Unlikely Friendship

The cafe began to feel like her only real home.

It wasn’t that she spent an awful lot of time there, but… at least here there were no looks of pity. Delhia understood… truly she did, but she hated them. Her family was making the house unbearable and they didn’t even realize it. They didn’t listen… They coddled her, smothered her. All in the name of protecting her, but…

And at school, it was worse… people could barely look at her. And if they did, they would blush in embarrassment that they actually met her gaze or looked at her.

It wasn’t as if she were disfigured or anything like that; well, it could have been a lot worse. She was in a wheelchair; sure that wasn’t her plan for life but life didn’t always go according to plan. And she could have died in that accident; like the other driver involved.

She understood the pity; she was feeling rather sorry for the man who had lost control of his vehicle and crashed into her car. He had lost his life. And she was more than sorry for the wife he left behind.

Neither their fault; they both drove below the speed limit. Who could have expected that tree to fall precisely when he drove by, forcing him to swerve and drive on the other lane. She’d braked like a crazy woman, both of them did, but the storm of the previous night had left debris all over the road.

In the end it was the rail that saved her and didn’t him.

She was in a wheelchair, in a cafe where nobody knew her story. He was in a coffin and his wife sat just now with the person she must hate the most in the world. The survivor.

Yet, they would meet every week in this cafe for the next six months, the next six years… both of them feeling it was a better place than their house or work where pity was all they received.

They never spoke of the accident… But they became friends. Delhia was the first to know Cassie had met someone; she was the first to know they were engaged. And she stood – well sat really – by her friend’s side, as her Maid of Honour – when she got remarried.

And throughout this all, the cafe remained their home.

©scolpron2021