Small Mercies

The coffee was bad. It always was. Lena knew this because she had been pouring it for ten years, and bad coffee had a taste that you couldn't unlearn — like water that had sat in a plastic bucket for three days and then someone added instant granules and called it a day. She poured it into a styrofoam cup and set it on the counter in front of the man sitting at position four, and he didn't look up from his phone.

"Black," he said.

" figured," she said. She wasn't sure she had figured it right, but it was close enough. Black coffee in this diner was like black coffee everywhere else in the world — something people drank because they needed to be conscious and the alternative was going home to a quiet house and the kind of silence that made you think about things you didn't want to think about.

He looked up then. Not at her — at the space above her head, where the menu board hung and the light had burned out above the "Breakfast All Day" sign. He looked at it the way you look at something you've seen before and don't recognize anymore, like a photograph of a place you used to live.

"You've changed your hair," he said.

"I've had ten years to change my hair," Lena said. She wiped the counter with a cloth that was not as clean as it needed to be and felt the familiar resentment that came from talking to someone who knew the shape of your life but not the texture of it.

"Rosie," he said.

She looked up. The girl was sitting at table seven, legs not reaching the floor, swinging them back and forth in a rhythm that said bored but not unhappy, bored and not unhappy and not bored-unhappy, just bored with a side of not unhappy, which was as close to happiness as she had learned to expect.

"Tommy," the man said.

The boy was in the bathroom. Lena had heard him go in three minutes ago. He hadn't come out. This was not unusual for five-year-old boys, who had an almost supernatural ability to occupy a bathroom for extended periods without any discernible purpose. But something about the way the man said the boy's name — like he was testing the weight of it, like he wasn't sure it still fit — made Lena's stomach tighten.

"What do you want, Jack?" she asked. Not "Jack, what do you want?" Not "Hey Jack, what's up?" She said his name the way you say a weather report — factually, without expectation.

"Can I see the kids?"

"It's a diner, Jack. They're right there. You can see them."

"I mean — can I — is it okay if I — "

She looked at him. Really looked at him. He was thirty-three, but he looked older. Not in the way that age makes you look older — wrinkles and gray hair and the general wear-and-tear of time — but in the way that hardship makes you look older, like a building that has been standing in the rain too long and is starting to sag at the corners.

"You look tired," she said.

"I work nights," he said. "Warehouse. Twelve-hour shifts."

"That's hard work."

"Yeah."

"Are you eating?"

"What?"

"Eating. When you work nights, you need to eat. Not just the gas station stuff. Real food."

He looked at her, and for a moment — just a moment, the kind of moment that exists only in the space between one breath and the next — something passed between them that wasn't anger and wasn't love and wasn't anything she could name without feeling stupid for trying.

"I'm fine," he said.

"You're not," she said. "You look like you're running on fumes."

The boy came out of the bathroom. He had not used the bathroom. He was holding a plastic spoon he had taken from the condiment station.

"Tommy," the man said.

"Hi," the boy said. He didn't say "Dad." He didn't say "Hello." He said "Hi," which was neutral and safe and said everything by saying nothing.

"Come sit down."

The boy sat. The girl came over from table seven, dragged by some invisible string that connected her to the man the way a kite is connected to the hand that holds its string — not because the kite wants to be held, but because the wind makes it feel like flying.

"I brought something," the man said. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a small object — a baseball, scuffed and stained and clearly well-used. "For Tommy."

Tommy looked at the ball. He looked at his father. He looked at the ball again. "I have a ball."

"I know. This is a different ball."

"What kind of ball is it?"

"A baseball."

"I know what kind of ball it is. I'm asking what kind of baseball it is."

The man smiled. It was a small smile, the kind that doesn't reach the eyes but tries anyway. "It's a ball that I used to play with when I was your age."

"Did you play good?"

"I played okay."

"Okay is not good."

"No. Okay is not good."

Tommy took the ball. He turned it over in his hands the way kids turn over things that matter to them, checking every seam, every stitch, every mark of wear, as if the ball itself contained information that he was trying to decode.

Lena went back to wiping the counter. She didn't look at the man. She looked at the condiment bottles. She looked at the coffee pot. She looked at the clock above the door, which was ten minutes fast and had been for as long as she had been working there. Time was something people disagreed about in this diner.

"Can I ask you something?" the man said.

Lena kept wiping. "Sure."

"Why now?"

She put the cloth down. She turned around. She looked at him across three feet of Formica and ten years of things unsaid.

"Why what?"

"Why come back. Why show up. Why bring the kids here instead of — I don't know, calling? Writing? Sending a lawyer? There are a lot of ways to do this, and you chose to show up at a diner where she works."

The man looked at her. His eyes were the same as they had always been — dark, intense, difficult to read, the kind of eyes that made people uncomfortable because they were looking at you the way you look in a mirror when you're trying to figure out what's wrong with your face.

"Because calling isn't real," he said. "Writing isn't real. Lawyers aren't real. This is." He gestured at the diner, the kids, the bad coffee, the sticky counter. "This is real. She's real. They're real. I'm real. And I want — " He stopped. He started again. "I want to try."

Lena felt something move inside her. It wasn't happiness. It wasn't sadness. It was something that lived in the space between those two words, the way this diner lived in the space between "trying" and "giving up," the way the Rust Belt lived in the space between "used to be" and "might be again."

"You try a lot of things," she said.

"I know."

"And how many of them stick?"

He thought about it. "Not many."

"So what makes this different?"

"Nothing," he said. "That's the thing. Nothing makes it different. I'm the same. You're the same. They're the same. Nothing has changed. Except I'm here."

Tommy was throwing the baseball against the wall. It bounced off the Formica and rolled under table three. The man didn't tell him to stop. Lena didn't tell him to stop. The ball was real, and the act of throwing it was real, and the fact that it rolled under the table was real, and none of it meant anything and all of it meant everything, and that was the point.

"Okay," she said.

The man looked at her. "Okay to what?"

"Okay to trying," she said. "Okay to whatever this is. Okay to you coming by and sitting at the counter and drinking bad coffee and watching the kids throw balls at walls. Okay to nothing changing and everything changing because you're here."

He nodded. He didn't say thank you. Thank you was for people who expected things to work out. He wasn't expecting anything. He was just here.

The girl leaned against Lena's arm. "Mom?"

Lena looked down. The girl was looking up at her with the kind of direct, unadorned gaze that only children possessed — a gaze that didn't negotiate, didn't maneuver, didn't perform. It just looked. And in that look was five years of a question that had no answer and didn't need one.

"Yes, Rosie?"

"Can we go to the park after?"

"Yes," Lena said. "We can go to the park."

The man — Jack — sat down at the counter with his coffee and watched his children walk out the door into a parking lot that was mostly empty and a sky that was mostly gray and a world that was mostly tired, and for the first time in five years, he wasn't alone in any of it.

Author Note & Copyright:

Author Note & Copyright: