"Longer Than Three Weeks"
1050 Words
# CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Thursday started ordinarily.
I finished the section of the NGO project I had been avoiding since Monday, sent it off before noon, and felt the particular satisfaction of a task that had been sitting on my conscience finally leaving it. Made lunch. Replied to two emails. Looked at the Later folder where the new client enquiry was still sitting and closed it without opening it.
Not yet.
I got ready for Oswald's at five thirty and left at five forty-five the way I always did, walking Veldmarch Street the way I always walked it, arriving at five fifty-eight the way I always arrived.
Sera was already on the floor when I got in. She nodded at me. I nodded back. The pre-service routine moved around us the way it always did and by six o'clock the doors were open and the evening had begun.
---
By eight the dining room was at half capacity.
Not empty. Not struggling. Just quieter than a Thursday usually ran, the tables occupied but the room breathing more gently than it did on a full service night. I stood at the console and managed what there was to manage, which tonight was not a great deal, and the evening moved at its own unhurried pace.
Sera passed me at some point with a tray.
"Quiet tonight," she said.
"It is," I said.
She moved on.
I looked at the dining room. The tables. The candlelight doing its thing across the linen. The older waiter moving between tables with the ease of someone who had been doing this long enough for it to become a part of him.
Outside the window Veldmarch Street was doing its Thursday evening thing. People walking. A couple stopping briefly outside to look at the menu board before deciding and moving on.
"It's unusually slow for a Thursday."
I wasn't talking to anyone. Just out loud. The kind of thing you said when you were thinking and forgot for a moment that thinking was supposed to be internal.
"Middle of the week. Sometimes it's like this."
I turned.
I hadn't heard him approach. He was standing near the console with the expression he had for things he was simply observing, not the dining room read, not the office version. Just present. Like he had been there for a moment already and hadn't announced it.
"How do you automatically know that?" I said. "I haven't encountered this once since I started here."
He looked at the dining room briefly. Then back at me.
"I've been here long enough," he said.
"Long enough meaning what exactly?"
He looked at her. "Longer than three weeks."
I felt my face do something I didn't authorize.
"How old are you?"
It came out before I decided to say it. Before I had finished the thought it was already in the room and I couldn't take it back.
He looked at me. That look. The one I had stopped trying to name.
"Old enough," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"No," he said. "It isn't."
He walked away.
I stood at the console and looked at the reservation book in front of me and did not read a single word of it for approximately thirty seconds.
Then I straightened it. Picked up the pen. Went back to the evening.
---
The service ran out its remaining hours quietly.
A party of six arrived at nine for the last full booking of the night, louder than the rest of the room, the kind of table that had been somewhere else first and brought that energy in with them. I settled them, managed the transition of the room around their arrival, and the evening found its final rhythm.
At some point I was aware of him moving through the dining room again. Not toward me. Just the usual read, the assessment, the way he moved through his own space like it had been built to his specific measurements.
He didn't stop at the console.
I didn't look up.
The party of six stayed until ten forty-five. By eleven the room was clear and the close down was moving and I did my checks and put my coat on and said goodnight to Sera who was pulling on her jacket near the door.
"Good service," she said.
"Quiet one," I said.
"Sometimes those are the best ones," she said.
She left.
I followed a minute later.
---
The walk home was cold and clear, the rain that had threatened all day finally arriving as a fine drizzle that was more atmosphere than inconvenience. I walked through it with my hands in my pockets and Veldmarch Street behind me and the city doing its late Thursday thing ahead.
I thought about the console conversation.
Not deeply. Not in the way I examined things when I intended to examine them. Just the way thoughts arrived when you were walking and the city was quiet and there was nothing else requiring your attention.
*Longer than three weeks.*
He had said it the way he said everything, flat and even and with something underneath it that you felt without being able to point to directly. Not mocking. Not warm. Just a fact delivered by a person who had decided exactly how much to give and had given precisely that and not a syllable more.
*Old enough.*
I turned onto Rue Selvaine.
I didn't know how old he was. I had asked and he had not answered and that was that. A closed door the way he had closed doors in every conversation we had ever had, not aggressively, just completely.
I got home. Took my coat off. Put the kettle on.
Checked my phone while the water boiled.
One message from Bree. A photo of the finished design project, the green linen from the market draped across a chair in the completed room, the whole thing looking considered and warm.
*Done*, she had written.
*It's beautiful*, I sent back.
Three dots. Then: *How was work.*
*Quiet*, I sent. *Unusually slow for a Thursday apparently.*
A pause longer than usual.
*Apparently*, she sent.
I put my phone face down and made my tea and did not think about what she meant by that and went to bed.
---
*End of Chapter Sixteen*
- Writer
