Sun In Her Hair – Chapter 3 – Coffee Number Six

I went back to the park on Saturday. Told myself it was for the walk.

She was there. 

Different bench, same girl, same railing crisis apparently ongoing.

 I didn’t sit down right away – stood near the coffee cart pretending to read the menu I already had memorized, giving myself an exit if this turned out to be a one-time thing that only worked because neither of us expected to see the other again.

“Six today?” she asked, without turning around, like she’d clocked me before I’d finished pretending not to be there.

“Two, actually. Showing restraint.”

“Progress.”

That was it. That was the whole invitation.

 I sat down on the far end of her bench, leaving enough room that a stranger could’ve read it as coincidence, and somehow that became the pattern.

 Saturday, then the following Tuesday, then a Thursday that wasn’t really a coincidence at all.

I learned things the way you learn things from someone who isn’t performing for you – sideways, out of order, mixed in with instructions to a three-year-old.

 Her name was Avery. 

It took two visits before I heard it, and I’m not going to pretend it didn’t do something ridiculous in my chest, hearing an actual word instead of her, like I’d finally been handed the right file after months of guessing at the contents.

The girl was Cindy. Three and a half, which Cindy would tell you herself, unprompted, several times an hour, in case you’d forgotten in the last ten minutes.

Other things came slower.

They’d moved here a few years back. No family nearby. 

She used to read more before Cindy, and missed it in a low-grade way she seemed almost embarrassed to admit, like wanting an hour to herself was some kind of character flaw.

Her husband came up occasionally.

My husband has a car.

My husband works Saturdays.

We moved here for his job.

Nothing dramatic. Nothing offered as evidence.

I collected it anyway.

I told her what I did for a living, and watched her eyes do the thing everyone’s eyes do at parties, if I’d gone to parties.

“IT,” she repeated. “So you fix things.”

“I keep things from breaking, mostly. Less glamorous than fixing.”

“And the eyes?” She gestured vaguely at my face. “Occupational hazard?”

“Industry standard. They issue us the red eyes at orientation, along with the beard.”

“Mandatory beard?”

“Highly encouraged. Something about looking trustworthy to servers.”

She laughed properly at that, head back, and Cindy looked up from the railing like she wanted in on the joke despite having no idea what it was.

I didn’t mention that I’d seen her before the coffee cart. There are facts that become stranger the longer you’ve waited to disclose them.

That one was already getting strange.

I didn’t ask about him. That felt like the one rule I hadn’t been told but understood anyway.

What I noticed, without meaning to catalog it, was how much lighter she got by the second coffee.

 Not performing lighter – actually lighter, like the park was the one part of her day nobody needed anything from her.

I liked being the reason.

Or at least part of it.

More than I should have.

By the third week she’d started asking where I lived, in the offhand way people ask when they’re mapping you onto their own routine without admitting that’s what they’re doing. 

I told her – first floor, the building on the corner, the one with the blinds that never fully close because the guy who lives there can’t be bothered.

“That’s the one with the blinds always half up?” she said. “I walk past there every day.”

I said something noncommittal. My heart did something considerably less noncommittal.

The next morning, quarter past eight, I was at the desk like always, coffee like always, and I heard them before I saw them – Cindy’s running commentary on something, getting closer.

I looked up at 8:15, same as I had for months, except this time she looked back.

Not the accidental glance of someone glancing at a window because windows exist. She looked straight at the glass, found me exactly where I was, and smiled — the real one, the one from the park, not the polite stranger version I’d gotten the first day.

I lifted a hand. Barely. Just enough.

She kept walking.

I sat there with my coffee going cold, staring at the place she’d been.

For months, I’d known exactly when to look up.

Now she did too.