Chapter 6
The Little Things
Daniel had never thought of himself as an observant man.
His sister said he was oblivious. She said it fondly, usually while handing him a baby. His students said he was the kind of teacher who forgot to take attendance and then knew, in the middle of a lab, that Marcus was missing and had gone to the bathroom to avoid a conversation. His father said he got it from his mother. Your mom could tell what you'd had for lunch by how you closed a door.
So it was an odd discovery, in the first week of December, to find that he knew a great deal about a person he had met four times.
He knew she was left-handed, though she used the right for scissors. He knew that she held a pen the way people do who learned to write in a hurry, with her thumb wrapped over the top. He knew that she pulled her sleeves down when a conversation turned to something that might ask her to explain herself. He knew that there was one kind of laugh she gave to be polite, short and bright and a little high, and another that she hardly ever used, low, with a catch in it, as if it surprised her every time.
He knew that she always arrived at Ruth's at 5:20. He knew that she stood in the doorway for exactly one second before coming in, with her hand flat on the glass, like a swimmer feeling the water.
He did not know why he had noticed any of this. It was only that he had a feeling, listening to her talk, of paying attention for the first time in a long while to somebody who made the effort worth it.
It was a Tuesday. The tenth. Outside Ruth's it was snowing, a thin gray snow that did not settle, and the windows had steamed over so that the street was only a smear of orange. He had come early. He had told himself that it was to get the good table.
At 5:15 he went to the counter.
"Chai," he said. "Oat milk. Extra hot. With honey, not sugar."
Mia looked up from the espresso machine. She raised her pierced eyebrow, very slowly, to its full height.
"Is that for you?"
"It's for a friend."
"I know who it's for." She looked at him for a moment. Then she said, in a flat voice, "Two minutes," and turned away, and he heard her mutter into the milk, "It's about time."
"What?"
"Nothing."
"What's about time?"
"The weather," said Mia, and gave him a smile of such sweetness that he took a step backward.
He paid. He found, in the pocket of his coat, a small brown paper bag that he had been carrying for three days. He had bought it on Saturday at a stall on Water Street, on a whim, from an old man who sold things in jars. It held six thin glass straws, filled with honey, sealed at the ends with wax. They were the kind children had in the old days, he supposed. They were the color of tea.
You have lost your mind, he told himself.
He put the bag on the table, by her place, and turned it over so that the writing was hidden. Then he sat down, and pretended to grade.
She came in at 5:20.
He saw her in the glass before he saw her. She stood in the doorway with her hand on it, for one second, in a dark red coat, with snow in her hair. Then she came in, shaking it off, and pulled down her scarf, and looked round, and he saw her face find the corner table and stop.
The mug was on it. Steam was rising off it. It was a blue one, with a chip.
"It's already here," said Sarah.
"Mia did it."
"I didn't order."
"I may have," said Daniel, "mentioned it."
"You may have."
"I got it wrong, probably. I said extra hot. I might have said oat. I couldn't, I kept thinking it was soy. I'm very sorry."
"It's oat."
"Is it?"
"I can smell it." She was looking at the mug. She had an odd look. She took her coat off, slowly, and hung it on the back of the chair, and sat. She picked up the chai in both hands. She breathed it in. "It's the right one."
"Good."
"Why did you get it?"
"Because it was snowing."
"That's not a reason."
"It's my reason." He shrugged, uncomfortably. "I thought you'd be cold. I didn't want you to have to wait."
She said nothing. She turned the mug once in her hands. The little bag was on the table at her elbow, with its fold of brown paper, and he saw her eyes go to it. He wished, suddenly and completely, that he had thrown it in the river.
"What's that?"
"It's nothing."
"It's got my, it's by my seat."
"It's a, I was in a stall. I thought of, honey. It's a very silly thing. They're not, you don't have to."
She opened it.
She did it carefully, with her thumbnail, and shook the straws out onto the table. They rolled and clinked, six of them, small and gold in the lamplight. Each had a bit of white wax at the tip. She picked one up and held it against the light. It glowed.
"It's honey," said Daniel. "It's the old man said it's from clover, and from a place near Dunmore, and you just, you bite the end off, and you can put it in tea. Or you can, I think you can just eat it. It's meant for children."
"They're beautiful."
"They're a bit, I know. You don't have to like them."
"Daniel."
