"My mother..." Fayiz began. "...used to call me every Sunday."

Mollie's eyes moved from the cup to his face, and he could feel the weight of her attention, the same way he could feel the weight of light on a canvas, the way it changed everything it touched.

"Every Sunday," he said. "Seven o'clock. She'd tell me what she was cooking. Who in the family was sick. Which cousin had married which wrong person. She'd ask if I was eating and I'd say yes, even when I wasn't. She'd say you're lying, Fayiz, I can hear your ribs. Which doesn't make sense. But she said it every time."

She was completely still. The funeral-home stillness, except warmer. The stillness of someone who was listening with her whole body.

"She doesn't call anymore."

"How long?"

"Three years."

He said it simply. It sat behind his teeth like something unswallowed. Most days, he could speak around it. Some days, like this one, he felt it shift when he opened his mouth.

She didn't say I'm sorry. She didn't tilt her head or make a sympathetic sound. She looked at him across the table with something that wasn't pity and wasn't sympathy and was closer to recognition... the specific, ugly, hard-won understanding of someone who knew what it felt like to lose a person. Whether that person was alive or dead didn't change the mechanics of it much. The phone still didn't ring.

"Charlie," she said, "would have liked you."

She said it fast, like she was getting it out before she could change her mind. Then she picked up her tea and drank it, and the moment closed the way a good painting closed. Cleanly. Completely.

• • •

Dottie materialized with a coffee pot and a look on her face that meant she'd been listening from behind the counter for the last five minutes and was pretending she hadn't.

"Refill?" she said.

"Please."

She poured. Slowly. The way someone pours when they're buying time.

"Forty-three years," she said. "Forty-three years I've watched people sit in booths and talk about things they should have said a lot sooner." She set the pot down. Looked at Mollie. Looked at Fayiz. "You two are doing fine."

She left.

Mollie stared after her.

"Does she do that often?"

"More than you'd think. She once told me I was holding my fork wrong and it was 'affecting the atmosphere.'"

Mollie snorted. The real one. The involuntary one. The one she'd clapped her hand over the first time and that now escaped with only a wince, like she was learning to let it happen.

Across the diner, Saoirse dropped a menu. Picked it up. Dropped it again. Disappeared into the kitchen.

"You've broken her," Mollie said.

"I haven't done anything."

"That's the problem." She gestured at his face. His whole face. "It's a public safety issue."

He laughed. A surprised laughter that started in his chest and climbed. He didn't try to stop it. She watched it happen, and her eyes softened, just a fraction, just for a second. A flash. Gone before you could file it.

But it had been there.

• • •

They finished breakfast. Saoirse cleared their plates and managed to say "Have a good day" directly to Fayiz's left ear.

She glanced at Mollie then, just once. Not hostile. Just curious. As if trying to understand what Mollie was, and why she got to sit in the booth with him.

Mollie bit the inside of her cheek.

Fayiz looked at the door.

At the door, Mollie wound her scarf, three loops, folded twice, and said, "Thursday."

Then, quieter: "Thanks."

"For what?"

She looked at him. Looked at the booth. Looked back.

"For not asking."

He nodded. She left. The bell rang. The cold came in and the door closed behind her and he stood there for a second watching the empty space where she'd been.

Dottie appeared at his elbow.

"She's got a brother," Dottie said. Quietly.

Fayiz didn't answer. He thought about verb tense. About the way Mollie used past like it was safer.

"Maybe," he said.

Dottie was quiet for a long time.

"That explains a lot," she said. And went back to the counter.

Fayiz walked home along Water Street with the fog on his face and her brother's name in his head. Three years of Sundays without a phone call. She hadn't said I'm sorry for that either. She'd just looked at him and understood the mechanics of it.

Charlie.

He didn't know what had happened to Charlie. He didn't know anything except the way she said the name, and what that kind of saying cost, and the face she'd made when she went somewhere he couldn't follow, young, open, briefly unguarded, the way a painting looked in the last hour of drying, before the surface hardened and stopped changing.

At the studio, Theodore was asleep on the good cushion. The scarf was on the hook. The canvas was on the easel, the green mark from last week still cutting across the grey.

He stood in front of it.

Picked up a brush. Mixed ochre, warm, the colour of cardamom, the colour of home, the colour of the tea she wrapped both hands around every morning like it was the last warm thing on earth.

He made a stroke beside the green one. Ochre next to green. Two colours on a grey field.

It was terrible. It was also, somehow, the most honest thing he'd painted in a year.

He put the brush down. Looked at Theodore. Theodore opened one eye. Assessed the canvas. Closed the eye. This was, Fayiz had learned, the closest Theodore came to approval.

One hundred and seven days.

☕︎