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Show Inside Out, 202 Cafe was a little restaurant that we had often passed. From what I could tell from the outside, it looked like the perfect place to take her for a fancy lunch. "Fancy," to me, meant a place where waitresses brought you menus instead of you ordering at the counter. My mom had been tickled with the present, and a few days later we had our date. But things started off badly and only got worse. First of all, the hostess seated us at a table that was so sticky that Mom had to ask her to send someone to wipe it. Then, the forks were dirty, crusted with something unimaginable. My stomach sank lower and lower. This wasn't working. She was hating it. I was hating it. It wasn't at all what I had planned. Then the menus came and I froze. I only had enough money for one of us to buy lunch. What was I going to do? I held the menu up in front of my face as tears ran down my nose and I tried not to sniffle, my mind racing. What could I do? What could I do? I was going to have to tell her. I couldn't think of anything else. And then she had gently lowered my menu and wiped at a tear with her fingertip. "You know what?" she said. "This place isn't as nice on the inside as it looked on the outside, is it? And to tell you the truth, I'm really craving a hamburger. Why don't we just go across the street to that Wendy's instead?" I knew she had figured out the truth, but the relief made my knees weak. "OK," I croaked, and we made our way out. On the way across the street she told me a story of a day she had played with a Lladro figurine of her grandmother's even though she had been told not to. And, of course, she had broken it. She told me of how awful she felt, and how her grandmother |