"Yes?"
"I'm very touched," said Sarah.
She said it plainly. She was holding the glass straw in two fingers, and her face had gone very quiet. She did not look at him. She looked at the honey, and the wax, and a drop of it caught at the tip, and she bit the end off with her front teeth, with a small crack, and stirred it into her chai with the straw.
She took a sip.
She closed her eyes.
"That's very good," she said, after a moment, in a small voice.
He did not trust himself to say anything. He bent over his papers. He wrote B+ on a lab report, in green ink, and underlined it twice. It was Marcus's. It deserved an A. He did not notice.
"Why green?" said Sarah.
"What?"
"You always write in green. Why not red?"
"It feels mean." He looked up. "A kid gets a paper back with red on it, he thinks, I've done something wrong. He doesn't read it. He sees the red. And then he's, it's a, I don't know. I just think green's friendlier."
"That's very good teaching."
"It's the laziest kind. I bought one pen and never changed."
"It's not lazy," said Sarah. "It's kind."
"It's cheaper."
"It's kind," she said again, with great firmness, and he gave up.
It was a thing she would not have admitted to anyone, but she had begun to keep a list.
She did it in her head. She had no pen for it. It was only that, over the next week, as December went by and the snow came and went, a sort of private catalog began to accumulate in a back room of her mind. Small things, odd things, that she had noticed about a man. She did not ask herself why. She only stored them, as a person stores string.
He tapped two fingers on the table when he was thinking. He did not know he did it. It was a quick, soft, uneven beat, like a very small horse.
He said okay before bad news. She had noticed it twice. Okay, he said, and took a breath. The thing is. It was a way of getting a running start.
He could not whistle. He did try. It was dreadful. It came out as a long wet hiss with a note in it, like a kettle with a cold, and when she laughed, he gave up and hummed instead, a wandering tuneless hum, a quarter tone flat, that went on under his breath while he graded.
He had small scars on his hands. A white one across his left thumb, from a bicycle chain. A line of tiny ones on the back of his right, from some old fight with a wire brush. He never hid them. He used his hands when he talked.
He never looked at his phone while she was speaking.
That was the one that she had trouble with. It was such a small thing. She had almost not noticed. But on the Tuesday before Christmas, a week after the honey, she was telling him a long, tangled, rather pointless story about the library's holiday party, and a cake shaped like a book, and a very fat man who had eaten the title, and halfway through she found herself looking at his face.
He was not waiting.
He was not looking for the place to come in. He was not looking at the clock, or her mouth, or his own hands. He was just listening. He had his chin on his fist and his eyes on her face, with the quiet, absorbed expression of somebody reading a good book, and he was, in the lines round his eyes, already beginning to smile at the part that had not happened yet.
She stopped.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing."
"You stopped."
"I lost the, I forgot what I was saying."
"The man ate the title."
"Yes."
"And then?"
"And then," said Sarah. She stopped again. Her throat felt strange. She cleared it. "And then nothing. It was a, he said it was a very good cake."
"I'd like to have been there."
"You wouldn't. It was dreadful."
"I'd have liked to see the man."
She picked up her chai. She drank. She did not know what was wrong with her. There was an odd, loosened, warm ache under her ribs, and it had nothing to do with the tea, and she was in no way ready to look at it.
Mark never does that, she thought.
It was only a thought. It had no edges. It was a plain, quiet observation, like noticing that a window was open. It slid in, and she did not know how to make it go out.
Mark waits for me to finish.
She put the mug down.
That's not the same thing.
She said it to herself firmly, in the pale kind voice she used on children. Mark listens. Mark remembers. Mark brought a hundred sunflowers. She said it again. She believed it. She was sure that she believed it. It was only that, in the long moment before she picked up the story again, she had the oddest sense that she had seen something very large through a very small door.
He gave her the mug on the twentieth.
It was the last Friday before the holiday, and the library's party was over, and she had stayed late to stack chairs. At six she walked to Ruth's in the snow. He was already there, at the corner table, with a plain paper bag on the chair beside him and a look of deep unease.
"Before you open it," said Daniel, "I'd like to say it's not a big thing."
"You say that every time."
"It's usually true."
"I got you one too."
"You what?"
"It's small."
"You didn't have to."
"You first," said Sarah.
