Chapter 16
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
Twenty-One Weeks
Aoife
I saw him the moment he came through the door.
I was carrying two plates to table seven and I looked up and there he was, standing inside the entrance to Harrington's in his suit and his jacket, looking at me with an expression I had not seen on him before.
It was not quite the careful composure he usually carried.
It was something closer to relief and something closer to apprehension and some combination of both that did not resolve into anything I had an immediate name for.
He looked like a man who had been looking for something for a long time and was not yet sure what to do now that he had found it.
I thought: no, very clearly and very quickly, and then I completed the delivery to table seven and smiled at the couple there and asked if they needed anything else, and I walked to the kitchen and I stood at the pass and I breathed.
Glen said, "You okay?"
I said, "Fine, yes, sorry." I picked up the next order. I went back out.
He had sat down. He had chosen a table in my section.
I took the order at the next table. I topped up coffees at the table after that.
I was aware of him watching me with an attention that did not waver, and I managed this for some time by the simple method of finding urgent tasks at every other table in the section.
He caught my eye on my second pass. He looked at me steadily, and there was something in his face that was a request, not a demand, something that understood it might not be granted. I looked through him and moved on.
He came back the next three days.
Monday he sat in my section and I did not serve him.
Tuesday he arrived at the beginning of the shift and sat at the counter and I was aware of him for the full four hours before he left.
He did not push. He did not approach me or create a scene.
He sat there with the patience of someone who had decided he was going to be present until being present meant something, and when his shift at a table was over he left without incident, and I watched him go from the corner of my eye.
Wednesday he sat at the counter again. When I passed with a tray he said, "Aoife, please." Very quietly. Just those two words.
I stopped. I looked at him. He looked back at me with an expression that was not asking me to forgive him and was not performing remorse and was not doing anything calculated.
It was simply the face of a man who was here and who knew why he was here and who was waiting for me to decide what to do about it.
He looks like he has been waiting for a long time, I thought.
And he has probably earned that wait and more.
But not in the middle of a Wednesday shift at Harrington's.
I said, "I'm working," and I moved on.
He left. I watched him go. Then I went to the kitchen and I told myself that the feeling in my chest was not grief and not longing but simply the memory of both, and that memory was something you could manage.
The Monday he did not come in, I was twenty-two weeks pregnant and I had an appointment with Dr. Mehta on the Wednesday.
Dr. Mehta sat across from me with her quick eyes and her direct manner and told me that my blood pressure was reading at 148 over 96 and that she wanted to discuss something called preeclampsia.
I sat in the appointment chair and I listened carefully to everything she told me, and I asked the questions I needed to ask, and I wrote down the information she gave me in the small notebook I brought to every appointment.
I looked at the notebook after she finished and I thought about the daycare and Harrington's and the deliveries and the rent on Alderton Street.
I'll manage it, I told myself. I'll cut the deliveries. I'll figure it out.
Three weeks later I fell down on a Sunday pavement in the middle of August, and the managing came comprehensively undone.