Side By Side

On Saturday Spouse and I sat down to dinner with a friend. It might have been a simple affair, but six years had passed between gatherings- our various jaunts around the country had seen to it that such meetings could not easily be orchestrated.
We greeted our friend inside the restaurant, and ate and talked and clung stubbornly to our table late into the evening, long after every spoon and scrap had been removed, and in spite of the waiters silently but fervently imploring us to stand up and go elsewhere so that our place might be given to others.
We had more, many more words, but ones that would have to wait. Soon, we said, then strode across the parking lot to our respective vehicles. The lot was vast, with endless lines of shadowy wheels sandwiched together.
It turned out that at least two of those cars were aligned in a particularly fortuitous and telling way: we were parked side by side.