He took out the mug. He held it a moment, in both hands, as one holds something that might go off. It was white, ordinary, large, of the sort sold at those stalls where they print a joke on whatever you like. On the side, in plain black capitals, it said:
GUS SAID TWENTY MINUTES.
And under it, in smaller type: (He lied.)
She looked at it. She looked at it for such a long time that he began to talk.
"It's a, I had it made. There's a place on Water Street. They do it in a day. I don't know if it's, it might be too much. It might sound as if I'm making fun. I'm not. I just thought it was a, it's a philosophy. I said so. I thought you'd like to have it somewhere. At work, maybe. If you don't want it at home."
"I want it at work," said Sarah.
She said it before she knew that she had thought it.
There was a short silence. It was a strange one. It went on a beat longer than it should have. They were both looking at the mug. She felt, for no reason at all, the color rush into her face, and she understood, with a sharp dismay, what she had just said. She had said work. She had said it fast, and gratefully, in a small relieved voice, as a person says it who has been given a thing that she would have to hide.
He had heard it too.
He said nothing. He looked at her, over the top of the mug, with an expression that she could not meet. It was not hurt. It was something quieter. It was a look of understanding, careful and gentle and a little sad, as though he had picked up a coin and found it very old.
"Work's a good place for it," said Daniel.
"I think so."
"People'll need it. There's a lot of, there's always a repair guy."
"There's always a repair guy."
"I'll open yours," he said, and took the little box out of her bag before she could hand it over.
It was a pencil case. It was black canvas, with a zipper, and inside were twelve pencils in a rubber band, a pink eraser in the shape of a fish, and a note card, folded once. She had written on it, in her tidy hand:
For your crossword heresies. Please use the eraser sparingly. —S.
He took out the fish. He held it up in the light, between finger and thumb, and began, helplessly, to laugh. He laughed until he had to put it down. His shoulders went. A man at the next table looked round. He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, and said, "It's got a face. Look. It's, it has a little eye."
"I know."
"It's judging me."
"It's meant to."
"I'm going to keep it forever," said Daniel.
She smiled at him. It was a full, sweet, silly smile, and it went all the way up, and she did not try to stop it. He looked at it. For a second, there was nothing in his face at all but that, and then he picked up his own mug, and drank, and looked out of the window at the snow.
She took the white mug to the library on Monday.
She put it on the shelf behind the circulation desk, between a stapler and a jar of paper clips. She turned it so the writing faced the wall.
Tessa found it by ten.
"Gus said twenty minutes," she read, slowly. She had a coffee in one hand and a stack of overdue notices in the other. "He lied." She looked round the side of it, at Sarah, with her large dark eyes. "Who's Gus?"
"My dad's mechanic."
"And who gave you a mug about him?"
"It's a joke."
"I'm sure it is." Tessa put down the notices. She leaned on the counter, with her chin in her hand, and regarded her with that long, comfortable, patient look. It was the look of a woman who has been waiting a very long time for the end of a sentence. "You've been smiling at your phone for a month."
"I haven't."
"You do it in the staff room. You do it in the bathroom. Joy saw you do it in the stacks. You've got a little face you make."
"I haven't got a face."
"You've got the face." Tessa tilted her head. "Sarah. I'm not going to say anything. I love Mark. I do. He's a very nice man. He sent me flowers when my grandmother died." She was quiet for a moment. "I'm just saying that I haven't seen that face in three years. And I'd like to know who it's for."
"It's a friend."
"Okay."
"It is."
"I said okay."
"It's a friend, Tessa. His name's Daniel. He's a teacher. He's got a dog. We talk about, it's nothing. It's not, I'd never."
"I know."
"I'm with Mark."
"I know you are."
"Then why are you looking at me like that?"
"Like what?"
"Like you're sorry for me."
Tessa did not answer at once. She picked up the mug. She turned it in her hands, so that the black letters came round to the light, and she read it again, silently, with her lips moving. Then she set it down with a very small click, in exactly the place where it had been, with the writing out.
"I'm not sorry for you," she said gently. "I'm just glad you've got a place to put it."
She went away to find the notices.
Sarah stood still behind the desk. After a time she picked up the stapler, and put it down. The mug stood beside it, white and plain and ordinary, with its black joke. It was only a mug. She had not meant it to be anything.
She looked at it for a long moment.
Then, very slowly, so that nobody would see, she turned it round again, and faced it out.