I am staring out the window watching the clouds roll in and the construction workers hustle to clean up before the rain comes. There is a row of Jersey barriers that they are moving into place with a hydraulic excavator. The driver is using the bucket to nudge them gently into place and watching it from up here you'd think that the barriers weighed about a pound each. The movement reminds me of having dinner with Martha, in Austin, at the apartment on Leon that she was subletting a room in for the summer.

We went to Central Market to pick out food and then brought it back to her place. We squeezed into the tiny kitchen to make a frittata that wouldn't flip out of the pan because we'd used to many good-bits in proportion to the eggs. Our prized purchase for the evening was a bottle of elderflower presse. The year we lived in England we would frequent a little cafe/bar/restaurant called Cafe Coco. On their cocktail menu they had an elderflower cocktail, which neither of us ordered, but when someone we knew did we would sip theirs with delight. The elderflower presse didn't have alcohol, but we figured it would provide us with a nice flashback to three years ago.

We filled our wine glasses with elderflower presse and sat down to eat. When Martha and I hung out regularly we didn't really need alcohol in order to act like drunken fools--we did it just fine naturally. We pretended we were drinking cocktails and sitting outside at Cafe Coco, even though Cafe Coco didn't have outdoor seating. We were pretending we were sitting outside of Cafe Coco, but we were actually imagining the outdoor seating of that coffee shop we went to only once. When it came time for seconds Martha pretended to be the waiter, dishing more food onto my plate and standing up to grab the bottle of presse. She moved the bottle toward my wine glass and I put my hand over the top of the glass, No more for me, thanks. I've had enough. She nodded and used the mouth of the bottle to push my hand out of the way so she could pour more presse into my glass.

We laughed at the visual of my hand being nudged out of the way by a bottle. Once we stopped laughing I did it to her, in order to refill her glass and we started laughing again. Then we laughed at the idea of a waiter actually doing that. Then we laughed at the idea of becoming a waiter so that we could do it to someone else.

I am looking out the window watching these barriers being nudged into place and imagining myself working at a fancy restaurant and nudging women's hands out of the way as I entice them to have just one more glass of wine.