The Cookie Crumbles
By Audrey W.
Roy DeSoto watched from where he sat at the table as his partner came into the dayroom, a medium brown paper bag in his right hand. Before he knew it, John Gage had dumped a pile of fortune cookies wrapped individually in cellophane packets on the center of the table, then tossed the bag aside.
“What’s this?”
“C’mon man, you know what they are. I need your help before the engine crew gets back from their run.”
Roy once again looked at the pile, before returning his gaze to the younger man. Gage pulled out a chair beside him, sitting in it as he did.
“I know I’m going to regret this, but how am I supposed to be of help?”
John grabbed a cookie, then tore off the wrapper. He broke it open as he explained, “We gotta look at the fortunes inside.”
“I don’t think I wanna know that much into my future, thank you.”
The other shook his head as he read the fortune he’d just gotten out of cookie number one.
“Man, what is goin’ on. . .”
“Well, this is your idea. So if you don’t know, I guess we’re done.”
John shot an annoyed glance his way. “No, the fortune.”
He looked at the small strip of white paper in his hand, then returned his gaze to Roy, with a frown. “The fortune inside. Give to others.”
“What’s wrong with that? I think it’s a good one.”
“Of course you would. You’d be one of those others.”
“That’s true, but I meant because it’s just saying ‘be nice, be kind’.”
“Well, it’s not what I need right now. Roy, lately I’ve been gettin’ the same fortune every time I get one of these on every date I’ve taken a girl to a Chinese restaurant. Every time. I wanted to see if I’d get it here. Now that I didn’t, I gotta wonder. . .am I really supposed to be getting a message? Is there real meaning to these things?” He looked at the cookies and with open arms said, “I need a little bit more of a clue here.”
He remained staring at the pile in thought as Roy finally grabbed a cookie, then broke it open after unwrapping it.
“Let’s see what mine says.”
“Roy, this isn’t about you. This is about me.”
The senior paramedic read what he still considered his out loud.
“You’ll be dragged into a crazy scheme by your even crazier partner.”
John gave him a sour look, then grabbed the paper from the other.
“Give me that. . .”
Roy couldn’t hide the grin on his face. He couldn’t pass up the opportunity to say what he was thinking and blame it on the cookie.
The younger man read what it really said. “Don’t just think, act! See? Even the cookie says you should help me with this.”
“That’s for you, remember? Not me.”
John rolled his eyes. “You don’t get it, do you?”
“Well, maybe if you told me what the fortune you keep getting said, I would ‘get it’.”
The younger man sighed. “First lemme explain, I thought goin’ through a buncha cookies would prove if the fortune I keep gettin’ was valid or not if it didn’t come up here and only when I was with a girl.”
Roy just stared at him a moment before replying, “If you think it matters. What I’d like to know is since when did you start taking dates to Chinese restaurants? I always had you as a hamburger kind of guy.”
“Since I discovered Chinese buffets are cheaper than a lot of hamburger places,” he shrugged. “And on the other, it does matter, Roy! It does!”
“If you’re taking two different dates to the same Chinese restaurant, I think it’s pretty clear what your future will be with them soon.”
Gage rolled his eyes. “It’s not like I’m datin’ two at the same time. Not exactly. I mean, yeah, I’m seein’ um both. But it’s not like any of us has said it’s anything steady. . .yet.”
Roy held up his right hand. “Okay. I’ll try again, then. What does it say?”
“It says--”
He stopped in mid sentence at the sound of the engine crew returning from their run.
Gage got to his feet, scooping the cookies, wrapped and unwrapped, into the bag. “Quick. Help me clean these up.”
Roy rolled his eyes as he complied. They had gotten them all in the sack before the others came into the room.
John started for the doorway that led to the apparatus bay. “I guess I take them back to my locker.”
But instead of getting out of the room soon enough, he nearly collided with Marco, who was leading the rest of the engine crew members through the doorway.
“Where’s the fire?” Chet Kelly teased from behind, peering over Marco’s right shoulder.
