𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑹𝒉𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒎

Thursday. November 9. 143 days left.

She was early again. He was beginning to think she was always early, that she arrived everywhere ten minutes before the rest of the world caught up, coat buttoned, tea ordered, sitting in the booth like she'd arranged herself there on purpose and had no intention of being moved.

Fayiz was three minutes late because Theodore had decided that 7:51 a.m. was the ideal time to eat a sock. A different sock. A new sock. Fayiz had spent four minutes extracting wet cotton from a terrier's jaw while Theodore growled like a much larger and more threatening animal, and then he'd jogged four blocks in November air that tasted like the inside of a freezer, and when he pushed through the door of The Classic she was already stirring a cup of tea that he would bet his last canvas had been stirred six times already.

"You're late," she said.

"Three minutes."

"Late."

"My dog ate a sock."

"That's not my problem."

"It was a good sock."

Something happened at the corner of her mouth. A twitch. She killed it fast, but he saw it. He filed it away the way he filed away the angle of light on a surface, or the exact shade of blue the harbour turned at 4 p.m. in October, information he didn't know he'd need until he needed it.

He ordered pancakes.

She ordered toast and tea.

Dottie brought both without writing anything down and said "Same booth as Tuesday" and Mollie said "We're creatures of habit" and Dottie said "Sure you are" and walked away before either of them could figure out what she meant by that.

Fayiz ate. Mollie didn't. She pulled her toast apart in strips and left them on the plate like she was performing an autopsy on bread.

"You're not eating," he said.

"I'm eating."

"You're dismantling."

"That's how I eat toast."

"In strips."

"In strips."

"Alright."

She looked at him. He looked at her. And then she ate a strip, deliberately, while maintaining eye contact, as if to say see? Eating. Happy? and he wanted to laugh except he could tell, the way you could tell when a colour was one shade off from right, that laughing would embarrass her. So he went back to his pancakes and said nothing and let the quiet do what quiet was supposed to do in diners at 8 a.m., which was be easy.

It was almost easy.

The thing about Mollie... and he'd noticed this on Tuesday, had thought about it all Wednesday, had stood in front of the useless grey canvas and thought about it some more, was that she spoke in two registers. There was the voice she used for the world: sharp, dry, wrapped in British irony. And underneath it, in the pauses between jokes, in the half-second where her eyes went left before she answered a question, there was something else. Something she guarded like it was the last thing she owned.

He cut another triangle of pancake. Didn't eat it.

Rifa used to say he had two faces: the one he showed people and the one she got when nobody was watching. She'd said it like a compliment, at first. Like being the person who saw behind the mask was a privilege. Later she'd said it like an accusation. I can't reach you. I never could.

And then she'd reached for someone else.

Fayiz ate his triangle of pancake. The memory of Rifa was like the paint in his knuckles... he'd stopped trying to scrub it out. It lived there now. He'd learned to carry it.

"So," Mollie said. "What does a painter do all day when he's not painting?"

He looked up.

She was watching him over the rim of her cup, both hands wrapped around it like she was trying to absorb the heat through her skin.

"Who said I'm not painting?"

"You said your things don't sell. I assumed that implied a crisis of some kind."

"You assumed right." He smiled before he could stop it. "I stare at a canvas. Theodore stares at me staring at the canvas. Then we both stare at the wall for a while and then it's dinner."

She tilted her head. "Must be nice. Having a job where not doing it still counts as doing it."

He looked at her properly then. "You think that's what I do?"

"I think you get to call staring productive."

"And you call organizing coffins productive?"

"Someone has to."

"So does someone have to paint?"

Her fingers tightened around the cup. "No."

He let the quiet sit there a second too long.

"I didn't mean..."

"I know what you meant," she said quickly. Too quickly. "I'm just saying. Some jobs are indulgent."

"And some are survival," he said.

Her eyes flicked up. Met his. Sharp.
"Exactly."

Dottie chose that moment to slam a coffee pot down at the end of the booth like punctuation.

Mollie smiled. Briefly, and mostly into her tea, like she was hiding it there. He counted it anyway. That was two: the twitch earlier and this one. Two almost-smiles in thirty minutes. He didn't know why he was keeping score.

They talked for another forty minutes. About the diner jukebox (she had opinions; he had worse opinions; Dottie turned up the volume as if to punish them both). About weather. About the fog. Neutral territory, carefully maintained. He asked if she liked living here and she said "Liking has nothing to do with it" and he understood that completely.

At 9:10 she stood up and put on her coat and said "Tuesday" the way other people said goodbye.

After she left, he sat in the booth for ten minutes. Dottie refilled his coffee without asking. The jukebox played something loud and optimistic, which was its own kind of crime.

He pulled a napkin from the dispenser and took the pen from his jacket pocket and drew her hands.

He didn't mean to. He told himself that for the forty-five seconds it took to pick up the pen. The way she'd been holding the cup: both palms flat against the ceramic, fingers curled at the top, thumbs overlapping. Small hands. The silver ring on her right index finger that she twisted when she was about to say something honest and then decided against it.

The drawing took four minutes. He looked at it. It was the first thing he'd drawn in weeks that looked like it was alive.

He stared at the sketch longer than he meant to. If he kept drawing her, that would be a problem. The contract hadn't said anything about inspiration.

He folded the napkin. Put it in his pocket with the contract.

☕︎