The Last Cafe Frank Doyle was sitting on a couch in a hostel on Khan el-Khalili street and staring at a crack in the wall. The couch had seen better decades. The crack in the wall had seen better centuries. Frank had been staring at it for twenty minutes and had not moved. He was forty-two years old. He had driven a semi-truck for eighteen years. He knew every rest stop from I-90 to I-80. He knew which truck stops had decent coffee and which ones had beds that didn't smell like someone else's sickness. He knew the sound of his own engine the way a man knows the sound of his own children breathing in the next room. Then the company went overseas. The trucks were sold. The routes were reassigned. Frank got a severance check that felt like an insult and a bus ticket to Cairo because a travel agent at the Greyhound station in Buffalo said Egypt was interesting and Frank had nowhere to be for three weeks. Rosa Gutierrez came in with a map and asked if he knew how to get to the Giza Plateau. He said he didn't. She said she didn't either. They walked together because walking was cheaper than a taxi and because talking to someone was better than staring at a crack in a wall. She was thirty-eight years old. She worked at a 24-hour diner in Detroit called The Blue Plate. She woke up at 4:30 AM, drove ten miles from her apartment, served coffee and pancakes and burgers and pie to truck drivers and night-shift factory workers and people who didn't want to go home but couldn't afford to stay out. She saved every extra dollar for her daughter Maria's college tuition. A coworker won a free Egypt tour through a radio contest and couldn't take it. Rosa took the spot. They visited the Pyramids. Frank stood in front of them and said: "My dad built houses. Real houses. With brick and mortar. He could build a wall that would stand up for a hundred years. I guess he just forgot to tell the wall about the economy." Rosa said: "At least your dad built something. I flip burgers." Frank said: "These were built by people who didn't have burgers." They stood in silence for a while. The sun was hot. The desert was huge. Neither of them spoke. It was not an uncomfortable silence. It was a silence that belonged to both of them. At a small restaurant near the Citadel, they ate koshari. Rosa said it was the best she had ever had. Frank said he didn't know what koshari was but it was good. They paid eight dollars total. Frank put in five. Rosa put in three. Neither of them offered to pay more. Neither of them offered to pay less. They just paid what they had agreed to pay and that was that. On the way back to the hostel, the wind picked up. It was cold. Frank took off his worn denim jacket and held it out. Rosa said she was fine. Frank said: take it. She took it. It was larger than her, and it smelled like truck-stop coffee and old cigarettes and something that might have been twenty years of driving roads that connected nothing to nothing. She wrapped it around her shoulders and felt, for the first time in a long time, that someone noticed she was cold. She didn't say thank you. Thank you was a word she reserved for people who did things for her regularly, and Frank was not someone who did things for her regularly. He was someone who had given her a jacket once. That was different from someone who brought her coffee every morning at The Blue Plate. That was different from her mother, who called every Sunday and asked when she was coming home. Frank was different. Frank was a stranger who noticed she was cold and said take it. In the market, an Egyptian vendor offered them scarves. He was old. He had a white beard and eyes that had seen everything and were amused by none of it. "How much?" Frank asked. The vendor gave a price. Frank said: can you do fifteen? The vendor laughed and said fifteen. Frank bought two. Rosa said he didn't have to. He said he wanted to. She said nothing. She was thinking about the last time someone bought her something that wasn't on sale. They didn't have a cousin or a sidekick or anyone else to complicate things. They just had Frank and Rosa, two people who had spent most of their lives being told by the world that they didn't matter, standing in front of monuments built by people who understood that mattering was not about money. At the hostel that night, Frank sat on the balcony and looked at the city lights. Rosa came out a few minutes later and sat down next to him. She was wearing his jacket. "It's warm," she said. "Yeah," he said. They sat in silence. The city was loud below them. Cars and people and music and the call to prayer from a mosque three streets over. None of it was quiet, but the silence between them was. "My daughter got into community college," Rosa said after a while. "That's good." "She needs to pay a deposit by Friday. I have eight hundred. They need twelve." Frank was silent for a moment. "How much short?" "Four hundred." Frank reached into his wallet. He counted the bills. Six hundred dollars. It was everything he had. He was going back to Buffalo the next day and driving a delivery van starting the following week. It was not much. It was not enough. But it was something. He found Rosa on the balcony. He sat down next to her. He didn't say anything dramatic. He just said: "I have six hundred dollars. It's not much. But it's something." Rosa looked at him. "You don't even know me." "I know you're a good person. I know that. That's enough." She looked at him for a long time. The city was loud. The desert was quiet. Somewhere below them, a street vendor was packing up his stall and counting his day's earnings, which were probably not much more than six hundred dollars. "I'll pay you back," she said. "You don't have to." "I want to." Frank nodded. He didn't say anything else. He just sat there, next to a woman he had met three days ago, and listened to the city and the desert and the sound of a woman who was trying not to cry and not quite succeeding. The next morning, Frank was packing his cello case -- no, he wasn't packing a cello case, he was packing his duffel bag. He was not a musician. He was a truck driver who had driven trucks for eighteen years and now drove a delivery van. He packed the way truck drivers pack: efficiently, without ceremony, everything in its place because if you don't put things in their place they get lost and you can't do your job. Rosa came back from breakfast and went to the balcony to return his jacket. It was gone. Frank had taken it. She told herself she didn't care. She knew she would care. But for now, the desert was warm and the sun was rising and she had a deposit to pay. She wrapped the scarf Frank had bought her around her neck. It was blue. It was not expensive. It was from a market in Cairo and it had cost fifteen dollars for two. But it was warm, and it was blue, and it was something that someone had bought for her, and for Rosa Gutierrez, who had spent thirty-eight years buying things for other people and rarely for herself, that was more than she had expected. She went downstairs. She found Frank at the front desk, paying for his room. She walked up to him and held out his wallet. "You forgot this," she said. Frank looked at her. "I didn't forget it. I left it." "Why?" "Because I wanted you to have something else." She didn't ask what. She just nodded and put the wallet in her pocket and walked out of the hostel and into the Cairo morning and didn't look back. She paid the deposit that afternoon. Her daughter called that evening and cried. Rosa listened and said: "That's all right, baby. Mama's got it." She hung up and looked at the blue scarf on the chair where she had left it. She picked it up and held it for a moment and then hung it on the back of the chair, where it would be there when she came back. Frank drove the delivery van the next week. He made ninety dollars a day. It was not much. But it was something. Three months later, he was driving through Buffalo and he pulled into a rest stop off I-90. He went into the truck stop diner and ordered coffee. He sat at the counter and drank it and looked at the wall. The wall was blank. There was no crack in it. It was a plain, white, unremarkable wall. Frank drank his coffee and thought about a woman who had taken his jacket and given him back his wallet and left him with a blue scarf and four hundred dollars that he didn't need but had given anyway. He thought about a desert that had watched countless lovers pass through its gates and had never cared about any of them. He finished his coffee. He paid. He got back in the van. He drove to the next stop. The wall was blank. But he remembered the crack. And that was enough. ======================================================================