John stepped back and aside as the others filed in, Mike being the last.
“What’s all that?” The dark-haired paramedic asked when he noticed Chet and the captain were each carrying a couple of large white cardboard cartons.
Roy looked over with a grin from where he sat at the table. He knew by the smell what they were going to say.
“We stopped and got Chinese take-out for lunch,” Captain Stanley explained as he set his two cartons on the center of the table.
Gage’s mouth dropped open as he eyed the multiple containers now in front of Roy, then the bag still in his right hand. “I don’t believe this. . .” He muttered quietly.
“Okay, everybody work together to get the table set.” The captain eyed the still dumb-struck paramedic. “Don’t just stand there. Grab some forks.”
He nodded as he still stared ahead. What were the odds? *Unbelievable*, he again thought to himself. He held onto that thought as he went to get the forks as requested after setting the bag on the counter, out of the way.
Roy observed his partner’s effort to make the cookies not easily noticed. He, like Gage, had been surprised at the odds this would come about, but the timing was probably going to save him a lot of anguish with the fortune cookie situation. There was no way none of them would see the sack.
As John set the forks on the table, he wondered out loud, “How come you guys didn’t get some of the plastic chop sticks to eat with?”
“Because,” Captain Stanley began, reaching for one of the cardboard containers as he sat in his chair at the end of the table closest to the doorway. “We’re lucky enough to get a meal completed between runs when we eat with regular utensils. No sense in trying to do it with sticks, especially since most of us haven’t finessed the practice in the first place. We’d be lucky to get done by dinner without being dispatched in between.”
The men laughed at his explanation, but had to agree.
Soon they were all seated around the table, the cartons being passed around as each dished out what they wanted.
Gage eyed the open containers, noting what wasn’t inside any.
“Where’d you put the fortune cookies?”
The engine crew all looked at one another, realization on the faces.
“I knew we were forgetting something,” Chet said as he smacked the edge of the table with his right hand.
“You forgot the cookies? Who gets Chinese food and no cookies?”
“Probably the same kind of person who gets the cookies and no food,” Roy offered, a grin on his face.
Gage scowled. “Yeah? Well, I think that guy had a specific reason.”
Marco glanced from one paramedic to the other. “Why do I get the feeling we’re missing part of that story?”
“Because we are,” Chet said. “Care to fill us in?”
Two ‘no’ responses were the result.
“Let’s just eat before the story becomes cold food,” Captain Stanley said, his engineer Mike Stoker nodding in agreement beside him at the table.
Roy glanced toward the counter. Surprisingly no one had noticed the cookie bag after all. But he figured it was best for him if they did, so he suggested to his partner, “You should bring over your batch of fortune cookies when we’re done eating.”
He was about to shush him, when John saw the four engine crew members staring at him, waiting for an explanation and answer to the suggestion.
“I. . .uh. . .I kinda have a few. . .uh. . . .several,” he clarified when Roy cleared his throat at the mention of ‘few’. “Fortune cookies. . .uh. . .over there. . .on the counter. . .”
“I know this is going to seem like a stupid question,” Chet said sarcastically. “But why?”
“Intuition. He just knew in his gut they would come in handy today.”
Gage nodded, a wide crooked smile on his face at Roy’s quick response.
“Bet ya didn’t know I had it in me.”
Chet rolled his eyes. “I still don’t.”
“Gentlemen, can we save this till after lunch?”
Both Gage and Kelly knew that Captain Stanley was basically ordering them to drop their argument before it got started. The two complied.
~*~*~
The men watched as Gage dumped the cookies onto the table.
“Wow, that many, huh?” Mike Stoker asked.
“It’s not all that many, Mike.”
Roy raised his eyebrows, quite in agreement with Mike. John caught his reaction and responded with a ‘stop it’ facial expression. He then quickly gathered up the few empty wrappers he had scooped up with the unwrapped cookies in his earlier haste.
“Uh, we sampled a few,” he explained with a shrug.
