"It's life."
"It's a waste."
I feel my jaw tighten. "I didn't ask for your opinion."
"No," he agrees. "You didn't. But you have a gift, Monika. Steady hands. A steady mind. The ability to stay calm when someone else is falling apart. Those aren't common qualities. And watching you pour coffee in a diner at two in the morning feels like watching a surgeon scrape dishes."
I should be offended. Part of me is offended. But another part of me—a smaller part, a younger part, the part that stillremembers the barn and my mother's voice and the way it felt to pull Mercy into the world—wants to cry.
Instead, I pick up the coffee pot and refill his mug.
"My father is doing okay," I say. "He's lonely, but he won't admit it. My sisters call him every Sunday, and he tells them he's fine, and they pretend to believe him. I send money when I can. It's not enough, but it's something."
"Your sisters," he says, like he's filing the information away. "What do they do?"
I tell him. About Elena, the oldest, who married a contractor and lives in Ohio and has three kids she posts about on social media every hour. About Mira, the second, who lives in Florida and works as a dental hygienist and sends me postcards of beaches I'll never see. About Lena, the third, who stayed in our hometown and married the boy she dated in high school and works at the hardware store and seems perfectly content to never leave a twenty-mile radius for the rest of her life.
He listens. Really listens—not the way most people listen, waiting for their turn to speak, but the way you listen when you want to understand. When you're building a map of someone in your head, and every detail matters.
I don't know why that makes me nervous. But it does.
"What about you?" I ask, when I've run out of sisters. "Do you have siblings?"
"No."
"Parents?"
"Dead."
"Wife?"
His eyes flicker. Just for a second—a crack in the grey—and then it's gone.
"Also dead."
The word lands between us like a stone dropped into still water. I watch the ripples spread across his face, across hisshoulders, across the way his hands have gone very still around the coffee mug.
"I'm sorry," I say.
"Don't be. It was a long time ago."
"How long?"
"Long enough."
He's not going to tell me more. I can see that—the way his walls go up, smooth and seamless, like they were never down at all. I've learned to read that too, on the farm. The way an animal closes itself off when it's decided you're not safe. The way a creature draws inward, protecting what's soft.
I don't push.
I wipe down the counter instead. I rinse out the coffee pot and start a fresh batch. I cut myself a sliver of the apple pie—the edge piece, the one with the most crust—and eat it standing up, leaning against the pass-through, watching him watch me.
He stays until 3 AM. He doesn't say much after that—just sits with his coffee and his pie and his silence, like he's waiting for something. Like he's decided that this is where he wants to be, and time doesn't matter.
When he finally stands, he leaves a fifty on the counter. Too much. Way too much.
"The pie was forty cents," I say.
"Consider it a tip."
