a motel for a week.
“It sounds so childish…like this relationship,” she had snapped. He refused to apologize, so she packed a suitcase and told him that she expected him to call, but he shouldn’t expect her to answer, and she never did. One week later he woke up with her beside him and her suitcase nowhere in sight.
Clover strolled directly to her table, grabbing a copy of The Pittsford Community Voice on the way. Within a couple of minutes, a waitress appeared with a tray saying hesitantly,
“Clover?”
“Hmm? Yes, that’s for me.” Clover took the tray with her breakfast, and waved thanks to the tall man behind the counter.
“Clover Knapp, I’m here every day. How’s your first day going?” She held out her hand to the girl who stared at it for a few seconds, then took it loosely in hers, shook it once, and withdrew.
“Nice to meet you,” she said. “I didn’t make it, Dan did. He said it was for you.”
“Yeah, everyone here knows me. Thanks for the food,” Clover said and returned to her paper. The waitress scurried away to the safety of Dan’s shadow.
The diner, Bruun’s it was called, was nearly empty. Accustomed to being distracted by various soccer moms, suits, and grandpas, Clover instead took in her surroundings. The blue-grey carpet was worn almost smooth in most places. The tiles in front of the counter were chipped and made dull by winter salt and dirt. Pale wooden chairs were scratched and clashed with the dark coloured tables.
But the employees were clean and pressed, the prices high, and the customers eager. The business fronts across the street, seen through the many large windows, were bright and freshly painted, with trimmed shrubbery and shiny black SUVs filling the parking lots.
Her attention was brought back by the ringing bell of the front door and an unfamiliar man walking in. Unlike many patrons, he had no collared shirt and tie, no briefcase. His jeans were patched, and his T-shirt faded, and he wore large black boots. His face was barely wrinkled except for distinct, crinkled smile lines around his mouth, but his short hair was speckled with gray, and he wasn’t smiling now.
He stood in the doorway, one foot forward poised to move, glancing around. He locked eyes with Clover for a second and she hastily gave her attention to her pancakes.
Instead of going to the counter, he hurried to the very back table where a woman in a neat navy suit is already seated. She rose and they greeted one another with a peck on the lips and took their seats. Her hair had more grey, and her face had more lines, but she smiled at him warmly and leaned in as she spoke.
Clover saw there were already two steaming mugs on the table. As the man lifted his he frowned and said something to the woman, who shook her head, putting a hand on her chest. Clover imagined them arguing good naturedly about who was paying, but she saw a glint on the woman’s left hand—a wedding ring. The man also wore a golden band. A married couple then. Maybe after all the argument wasn’t about who’s treat. Did she order him the wrong drink? He sipped it in any case.
At that moment the usual steady stream of patrons began, the air hummed with voices, and the tables gradually filled. Clover listened to the chatty matrons at the next table over compare their children’s latest pranks, and the cracking voice of the young man interviewing for a job which somehow involved both machetes and Tigger—she must have misheard one of those. The waiter Dan came over once to flirt and refill her coffee.
When she returned her attention to the back of the room, the man and woman were no longer seated together, but at adjacent tables, still talking but not looking at one another. Musing that their argument must have been worse than she noticed, Clover left a generous tip and slipped out into the frigid air.

Clover only smoked on Mondays, a habit she picked up from Grey, like her dyed red hair and the dandelion tattoo on her shoulder—it took him six months to persuade her that she wouldn’t mind the permanence. His entire back was tattooed with a maze that led nowhere and his hands always smelled like nicotine or ink (he worked for the newspaper she didn’t read).
She refused to smoke in the winter, but May had rolled around and there was a wrought iron bench behind Bruun’s. At quarter to nine she tapped a single cigarette out of a silver case and leaned into the lighter flame.
Hearing an electronic song from the purse at her side, she held the cigarette between her lips and fumbled through the oversized bag. The screen on her cell flashed Grey and she let it ring while she took another drag on her cigarette. Her engagement ring winked at her and she glared back, then flipped the phone open.
“Yeah?”
“Clover?”
“Yeah?”
“My mom called this morning right after you left. She’s coming to visit in a couple of days.”
A blue convertible pulled up. She wasn’t wearing a blue suit today. The ankle-length pink sundress was almost too bright to look at and the top left little to the imagination. Her arms looked like roadmaps that had been crumpled and then flattened out again. Clover had never seen her wear her hair down before. With the sun shining off of it, it seemed even more gray.
“Clover?”
“Sorry, yeah. I’ll clean tomorrow. I have a job interview this afternoon.”
“Well skip it, will you? She gets her tomorrow.”
Her name was Sylvia, she’d discovered a couple of months after the first time they came in, back in January that year. Platform sandals made her seem longer and thinner—more spare, for all that she would tower over Clover even if Clover weren’t sitting. Then again, she was only 5’2”. Grey was a full foot taller. His first ever present to her, before they were dating, was a pair of stilts. “So you’re a little more difficult to chase, short stuff,” the note on the box read. Her high school girlfriends had all giggled and called her short stuff for the next several weeks.
“I already rescheduled once so I could drive you to the airport,” Clover said. She heard Grey draw breath to fire back and sighed. “I’ll cancel I guess. It’s just entry level. The agency probably wouldn’t hire me anyway.”
