First Munch

We sat in the car with the engine off and watched the door of the pancake house like it might change its mind about us.

“Ten minutes,” Joel said. He checked his watch, then the door, then me. “We can still leave.”

“We’ve been able to leave the whole time we were deciding to come.” I had my hands on my bag. The strap was twisted. I fixed it, then fixed it again. “If we leave now we just drove forty minutes to sit in a lot.”

“That’s a perfectly good use of a Tuesday.”

A woman went in wearing a fleece and carrying a tote. Nobody looked like the pictures in the books. That should have helped. It didn’t, quite. The sign in the window was about a breakfast special that ended at eleven. It was seven.

Joel drummed once on the wheel and stopped himself. “Name tags,” he said. “They said name tags. I didn’t bring a pen.”

“They’ll have pens.”

“Right.” He looked at the door again. “You don’t have to do this for me.”

“I’m not.” I meant it. I also wanted him to be the one who got out first. He didn’t. I counted the cars. Twelve. A truck idled at the far end and then went quiet. “Joel.”

“Yeah.”

“If we sit here another ten minutes I’m going to start making a list of what we’ll say if anyone asks what we do.”

He made a small sound, almost a laugh. “Dental office. Books. Riveting.”

“Exactly.”

He opened his door. The cold came in off the lot, fryer grease under it from the vent. “All right,” he said. “We go in. We have coffee. If it’s awful we leave after one cup.”

I got out before I could organize a better plan.

The back room had plain booths and plain tables and a coffee urn on a folding table by the wall. Someone had taped a paper sign to the door frame that said PRIVATE PARTY in marker. A man in a cardigan handed me a sticker and a marker.

“First name’s plenty,” he said. “Or whatever you want on there. Coffee’s hot. Pancakes if you want them. No speeches.”

I wrote Karen. Joel wrote Joel and pressed the sticker crooked on his sweater, then peeled it and put it straight. I watched his hands do that and felt the old want come up, sharp and stupid: let him stop checking. Let him decide the sticker was fine.

We took a booth. The vinyl stuck a little to the back of my coat. A waitress who clearly worked the front brought coffee in thick mugs and didn’t ask what the party was. I was grateful for her in a way that felt outsized. Joel ordered pancakes because the man with the stickers had said we could. I did too. Blueberry. Something to do with a fork.

Across the room a man with a gray mustache was explaining a turnout to two people who looked interested on purpose. “You wire the frog separately or the whole thing shorts,” he said. “I’ve got a loop in the basement that runs the mail train on a timer. Wife says it sounds like a hamster. I say it sounds like a railroad.”

Joel leaned toward me. “Model trains.”

“I heard.”

“This is not what I pictured.”

“What did you picture?”

He thought about it with his mug halfway up. “Fewer railroads. More people who knew what they were doing.”

“We know what we’re doing,” I said, and then didn’t believe it, and drank the coffee so I wouldn’t have to fix the sentence. It was burnt in the way diner coffee always is. Fine. Ordinary. The least charged room I had sat in since last spring, when I had finally said the thing out loud at our kitchen table and watched Joel go still, then thrilled, then pale. We had read everything after that. Forums. Books with clinical diagrams. None of it had prepared me for syrup.

A woman slid into the booth across from us without asking. Sixty-something, short gray hair, a fleece the same blue as the one that had gone in ahead of us. Her sticker said Bernadette in block letters. Behind her, a man with a quiet face and a name tag that said Lou took the chair at the end of the table and nodded once, like he’d already been introduced.

“New,” Bernadette said. It wasn’t a question. She looked at Joel’s straightened sticker, then at my hands on the mug, then at the way we were both sitting too upright for pancakes. “Which one of you is scared you’ll be bad at it?”

I raised my hand. So did Joel. We did it at the same time, and the foolishness I’d been afraid of landed, and then it didn’t crush anything. Bernadette laughed once, short.

“Good,” she said. “The ones who aren’t scared are the ones I don’t sit with. Lou, tell them the train man isn’t the weird part.”

