Nick
She's narrowing her eyes at me.
I've seen women do a hundred things across a table.
I've seen them laugh, flirt, cry, calculate, lie. I have never once in my life had a woman narrow her eyes at me the way Sadie is narrowing her eyes at me right now. It’s the exact way a mechanic looks at an engine that's running but isn't running right.
She knows I'm holding something back.
I am holding something back. I'm holding a great deal back, because if I told her the full shape of what happened to me in the back of that sedan, she'd be out of this booth and down the sidewalk in under a minute, and I didn't come here tonight to frighten her off.
I came here to sit across from her for an hour and let her look at me. Let her see me.
I keep my hands where they are. I keep my coffee where it is.
I let her work her way through the half-sandwich in front of her, and I watch her mouth at the corner where a small crumb of bread has stuck, and I don't say a word about the crumb, because I have learned in the last twenty minutes that Sadie Jenkins does not want to be told anything about her by a man.
She finishes chewing, swallows, and wipes the corners of her mouth with a paper napkin.
"You’re thirty-seven," she says. "You don't look thirty-seven."
"Thank you." I flicker my eyebrows in a bid to make her smile or laugh. Anything that isn’t this cold assessment of me.
"It wasn't a compliment," she says, and I feel a grin breaking through.
I watch her pick up her coffee in both hands, the way she has been picking it up since it was first deposited on the table. I wonder if she holds hot things with both hands because her hands get cold.
Everything she does, I make a note of. I can't help it. I've been filing since the moment she said my name is Sadie in the back of my sedan.
"Eat your sandwich," she says.
"Sorry?"
"Eat your sandwich, Nick. You ordered food. You're not eating it. It's making me twitchy."
I look down at the plate between us. I haven't touched it.
I haven't been hungry since the accident, frankly, and especially not tonight, because my stomach has been doing a thing all evening that makes me worry it won’t tolerate the weight of any food in it.
But she is watching me now with the same patient steady look she used in the back of the car when she wanted me to let go of her face, and I'm not going to disobey a direct instruction from that look.
I pick up a quarter of the club sandwich and take a bite.
Her shoulders loosen a fraction. I see the exact moment they do, and I understand something about her that the file didn't tell me, which is that Sadie Jenkins watches what is on other people's plates.
She watches whether they've eaten. She watches whether they're steady on their feet.
She has been doing this for so long that she does it without noticing she's doing it, and when a person across from her doesn't eat, it registers in her body before it registers in her mind.
She's a caretaker.
It makes sense. The whole shape of her life is a caretaker's shape. The mother who was a teacher. The career she chose at nineteen, to be a nurse, even though it didn’t work out exactly that way.
The way she dropped out of school to care for her mother.
The first aid kit in the back of her Corolla that I’m sure she would argue was for her own use, and just a happy coincidence it was there when several people needed it most.
I eat another quarter of the sandwich as she takes sips of her coffee.
"What was your mother like," I say.
She goes still and I watch her face and understand, two beats too late, that I have just stepped on something I should have walked around.
"I'm sorry," I say. "You don't have to answer."
"No." She sets her coffee down. "No, I'll answer. I just wasn't expecting the question."
"It’s fine, I'll ask something else."
"I'll answer," she says again, sterner this time.
She is steady on her feet even sitting down, and that is a thing I find I admire about her.
"She was a teacher. She worked most of my childhood.
She had a very loud laugh and a very soft voice and she kept her coffee in the freezer.
She always wore cardigans, and she died when I was nineteen. Breast cancer. She was fifty-two."
"I'm sorry."
"Thank you. My dad followed shortly after. It made sense, they’d been together since they were fourteen."
She looks down at her hands and sighs.
"I want to ask you something," she says.
"Go ahead."
"This morning in the alley you said you couldn't stop thinking about me because I didn't flinch. Tonight you said the same thing a different way. I want to ask you, plainly, if the reason you're sitting across from me is because I’m some kind of novelty to you."
I set the sandwich down and wipe my fingers on a napkin.
I look at her across the table and find that I don’t want to play the long, slow game tonight.
I want her to know, in the plainest sense of knowing, who I am.
She asked me what I do and I told her. She asked me why she's sitting here and I told her. She deserves the rest.
"No," I say.
"Are you sure about that?" she asks. It’s the first time I’ve seen something other than disapproval or sarcastic disbelief on her face. This looks very close to sadness.
"Yes."
"Think about it before you answer."
"I don’t need to think about it. A novelty is a thing you pick up once, and get bored of quickly.
You aren’t a thing I’ve picked up. You’re a woman I saw clearly for less than six minutes in the back of a car, and what I saw was something I didn’t know I needed.
You are the person I have been looking for my whole life. "
The words surprise me almost as much as they do her. I knew I had developed a need to see her again, an urge to make sure she wasn’t some kind of figment of my imagination, or the result of a concussion.
But now I know it’s more than that, and I found out at the exact same time as she did.
She sets her napkin down.
"I need to clear my head," she says as she grabs her coat and bag and slides out of the booth.
I stand while she pulls her coat on, pulling out my wallet and dropping a fifty on the table. She swings her purse over her shoulder and heads for the door.