"Well, well. You two again. What'll it be, hon?"
Charlotte ordered a grilled cheese and tomato soup. Dominic ordered a burger. The symmetry wasn't lost on either of them.
"So," she said. "This is a date."
"This is a date."
"What do people do on dates? I've forgotten. It's been a while."
"I think they talk."
"We talk every Thursday."
"About budgets and showcase logistics. I want to know about you." He leaned forward, elbows on the table. It was casual, none of the polished posture she'd spent six months sitting across from. "Tell me about Lake George."
She blinked. "What?"
"Lake George. You told me about it on our third date — your dad driving your family up in a car with no air conditioning, gas station sandwiches, swimming until dark. I didn't listen. I was on my phone." He met her eyes. "I'm not on my phone."
She looked at the table. At his hands, folded, still. At the phone that was nowhere in sight.
"It was the summer I was nine," she said. And told him.
She told him about the car, a maroon Buick with a tape deck that only played the left speaker. About her dad singing along to Billy Joel with the windows down because the AC had died on the Taconic, and her mom navigating with a paper map because they didn't have GPS and didn’t trust her phone. Charlotte in theback seat with her legs stuck to the vinyl and a juice box she'd been rationing since Yonkers.
She told him about the lake. The cold shock of the water, the green smell of it, how the light came through the trees in the late afternoon and turned everything gold. Her dad teaching her to skip stones. Her mom reading a paperback on a towel, sunglasses pushed up on her head, laughing at nothing.
"We stayed until dark," she said. "We ate gas station sandwiches on the hood of the car and watched the stars come out. My dad said, 'This is the good stuff, Charlie. Remember this.' And I did. I remember all of it."
Dominic was quiet when she finished. He’d been listening intently, with his whole body.
"What kind of sandwiches?" he asked.
She laughed. "That's your question?"
"I want the details."
"Turkey and Swiss. From a Mobil station. The bread was stale, but they were the best sandwiches I've ever eaten."
He smiled. It started slow and moved across his whole face, the one she'd seen for the first time in this same diner weeks ago, the one that made him look like a man she'd never met.
He asked her more questions. They weren’t the questions he'd asked during their engagement — where did you go to school, what's your class size, how do you like the apartment — surface questions, filling-silence questions, questions designed to show interest without requiring attention. These were different.
“What's the worst part of teaching?” he asked.
“The paperwork,” she said. “The bureaucracy, the testing mandates, the forms that multiply like rabbits. But I love the kids. So I endure the system.”
“What's your favorite book?”
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I read it at thirteen and it rearranged my understanding of what a story could do. I’ve read it six times since.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“Elevators,” she said. And then, quieter, “Being invisible. Being in a room with someone who's supposed to love you and realizing they don't see you.”
Charlotte met his gaze. That was the thing she was most afraid of, and she'd lived it. She was sitting across from the man who'd taught her what it felt like.
He didn't flinch. He held it.
