"She doesn't anymore," the woman said.
"Do you know how I can reach her?"
The woman looked at me for a moment, unhurried, her expression giving away nothing. Her eyes were steady and sharp. "No," she said. "I don't."
She was lying. I was certain she was lying, with the certainty of a man who had run negotiations for fifteen years. She had decided before I finished my sentence that I was not going to find out from her.
I left. I came back the following Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that, and each time the woman behind the counter told me the same thing with the same expression. On the third Tuesday a younger woman was finishing her shift as I arrived,collecting her coat from behind the counter. She looked at me and something passed across her face before she arranged it into something more neutral. She knew who I was. She had been told. She looked back at me with an expression that was not unfriendly and was entirely closed, and she did not say anything, but the look lasted long enough to say what she needed it to say.
It took me four months to find her.
?
It was a Sunday afternoon in early spring. I was on the other side of the city after a meeting that had run over and I was walking, needing the air, and I turned a corner and saw, through the window of a diner called Harrington's, a woman carrying three plates with the specific balance of a person who has done this a thousand times.
I knew her immediately. I knew her before I had processed the details, in the way you know someone whose movement is familiar to you. I stopped on the pavement. She was in the diner uniform, her dark hair pulled back, moving between tables with the brisk efficiency of someone managing a full section. And I could see, even through the window, that something was different about her.
She was showing. Not dramatically, but visible, the gentle rounding beneath the apron, and I looked at it and felt something arrive in my chest that I could not name precisely, partly guilt and partly something more complicated that landed with a weight I had not anticipated.
I could also see, watching her through the window, that she was tired. The hollows under her eyes were visible from fifteen feet away. She had lost weight in a time when she should have been gaining it, and she moved with the efficiency of someone who does not have the luxury of moving slowly. The smile she gave to a table near the window was the practiced smile ofsomeone who has learned to produce it on demand regardless of what is happening underneath.
I stood there for a moment. She is working this shift because of me, I thought. She is this tired because of me. She is doing this alone because of what I said and did and left on her table.
I went in.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Twenty-One Weeks
Aoife
Isaw him the moment he came through the door.
I was carrying two plates to table seven and I looked up and there he was, standing inside the entrance to Harrington's in his suit and his jacket, looking at me with an expression I had not seen on him before. It was not quite the careful composure he usually carried. It was something closer to relief and something closer to apprehension and some combination of both that did not resolve into anything I had an immediate name for. He looked like a man who had been looking for something for a long time and was not yet sure what to do now that he had found it.
I thought: no, very clearly and very quickly, and then I completed the delivery to table seven and smiled at the couple there and asked if they needed anything else, and I walked to the kitchen and I stood at the pass and I breathed.
Glen said, "You okay?"
I said, "Fine, yes, sorry." I picked up the next order. I went back out.
He had sat down. He had chosen a table in my section. I took the order at the next table. I topped up coffees at the table after that. I was aware of him watching me with an attention that did not waver, and I managed this for some time by the simple method of finding urgent tasks at every other table in the section.
He caught my eye on my second pass. He looked at me steadily, and there was something in his face that was a request, not a demand, something that understood it might not be granted. I looked through him and moved on.
He came back the next three days.
Monday he sat in my section and I did not serve him. Tuesday he arrived at the beginning of the shift and sat at the counter and I was aware of him for the full four hours before he left. He did not push. He did not approach me or create a scene. He sat there with the patience of someone who had decided he was going to be present until being present meant something, and when his shift at a table was over he left without incident, and I watched him go from the corner of my eye.
Wednesday he sat at the counter again. When I passed with a tray he said, "Aoife, please." Very quietly. Just those two words.
I stopped. I looked at him. He looked back at me with an expression that was not asking me to forgive him and was not performing remorse and was not doing anything calculated. It was simply the face of a man who was here and who knew why he was here and who was waiting for me to decide what to do about it. He looks like he has been waiting for a long time, I thought. And he has probably earned that wait and more. But not in the middle of a Wednesday shift at Harrington's.
I said, "I'm working," and I moved on.
He left. I watched him go. Then I went to the kitchen and I told myself that the feeling in my chest was not grief and not longing but simply the memory of both, and that memory was something you could manage.
