CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER
FOUR
A Fifty-Dollar Tip
Aoife
“We accept the love we think we deserve.” — Stephen Chbosky
He came in on a Tuesday, which was the slowest night of the week at Mae's, and sat at the counter because the booths by the window were taken by a couple who had been there since six o'clock nursing two coffees and what appeared to be a very serious disagreement about something they were both pretending was not serious.
The counter was mostly empty. It was twenty past nine and the kitchen was winding down.
He sat down and did not pick up the menu.
He put his hands flat on the counter and looked at them, which is something people do when they have been somewhere difficult and are not yet fully back.
His shoulders were slightly drawn in, not slumped but held, the posture of a man carrying something he has learned to keep very still.
I had seen that look before, on my grandfather after a hard day.
It was the look of a person still inside their own head who has not quite decided to come out.
I brought him coffee without asking because people who are not yet present sometimes need something in their hands before they can arrive.
He looked up when I set it down. He had dark eyes and the specific exhaustion that settles below them when sleep has been inadequate for a long time, not one bad night but many.
For a moment he looked at me the way people look at something unexpected, recalibrating slightly, as if I had entered a frame he had not thought to include anyone in.
"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 manage her 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 her she 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.