When it all goes wrong

"Will you just give me a break," she exclaims in exasperation, "I think I've lost my boyfriend and my job."

She was much too thin, greasy black hair, vacant brown eyes that were misted over, a white tank top with pink bra straps slipping over her shoulders, and cut off blue jeans. A tattoo of Celtic letters were painted in black on the base of her neck matching a circle of them around her left arm. A trampy Olive Oil, chain smoking, was doing everything wrong and someone had called her out on it.

Sarah and I had stumbled in for something to eat after attending the Savannah Singer Songwriter Series on the island.

"Will you please just leave?" she begs her customer and he does.

Everything she does seems to keep getting worse. After giving up rewriting the menu board, she grabs a dollar from the cash register and plays a sad song, very loudly, on the juke box. This ran off another customer.

When the song's over, the only other person in the bar besides us walks to the juke box and feeds it money. Country music blares over the basketball game that's on the television. We watch because there was no way we can hear anything that's said.

The greasy Olive Oil lights another cigarette and cries as she stares into place.

She took our order but never gave it to the cook. When the songs finally finished we tell her.

Everybody has those kind of days. Everything just seems to turn to shit. The harder you try, the worse it gets. Your roof may as well leak, your house have fleas and your car won't start. Broken hearts break a little more, loneliness grows, your best of friends give stupid advice and you just want to cry.

Our food arrives and Sarah asks for napkins.

She rushes, apologetic for the tardiness of our meal, grabs one a Coca-Cola napkin dispensers and places it before Sarah. It's empty.

We leave her a nice tip. There isn't anything else really to do.

And we both throw her prayers. We've had those kind of days.

The prayers may not help.

They sure as hell couldn't hurt.