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She exhaled, and it was clear she was too emotional to speak. He knew her well enough to know that she wasn’t about to cry; she was embarrassed and didn’t want to show it. She put one hand on the table and steadied her breathing. Then she said, “Maybe we need to do this later.” She wrapped up the uneaten half of her bagel and stood up.
“But,” he said, “can we just do it now? I mean, why should we have to do it again later, too?”
“Yeah,” she said, and she sounded almost relieved. “I don’t know. Can we just do it?”
Their eyes darted off of each other’s faces like moths.
Ben took a sip of his coffee and nearly winced it was so hot, and she chose that moment to say, “You mean break up?”
“Yes,” he said in a gasp. “I’m sorry, the coffee’s too hot.”
“Fine,” she said, “I’m — relieved.” Her lips were trembling.
“Me, too,” he said.
“All right, I need to run.” She folded her arms together with her bagel dangling from her fingers. And she allowed her eyes to tear up in front of him. “Are you okay here?” she whispered.
“Sure,” he said carefully. And then, assuming that they needed a more formal goodbye than simply “See you later,” he said, “Take care of yourself.” He felt ridiculous for saying it, but then she said something like, “You do the same.”
Then she turned and walked off. At that moment he recalled their first real date when he’d watched her walking away across a different food court to buy him a fruit-seltzer that she’d wanted him to try. And he’d thought in that moment that here was someone who he could confide in. Someone he could tell, just maybe, about the strange things he could do with his mind – reaching out, listening, seeing around corners. Creepy things, right? But he’d never let himself do anything that would hurt anyone’s feelings if they’d found out. He’d never taken personal advantage. And Donna, so he’d thought at that first date, might just be the first real friend he could open up to. But it had never happened with her. That first date, in hindsight, had been a mirage.
He felt a combination of exhaustion, hollowness, and irritation. What had she meant when she’d said, “Do you want to know?” Well, he did and he didn’t, but now he wouldn’t.
He sat at the table, self-consciously eating his bagel, feeling the last few tenuous strands of connection with Donna unraveling and falling away. Then he stood up as nonchalantly as he could and walked out of the SUB and toward the edge of campus to catch the bus to Prader’s. He was halfway there before his coffee was cool enough to drink. They’d done something wrong with the brew, though, and it was too bitter to drink.
~~~
Two elderly couples came in at 11 a.m. to be served. The four of them, at two separate but nearby tables, were the only customers. Ben nearly smothered them with his attention, making unsolicited suggestions for sandwiches and salad dressings until one of the women gave him a look and said, “We’ll need a few minutes, young man.”
After Ben served their food, he wiped down the prep counter and cleaned the fountain drink tray again.
Candace, the on-duty supervisor, was standing behind him with her back to the dining room. She had a textbook open — something about the Renaissance, from the looks of it. Candace was a graduate student in her mid-twenties and had worked there only a few months longer than Ben. His first day at work had been under her. An hour into that first day of work, he’d botched a customer’s order, and botched the apology, too. Afterwards, Candace had taken him aside and told him, albeit in a gentle tone, that if he screwed up like that again he would not last the night. Reflexively, defensively, he had replied, “I’m probably not right for this place anyway.”
To his surprise, she had covered her mouth to stifle a laugh. She’d said, “Well neither am I.”
She was quietly capable and confident as a supervisor. Apparently, everyone deserved to be told the bald truth, in her opinion. That both impressed and intimidated Ben, if he was honest. She had a small store of charm for the customers, but she didn’t lay it on thick. When business was slow, she either disappeared into the back office or pulled a book out and read openly at the counter. One time, Ben had seen the owner, Mr. Glaser, walk by her as she was reading, and he hadn’t even reacted.
Ben slipped the drink tray back in the cradle and looked around for something else to do.
“Don’t you have class work?” Candace asked without looking up from her book.
He tossed his rag onto the prep counter. “Didn’t bring anything with me.”
She looked up at him and then back down at her book. She was reading microscopic print next to a painting of a robed man standing on a rocky ledge. The man had his chest out and seemed to be shouting.
“Art history?” Ben asked.
Candace nodded.
Ben looked at the caption under the painting – “Saint Francis in the Desert” by Giovanni Bellini.
“Deadly boring class?”
Candace exhaled. Ben gleaned a paragraph of meaning from the exhale. His question was a cliché, for one. Sure, doltish students who took Art History typically complained of boredom, but Candace didn’t care whether the subject was typically considered boring. She appreciated art, found the study of paintings stimulating, found reading about them stimulating, found talking to knowledgeable and open-minded people about them stimulating. Ben had disappointed her, as most people did. It was quite an exhale — complex, adorable, formidable, and potentially promising. It wasn’t a “go away” exhale. He decided to try again. Nothing to lose.
“Do you like Bellini in particular?”
Her right eyebrow and the right side of her mouth rose microscopically. “What do you know about him?”
“Nothing,” he admitted, and then felt a small jolt of self-approval for owning his ignorance.
She nodded.
He said, “What can you tell an open-minded-but-not-knowledgeable person about him?”
She looked at him and screwed up her mouth. Then her eyes shifted past him and she said, “Table four.”
The man at table four asked for a cinnamon scone and two forks. Ben filled the order and then went back to at the end of the counter where Candace had moved. She’d put her book face down by the dairy refrigerator and was counting the milks and cream cups. She held a pencil between her teeth. Her pronounced cheekbones were slightly ruddy with acne scars, but otherwise her skin was smooth. She had what Ben considered a perfect nose and attractively light-lidded green eyes. By the standards of Arizona, she was pale. She wore her hair pulled into a nondescript bun. But the bun paid her the compliment of an attractive neck line in profile. Ben had not been blind to her before, but he was in a strange place today, just now. His nerve endings were wide open, his senses unguarded. He felt like talking, too, and he felt capable of talking interestingly, which was not always to be counted on. And maybe if he talked he could avoid the geeky urge to stare, moony-eyed.
As Candace finished her count and wrote numbers into the ledger atop the refrigerator, he said, “Let’s play ‘non sequitur.’”
She gave him a skeptical glance.
He said, “The USS Arizona was commissioned in 1913. Same year the crossword puzzle was born.”
“Trivia?” Her tone was clipped, but her green eyes were engaged.
“Where were you born?” he asked.
“Why?”
“It’s part of the game.”
Her gaze dared him to back down. When he didn’t, she said, “Alright. Millersville, Pennsylvania. What does that mean to you?”
“Near Lancaster, Amish country. At age 14, an Amish boy leaves home to experience the outside world. It’s a tradition called Rumspringa. It ends either when the boy returns to be baptized or chooses life outside the Amish.”
She nodded. “You’ve read the Cliff’s Notes on Lancaster County, I see.”
“No,” he said, missing the joke at first then realizing it a second later but deciding not to backtrack. “I watched a documentary. Now your turn.”
About Patrick Kelly Joyner