“Well, one thing’s for sure,” the captain said. “There’s still enough for each of us to have more than one.”
Chet started to reach across for a cookie when John smacked his hand away.
“Let me pick….no you all go first…no, wait…”
“C’mon, Johnny, do we pick or not?”
“Sure, Marco, just go for it.”
What else could he say?
Each grabbed a couple, leaving four for he and Roy.
“You wanna go next?”
Roy shook his head. “You go. You at least should pick your own.”
“You’re right. I probably should.”
As he selected his two, Marco read his first fortune out loud.
“All the troubles you have will pass away very quickly.”
“That’s a good one.”
He looked at Roy. “It would be if I had any troubles.” He shook his head. “Hope the next one is better.”
Hank Stanley read his. “A person is never too old to learn.” He pursed his lips in thought. “I agree, but I hope this doesn’t mean I’m old.”
“Only as old as ya feel, Cap,” John said.
“Some days I feel older than I am.”
Chet went next. “Distance yourself from the vain.”
“Well, there goes your bowling nights with Johnny.”
“Oh very funny, Mikey,” the paramedic commented. “Very funny. You’re a real Bob Hope.”
“Hey, I thought I was a real Bob Hope.”
“That was last week, Roy,” Gage muttered. “I’m past it.”
The captain snickered. “Okay, ‘Bob’, what does yours say?”
“Live your dream.” Mike looked at it a moment. “First time ever a fortune has been 100 percent right for me. I already am living my dream as an engineer in the fire department. So I guess this means I should stick with it.”
“Now, why can’t I just get one like that?” John asked no one in particular. “It would be so much simpler.”
“Than what?” Chet wondered.
Roy answered before his partner could. “Don’t expect to get an explanation from him. I’ve been trying and I still don’t know much more than I did before you came back.”
It wasn’t unusual for the older paramedic to be dealing with a baffling problem Gage had going in his personal life, so the others weren’t surprised with what they heard.
“I guess it’s my turn now,” John said as he opened the wrapper to his first cookie, wanting to move on before more was said. He broke it open, but it fell into more pieces than he intended. He spread out the slip of paper.
“Ah man. . .”
“That bad?” Mike wondered.
Roy leaned over and read the paper out loud while John glanced around at the four faces staring back at him, a sour expression on his own face.
“The love of your life is right in front of your eyes.”
Gage quickly shot a gaze in his direction. “Hey, don’t read--” but he cut himself off and just as quickly shifted his attention back to the paper. “Man, now I get it? I get this again now?”
“So this is the one you’ve been getting when you’re with either girl you go to a Chinese restaurant with?”
“Yeah, and I wasn’t sure which love. . .uhm girl. . .it was talkin’ about.” He once again glanced at the others still looking on in puzzlement, the men who though he thought of as family in a sense, they certainly would not be a reference for the fortune. Now that he had all of them in front of his eyes, that changed everything.
“I’m obviously back to square one because clearly it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.”
“Well, you know what they say,” Roy teased, sure about what his partner was thinking. “That’s the way the cookie crumbles….”
The others laughed as Gage groaned. “Oh, you’re a real Bob Hope after all.”
Roy then opened his first fortune cookie and nudged Gage as he showed him the words.
The younger man read his out loud, but in an unintelligible mumble that had the others straining to try to figure out what he said. It didn’t matter, they got their answer soon enough.
“You got my fortune?”
Gage crumpled up both his and Roy’s matching slips of paper and tossed them over his right shoulder to the floor behind them. He didn’t need a cookie to tell him he was completely done with Chinese fortunes.
Roy thought about reminding him that the fortunes in these cookies were often vague and did not always mean literally what they said. That his probably meant at some point he had encountered the love of his life, perhaps it being one of the two young ladies he had taken out. But the older paramedic figured his partner had suffered enough anguish over the whole thing, no sense starting it all over again. Some things were better left in the past.
October Picture 2021 Stories by Audrey W.
