38. Priya
PRIYA
Late April. Lavender House, Thursday morning.
The patio tables are back—wrought iron, white paint chipping in its annual layers.
The door is propped open with the ceramic cat doorstop.
The lavender hedge is in full spring delirium, the scent carrying through the open door and into the room where it mixes with the coffee and the cardamom and the warmth of a Thursday morning in a place that has been holding people for over twenty years.
The room is full.
Gerald is at his table with a lavender scone and the monograph. Bea is telling him about her morning. “Pool was closed,” she announces, setting a scone on the counter with more force than necessary. “The pump broke and the whole thing turned green.”
Gerald looks up from the monograph. “Good heavens.”
“Had to do chair yoga instead. In the multipurpose room.” She picks up the cloth and wipes vigorously.
“Forty-five minutes of sitting in a folding chair waving my arms around while a very cheerful young man told me to find my breath. I know where my breath is. My breath is fine. What I needed was the water.”
A beat.
“Janet loved it. Janet is going back next week.” She moves to the machine. “I’m going to find a different pool.”
Miriam is in her armchair. Silver hair, comfortable shoes, the small old book. She is actually reading today, or listening and reading simultaneously, which would not surprise me.
Marcus is at his table with David, who is tall with light black skin.
He’s quiet, and his stillness complements Marcus’s energy.
They are sharing a pastry. Marcus’s laptop is closed.
This is, I believe, the first time in the history of Thursday mornings that Marcus has been present without the chart open.
David’s hand is on the table near Marcus’s.
The nearness is the nearness of eight years.
Deenie and Sasha are at their table. Marguerite, three now, is methodically disassembling a cardamom bun with focused intensity.
Deenie’s hand is on the table. Sasha’s hand is near it, closer than it was in September.
The distance is closing at its own pace, in its own season, and the closing is not my story to tell.
Rowan is in the corner armchair. Hammertime’s whiskered face emerges from the fanny pack, regarding the room with the patient disdain of a hedgehog who has seen many Thursday mornings and finds them all equally beneath his dignity.
Rowan is showing Kim a color palette on their phone for the next hair appointment.
Sam and Lani are at their table, the drafty one by the side window. Sam has her coffee. Lani has her elbows on the table and is reading something on her phone and laughing.
“Look at this,” she says, tilting the phone.
Sam leans in. Their heads are close, six inches, the distance of a shared screen and a four-year friendship and something neither of them has filed correctly.
Whatever is on the phone makes Sam’s mouth twitch.
Lani sees the twitch and her face does a thing I have been watching faces do all year.
The pleased thing. The I made that happen thing.
The summer is two months away. The campus will empty.
The two of them will stay—camps to run, athletes to train, the long days and the quiet evenings of a place that belongs, in summer, to the people who never leave.
I do not know what the summer will do to the six inches between their heads. I suspect the six inches know.
Bea is behind the counter. The La Marzocco hisses. She is the center. She has always been the center.
And we are at the table by the window. Margot and I. The one with the good light, looking out onto the porch and the lavender hedge and the campus beyond.
Margot is reading. I look up from my coffee and she is not reading. She is looking at me over the top of her book with the expression she used to correct before anyone could catch it—the soft one, the unguarded one, the face that is simply love without architecture around it.
She sees me see it. The old Margot would look away. Would go back to the book. Would rearrange her face into something more composed and pretend the moment hadn’t happened.
She holds my gaze. She doesn’t correct it. She lets me see the whole thing.
Then she goes back to her book.
My throat tightens. I go back to my coffee.
The espresso machine hisses. Someone laughs.
Outside, the lavender hedge sways in a small April wind.
The light through the window is the specific light of late April in the Pacific Northwest, arriving after five months of grey and making everything it touches look as though it has been waiting for exactly this.
Nobody looks up.
Nobody looks up because this is Thursday morning at Lavender House and two women at the window table are not an event.
They are a fact. They are part of the room the way the lavender hedge is part of the room and Gerald’s monograph and Kim’s violet hair and Miriam’s armchair and Marcus’s closed laptop and Hammertime’s fanny pack and Bea’s counter and the years of warmth that built this place into what it is.
Two women at a table. One talking. One warming the other’s coffee with her hands. The light falling across both of them, warm and golden, the first real light of spring.
The room holds everyone. The room has always held everyone. This is what it was built for.
THE END… AND THE BEGINNING
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