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“Cat got your tongue?” the manager asked the girl.
“Love?” her husband prompted. “You need anything? The man’s asking.”
Their daughter shook her head and slouched further into herself, not looking up at her father or the manager.
“Aw, don’t hide that smile, how about—”
This, at last, broke her.
“I think we’re all set,” she interrupted with a brittle cheerfulness, eyes fixed dark. “Don’t let us keep you.”
The manager seemed to register her existence for the first time. A tightness rippled barely visible underneath his skin. She thought immediately of a fisherman on a riverbank, torn out of blissful casting by the realization his line was snagged in a tree he hadn’t noticed was so close behind him.
She pressed her tongue to the back of her teeth to force a hard, lipless smile. “Thankssomuch,” she hissed. “You’vebeensohelpful.”
“Oh…uh…right!” The manager’s face fell into what seemed to her exaggerated surprise and offense. “I’ll let you get to it, then.”
She watched him walk back to the café. Like the other employees, he was wearing black, but she frowned at his ratty T-shirt, the leering skull on the back under a band name printed in a font so Gothic it was unreadable. She took an enormous bite of her sandwich, pretending she didn’t feel her husband’s eyes on her.
“Why’d you have to be rude to the guy?” her husband asked.
She finished chewing. Swallowed. “I said he was helpful.”
“Come on.”
“He’ll survive.”
“He’s just trying to be friendly. Get people to come back. New business and all.”
“Mmm-hmmm.”
Her husband leaned back in his chair. “I knew you’d have an issue thesecondhe called her ‘princess.’ That kind of thing drives you nuts.”
“Just didn’t want to talk to him when I could be talking to you guys.”
Her husband gave a puffing exhale.
She ran her hand through her son’s black hair. Down his soft neck. He nuzzled her hand with his cheek like a fawn. Then he picked his nose.
“Stop that,” she told him, “it’s gross.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Sure you can.”
A woman came out of the café holding two cups. Spotting the numbered flag they’d been given at checkout, she headed to their table.
“One iced coffee and one iced chai latte?”
“That’s right, thanks,” she said as the woman set the sweating plastic cups on the table.
“I’ll just put your receipt right here,” the woman said, tucking the curling paper under the metal weight of the numbered flag.
“I like your hair,” her daughter said, fixated on a streak of pink by the woman’s cheek.
She held her breath the way she always did at such precipices.
“I’ll tell you a secret,” the woman said. “It’s not my real hair! It just clips in.” She paused, looking at their daughter’s disappointed expression, then lowered herself down expertly in her short skirt to be eye to eye, said conspiratorially, “If I had hair nice as yours, I wouldn’t need to stick fake stuff in it.” The woman regarded the shining black depth of their daughter’s hair. A marking whitened half of the girl’s left eyebrow and turned a streak of hair ultrapale at her temple. “Really. It’s something special.”