Lou buttered a pancake he hadn’t ordered. Someone must have brought it on a plate meant for the table. “The weird part is thinking you have to perform it,” he said. His voice was low enough that I leaned in. “You don’t. You have coffee. You go home. You figure out what you actually want when nobody’s watching.” He cut the pancake and didn’t look at us while he said the rest. “I’ve been doing this thirty years. Most of it looks like Tuesday.”

Bernadette pointed her fork at Joel. “You. Walk with me to the urn. I want a refill and I want a word without an audience.”

Joel glanced at me. I almost told him to go, almost managed the evening the way I manage a front desk. I kept my mouth shut and nodded at my plate instead. He went. I watched them stop by the urn, her back to me, his head tipped down. She talked. He listened. Once he started to answer and she held up a finger and he stopped. Lou ate. The train man moved on to couplers. I could not hear a word of what Bernadette said, and when Joel came back he would not give it to me.

“Well?” I said.

“Coffee’s still hot.” He sat. His sticker had curled at one corner. He left it.

“That’s not what she said.”

“No.” He cut a piece of pancake and didn’t eat it. His ears were pink. “I’m not repeating it.”

“Joel.”

“Ask me at home if you want. Or don’t.” He met my eyes, and for a second the careful man was still there, apologizing in advance. Then he didn’t apologize. “She told me one thing. It’s for me. You don’t get to file it.”

I should have minded. I minded a little. Under that, something in me unclenched, because he had kept a thing on purpose.

Bernadette came back with two full mugs and set one in front of him. “Eat,” she told both of us. “You look like you’re waiting to be graded.” She sat, stole a blueberry off my plate, and launched into a story about a munch in ’09 where the only drama was a man who insisted on wearing boots to a place with no-boots floors and had to eat in his socks. Lou didn’t add anything. He didn’t need to. He passed Joel the syrup without being asked, and Joel took it, and for a minute nobody performed a single thing.

We stayed through the pancakes. Joel asked the train man one question about the mail loop out of actual curiosity. I talked to Bernadette about shift work and bad coffee and nothing else that mattered, and that was the point. When we stood to go she squeezed my wrist once, friendly, done.

“Don’t make it a project,” she said. “Lou, we’re taking the long way. I want the pie they won’t admit they still have.”

They went toward the front. We went out the side door into the lot. The cold had sharpened. Our car sat under a light that buzzed. Joel was quiet the whole walk. I matched his steps and did not fill it. That cost me. I usually fill it.

At the passenger side he stopped. He did not reach for my door. His keys were in his hand and he didn’t use them. I waited, bag on my shoulder, already lining up the drive, the heat, what we’d say on the way, whether I’d ask about Bernadette again and how I’d ask it so it didn’t sound like a quiz.

“Get in the back seat of your own head,” he said. His voice wasn’t steady. He heard it and didn’t sand it down. “Stop organizing tonight. I’ve got it.”

It was a terrible sentence. The back seat of my own head. I almost laughed, and the laugh snagged, because he meant it, and because he was standing between me and the door I would have opened myself.

“That’s not how a back seat works,” I said.

“I know.” He looked at the keys, then at me. “It still stands.”

I let the strap of my bag slide off my shoulder into my hand. I didn’t fix it. “Okay.”

He put the keys in his coat pocket. Then he took my face in both hands. His palms were cold from the lot and then not. I had time to see the light on his forehead and the crooked sticker still on his sweater. He kissed me. Not the careful kiss from the kitchen, not the one that asked if the timing was decent. Harder than he had in years. I kissed him back and got a hand in his hair, and his other hand found my wrist and held it there against his chest, over the coat, nothing more than that. My bag bumped his leg. Neither of us fixed it.

He pulled back far enough to talk. His breath showed. “When we get home,” he said, “you’re going to go upstairs and wait, and you’re not going to tidy anything.”

I looked at him. The want sat right under my ribs. “All right.”

He let go of my face. He opened the passenger door. I got in. He shut it, walked around, and started the car. The heater blew cold, then less cold. I looked at the dashboard, at the little lights coming on, and tried not to smile.

I didn’t manage it.