“You’ve never worked in real estate sweetheart, and anyway you don’t need to work. We decided that.” When Grey was given his own column on the front page, he had flung open the door and announced that she wouldn’t work a day in her life. The frosted glass pane in the door shattered when the door hit the wall. Clover had been outside gardening in bare feet and when she came in the glass was still there. Grey insisted on driving her to the hospital immediately to have the shards removed. The varnish on the wooden floor was bleached in the spots where she had tried to remove the blood stains.
Sylvia was still standing by her car, twisting the ring on her finger. With a sudden jerk, she pulled it off and put it in her pocket.
“Clover?”
“I’ll call you back,” she said absently, and hung up. Her eyes followed Sylvia into the building. Standing abruptly she nearly lost her balance before she remembered her 3-inch pumps—another gift from Grey.
Their echoed clacking on the sidewalk followed her inside.
For the first time in five months Sylvia was sitting at the same table as the man again—the waiter Dan had told Clover that his name was George. Other than holding The Voice in her hand, she made no semblance of reading. This was the first time she could remember George arriving before Sylvia. She was also wearing a little bit of makeup, and her fingernails were painted red. The blush and lipstick, the dress, the nails; contrasting her usual blue color scheme, she now resembled a walking, talking sunrise.
George still wore his ring. His hair was now completely grey, his jeans had one more patch, and he happened to wear the same T-shirt as the first day Clover saw him. It had a picture of Tigger on it, so faded that he appeared yellow and grey instead of orange and black. They greeted each other with a chaste kiss and conversed affably, as usual. There were two steaming mugs on the table, as usual. George was stoic, Sylvia engaging. Clover nearly laughed at how much Sylvia’s hands were moving as she chattered.
Somewhere in the background the bell jangled. Then the door slammed with an explosion of sound as the glass window in it splintered and fell away. The whole restaurant stopped mid-sentence and stared at their ruined routine, a short, stocky woman in jeans and flowing, flowery top who appeared to be on fire.
Bright red hair crackled almost audibly, in a halo around her head, and her black eyes were hungry enough to consume everything she saw. But she only had eyes for two people. Sylvia and George.
George wasn’t facing the door, but Sylvia had turned dead white and gripped his hand, whispering a few words that Clover thought looked like, “She’s here.”
Clover thought she had never seen anyone stand so straight as that woman. She strode directly to their table, not looking right or left. The resumed hum of voices was almost a whisper.
“How DARE you,” the women shrieked. Clover thought that must be what a banshee would sound like.
“You think I wouldn’t recognize that thing’s car? I sold her that damned car!” She jabbed a finger behind her at the car so ferociously she should have snapped something. Clover sipped her coffee and stared, the newspaper dropped to the table, all pretenses abandoned.
“Oh I’m sure you thought you were so clever,” she spat, “changing locations, switching times. Well congratulations!” Her voice rose again so Clover thought she might shatter more than one window before the confrontation was over. “You made it another five months, I’m sure you were thrilled!”
Sylvia seemed to be trying to shrink to invisibility, arms clasped around herself for dear life, shoulders hunched, leaning as far back in her chair as she could. But her head was high and her jaw clenched as she stared at nothing. George’s face was pale green but he sat as stiffly as his wife stood.
His wife. Everything clicked in Clover’s head and the woman’s righteous anger suddenly seemed so very piteous and futile.
It was May 9th. Grey had gotten down on one knee exactly one year ago. He surprised her with a picnic at the beach. He said “Clover Julia Knapp,” talked about all they had been through together, told her all the little things he loved about her, and said he would be the happiest man in the whole world. It was just like a scene from a movie.
“You make me sick, you little vixen, you shameless home-wrecker,” she turned on Sylvia. “Once a tramp, always a tramp, but one thing’s certain, you don’t age gracefully,” she sneered. She leaned right into Sylvia’s face. “You’re pathetic.”
Sylvia only stared at George, silently. Her hands were shaking visibly as she spread them on the table. He still said nothing.
She stood so fast George’s wife nearly fell backwards, but he automatically reached out a hand to support her back. Sylvia didn’t look back once as she strode out, sandals slapping the ground with a rhythmic thumping, scattering tiny bits of glass when she walked out the door. George took his wife’s hand and stood. He whispered something in her ear.
She slapped him across the face and there was an audible gasp in the room. No one was pretending to talk. She slapped him again, her arm coming all the way around. George didn’t so much as flinch as he saw it coming, but he staggered a little under the blow.
Then she stormed out and he walked out behind her. The remaining customers all stared around at each other, then hastily returned to their own business, as if nothing had happened. Dan taped plastic over the broken door as another new waitress swept away the pieces.
Clover heard her phone ringing again and pulled it out. The screen flashed Grey. She let it go to voice mail.
A teenaged couple walked by and she heard the girl remark, “Does romance even exist at their age?”
When she had finished her waffles with fresh strawberries, and her cold coffee, she left a generous tip, and slipped out into the warm, spring sun. She drove home, cleaned the house, apologized to Grey, and welcomed his mother the next day.
The next morning Sylvia appeared at her table, and George did not. She wore a neat navy suit, and no wedding ring. She came back every day, but now she drank both mugs herself.