“You look nervous,” I told him. “Is everything OK?”
“Sure.”
“Are you sure? Because as soon as I mentioned the doctor, your expression changed.”
It was odd. Lucas was normally so relaxed, and I hadn’t seen him show any particular concern over Monica. But now I knew what had happened to the baby that he had thought was his for so long, so I thought there might be something else there.
Stirring his coffee, he said, “Here’s the thing. I wasn’t happy when I found out I was going to be a father. I wasn’t ready for anything like that, and I didn’t know how to face it. But everything changed whenClaudia did her third ultrasound. That’s when I started thinking of him as my son, and in that moment, I began to love him. He became the most important thing to me.”
“Do you still think of him?”
“Sometimes.”
“I’m so sorry you had to go through something like that,” I told him.
“Me too.” He exhaled and then his face lit up as he pointed at the box of pastries. “Cream or chocolate?”
“Chocolate!”
He stuck around for a while, sometimes observing the customers as they trickled in, other times staring at my shorts or the neckline of my shirt. I tried to swat him away when he made it too obvious and smiled at Lola, one of our regulars, who was Spanish, too, and stopped in sometimes just to chat. She was inquiring about something, and I couldn’t quite hear her, so I asked her to repeat it, and slightly impatiently, she said, “I was wondering if putting aspirin in water really helps your roses last longer.”
“Honestly, I don’t know…” Lucas slid his hand into my shorts just then. Lola couldn’t see it, but that didn’t make me any less nervous. “We’ve got a product though. If you use this, your roses will easily last for two weeks.”
I passed her a little packet, and she asked, “Is this the same one I took for my carnations?”
“I think so.”
“Well, they sure as hell didn’t last two weeks.”
“Got it,” I said. “Maybe I should call Monica and ask her.”
When Lucas’s finger tugged at the seam of my underwear, I stomped on his foot, and he whimpered softly, pulling away. Lola asked him if he was all right, and he told her, “Yeah, I’ve got a bunion. It’s killing me.”
“Oh, you should get that operated on,” she said. “I had them on both feet, and getting them taken off changed my life. Maya, just give me the preservative you were talking about. But I think I’m going to try the aspirin thing, too.”
I rang her up and handed her a receipt, then ran out from behind the counter to hold the door for her. As she said, “Bye,” I turned and scowled at Lucas. “You’re acting like a child!”
He giggled, walked over, grabbed my wrists, and wrapped my arms around his waist. “Aren’t you getting bored here?” he asked me. “The minutes are just creeping by.”
“I’m not a busy bee like you. Anyway, nobody’s forcing you so stick around,” I replied.
“Ouch.”
Looking at the clock, though, I saw it was time to close, and I pulled away from him and started cleaning up. He sat on a stool and stared at me as I did so. Then he asked, out of nowhere, “How come you never say goodbye?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that: You never say goodbye. You never even wave. At most, there’s a teeny-tiny movement of your lips when someone else says it.”
“I never realized,” I confessed.
“I don’t buy that. You know, because you get tense right when you’re supposed to do it. You’ve been here for months now, and I’ve never seen you say goodbye to anyone.”
I hung the CLOSED sign on the door and lowered the blinds that covered the glass, asking myself when Lucas had gotten to know me so well. When he’d started picking up on those details no one else noticed.
“I just don’t like that word,” I said. “I don’t like what it means, what it implies… I don’t know. It’s so…absolute. Definitive.”
“Definitive?”
