Free The Wrong Man by Matthew Louis Page A

an aversion to these restaurants. I feel like the mark in a con operation, as if the servers and cooks will be in the back after closing, laughing and slapping each other on the back, eating hamburgers and talking about the fools they lured in and neatly extracted money from. There is something vaguely humiliating about it. The food always seems to answer to a taste I have yet to acquire, the candle light and gaudy music lay the atmosphere on a little too thick to be believable, the waiters seem to be on the verge of smirking, covering their faces and chuckling, at which point the whole facade would go up in vapor and I would stand, snarling, and ask them what the hell they were trying to pull. But the facade never cracks. You are lured in, seated, talked down to, and not until the bill is delivered do you realize how thoroughly you’ve been had.
    Tonight, however, I shut up and played along. The waiter was a slim, middle-aged gay man and I didn’t comment on it. The portions were small and strange, and I ate all the bread in the basket and dabbed the butter from my mouth with the cloth napkin and said how good everything was.
    It wasn’t, in truth, all that difficult with Jill across from me. She had made a job of dressing for the evening, with that pride and resourcefulness that certain girls take in their appearance, and it made me feel like we were on a first date two years ago. Men’s eyes lingered on her as we entered the restaurant and our waiter seemed pleased with her, wishing, I guess, that he could look just like that. Her shirt was snug and scooped low at the neck and her skin glowed. Her makeup was subtle, applied cleverly so a face I had looked at a million times became a brand new distraction.
    With my bruised face and general lack of style I felt like a panhandler she was treating to a meal. I took off my old brown derby jacket, hoping my button down shirt would be somewhat more appropriate. When I hung the jacket on the back of my chair, it hung oddly and the weapons clumped against the chair legs.
    Jill smirked at me. “You got rocks in your pockets?”
    “I’m just happy to see you,” I said, then tried again: “Yeah, rocks. You know, in case the waiter takes too long, I can nail him—”
    “He’d probably like that,” she said, and I laughed. The good humor was slightly forced, but better than the alternative. But her eyes held me and the juice went out of her smile. “So what’s in your pockets?”
    “Nothing.” I shook my head. “Don’t worry about it. ”
    “Okay, then . . . what happened to your knuckles?”
    I looked down. Two of my knuckles were scraped, the middle one bruised as well. I sighed. My mind raced ahead and I knew I couldn’t bring reality crashing down on us right now.
    “The cash register at work,” I said. “You know the little springs on the little metal things that hold the money down? Well you reach in there at the end of the night to get all the bills out, and the end of the spring goes right under your fingernail. Never fails. It gets a nerve under there, hurts all the way up to your shoulder.”
    She was looking at me a little too hard, trying, it seemed, to see around my lie.
    “So,” I said. “When it happened last night I got pissed and punched the edge of the counter.”
    “Sam! You need to control your temper.”
    “I know.”
    “And I’m not even going to ask you what’s in your jacket pockets.” Her eyes glittered. “I’ve forgotten all about it.”
    Our eyes remained locked for several seconds and that look had more meaning than any of the conversation. That look said that we were both here pretending and it was okay.
      It was a relief, that moment of speaking with our eyes. I had been worrying on some level that she was damaged so profoundly she would never quite touch down on the real world again.
    The movie was an idiotic hottest-new-slapstick by a team that had made one genuinely funny movie a few years ago the way a drunken,