My honey called me after he finished playing at church to go to our Saturday eat out place; Taco Bell. So I get ready and we head over there. It’s 90 out at 6:30, so I’m dressed lightly. I ask David where he wants to sit and he points to a table that we sit at often, because it’s warm. Other than a backpack and bag piled in a chair, the spot seems deserted. I look around, there’s no one ordering a meal and for all I know it belongs to the person at the next table, but they don’t say anything about someone already sitting there, so we sit down. They don’t take the bags when they leave. That’s when I assume someone has left the bags. About a half hour later, right before we get ready to leave, someone orders food and sits down at the table next to us where the other couple had been. He looks at me, but generally seems disinterested until I get up and start to take the bags over to the ordering counter, because I think someone might miss them and I would want someone to turn them in if I had left something. So the guy asks me what I’m doing with the bags. I tell him I’m taking them to the ordering counter as they appear to have been left behind. He says they belong to him and starts getting pretty loud saying that I should have known that someone was trying to save the table. Perhaps that’s true, but it doesn’t even occur to me that someone would leave their stuff at a table and leave the room – unless they were forgetting the stuff. People normally don’t leave their belongings unattended in public places.
Generally speaking, I’m pretty aware of my surroundings, and he wasn’t in the dining area when we came in. I didn’t notice him until he was ordering at the counter – older guy, hard life, doing the biker look.
I was irritated because all I was trying to do was do the right thing. I have no idea whether those bags belonged to him, but I stifled what I really wanted to say, set them down, filled my drink back up, and left as my husband said, “No good deed goes unpunished.”