Under the Red Roof
The door bell chimes you into a time that still knows your name. Air warm with butter and oregano, carpet the color of ketchup, and those Tiffany-style lamps that drip stained-glass pizza slices over red vinyl booths. A hostess flips a metal number stand onto the table like it’s part of the ritual. You sit where the light makes little mosaics on your forearms.
The red plastic cup—pebbled, immortal—arrives sweating cola and ice that crackles like a tiny crowd. On the table: the Parmesan snow shaker, the red-pepper confetti, a stand that lifts the pan so the pizza can be admired as if it were a science fair project. In the corner, a tabletop arcade blinks Ms. Pac-Man dots into eternity; two quarters wait under someone’s palm like fledgling planets.
You pretend the salad bar counts as virtue: iceberg like lake ice, fluorescent carrots, bacon bits with ambitions. Ranch says forgive yourself. Back in the booth, the pan lands with a skillet hiss that rearranges the air. The crust is a buttery ring with its own gravity. Pepperoni cups hold constellations of oil; you tilt the slice to spare your shirt and let it rain on the black pan like weather that chose you.
Conversation is easy in this century: whose turn it is to grab extra napkins, who can fold a triangle without losing toppings, how many books you read for the BOOK IT! button that still lives in a junk drawer somewhere. A dad at the next booth negotiates peace with a pitcher of soda; a team of kids in grass-stained socks high-five around a pie like it’s a trophy that happens to be edible.
You know this menu by heart—Personal Pan as love language, Breadsticks as truce—and you know the choreography: slice, blow, bite; sip, ahh; pass the cheese like communion. The lamps hum. The jukebox slips a slow classic between hair-metal and an upbeat thing no one will admit liking in ten years. Out the window, the red roof turns the dusk a little warmer than it has any right to be.
When the check arrives in its black folder, nobody rushes. There is time to trace the sweating ring left by the cup, to press a straw wrapper into a paper accordioned snake, to look at your people and decide that memory is sometimes a choice you make while things are still happening.
On the way out, you pass the claw machine that never forgives and the poster for a Tuesday buffet that feels like a field trip. Cold air greets you as the door shuts, and the smell of butter hangs on your jacket like a souvenir that isn’t tacky. The night outside is ordinary. The night inside comes with you anyway, hot pan and red light and the sound of a bell that still knows how to welcome.
