"Thank you," he said. His voice was low and careful, the voice of someone who measured what he put out into the world.
"The menu is there if you want it," I told him. "But you don't have to decide anything yet."
Something shifted in his expression briefly, something I could not name. The tension in his jaw loosened just slightly, as if the sentence had given him permission for something. Then he looked down at the coffee and said he would have eggs and toast, please.
He ate perhaps a third of the eggs and none of the toast and drank two cups of coffee and looked, throughout all of it, like a man attending to the fact of being in a room rather than enjoying the experience of it. When I brought the check he looked at it and then at me.
"What's your name?" he asked.
I told him. I watched the brief familiar pause as he processed the spelling against the sound, the slight adjustment of expression, the small effort to resolve it.
"Aoife," he said. He did not get it quite right but he was closer than most managed on a first attempt, and he said it as if he genuinely wanted to say it correctly rather than as if he were simply moving past an inconvenience. Something about the care of it caught me off guard.
"That's right," I said.
He left a fifty-dollar bill on a six-dollar check and was out the door before I could say anything about it. I stood at the counter and looked at the money for a moment and then I looked at the door, which had already closed behind him, and I thought with the particular clarity of a person who has learned to manageher own expectations carefully, that I would probably not see him again.
He came back the following Tuesday. He sat at the same seat at the counter. He did not need the menu.
?
He came back every Tuesday for a month.
I learned things about him in the incremental way you learn things about a person who volunteers very little. He took his coffee black. He was not a late eater by preference but by circumstance, which meant his days ran long. He worked somewhere that required a suit, which he wore well in the way that men do when they have been wearing suits for long enough that they stop being a performance. He walked from the direction of the park four blocks north.
He asked me questions in the way that people do when they are genuinely curious but have forgotten how to make conversation easily, in small careful increments. He asked about the daycare on the third Tuesday, after I had mentioned it in passing while refilling his coffee. I told him about the children and he listened with a quality of attention I was not accustomed to, leaning forward slightly, his hands loose around his cup. He was not waiting for his turn to speak. He was actually listening, which was different enough from my usual experience of being listened to that I noticed it and kept going longer than I had intended.
On the fourth Tuesday, Simone was finishing her shift when he came in. She passed behind me on her way to collect her coat and said, very quietly, directly into my ear, "Who is that and why does he look like that?" I told her he was a regular. She paused. She looked at him and then at me with the specific expression she reserves for things she finds worth examining. She said, "He's looking at you like you're the only thing in the room and you are actively pretending not to notice." I told hershe was imagining things. She gave me the look she reserves for statements she finds beneath response and left.
I was not pretending not to notice. I was simply being careful. He is just a Tuesday-night regular, I told myself. You are his waitress and that is a perfectly fine thing to be.
?
He asked for my number on a Tuesday near the end of the month. He said it plainly, without preamble or performance. "I'd like to have your number, if that's all right with you."
I looked at him for a moment. He met my eyes without any of the anxious energy that sometimes accompanies that kind of asking, not nervous, just present, his face open and waiting to see what I would say.
I wrote it on the back of his check. He folded it and put it in his jacket pocket, and the corner of his mouth lifted very slightly, not quite a smile but the possibility of one, something that was not there before and was there now, and then he left his usual fifty on a seven-dollar tab.
Simone texted me at eleven that night. She said: "Did tall-dark-and-sad finally make a move?" I told her he had asked for my number. She sent three responses in quick succession. The first was a series of exclamation marks. The second asked what he did for work, which I could not answer. The third said: "Be careful, Aoife. He has a whole thing going on behind those eyes. I can't tell what kind of thing yet but it's a whole thing."
I read her messages and I put my phone down and I lay in my bed in the apartment on Carver Street and I looked at the ceiling. I know, I thought. I can see it too. But I am so tired of being careful all the time.
CHAPTER
FIVE
What He Takes
Jensen
Idid not entirely understand what I was doing, in those first weeks at Mae's Diner. I know what I told myself I was doing, which was that I needed somewhere to go on the evenings I left the cemetery, somewhere that was not my house, which had begun to feel, in the second year, less like a monument and more like a tomb I was choosing to live inside. The diner was warm and lit and uncomplicated. That was all I wanted from it.
That was what I told myself.
The girl with the unpronounceable name was not part of the plan. I noticed her the first night because she brought me coffee without being asked and because when I looked up and thanked her she smiled at me and looked away almost immediately, without the performance of warmth that I had learned to identify as professional rather than genuine. She had a genuine smile, the kind that reaches the eyes before the mouth and retreats a half-second before it has fully arrived, as if it belongs to a person who is not entirely sure it is welcome.
I went back the following Tuesday because the diner was warm and the coffee was good. By the fourth Tuesday I was aware, with a clarity I found unwelcome, that the diner was warm and the coffee was good at a number of establishments between my office and the cemetery, and that I was not choosing any of them. I was choosing this one.
