The bookstore café was lit by lamps on tables, the big windows at the front beaded with condensation that acted like a blind, dimming the afternoon light. Sylvia had secured the corner table and, as she waited for her sister, she poured sugar into her tea, tearing the corners of the paper packets with her fingernail so that there was only the tiniest hole from which the sugar fell in a slow stream. She told herself that if her sister had not arrived by the count of five she would allow herself one more sugar. Her tea now was on its way to becoming a dessert. The white paper wrappers were beside the lamp in a flimsy pile.
The snow that morning had been a surprise, weighing down the branches of the trees in the ravine across the street. The birds sang incongruously. It was a heavy spring snow, arriving after crocuses had already begun to push free of the wet earth, after Sylvia had noticed the first yellow buds on the forsythia next to the house.
The bells of the café door jangled. Sylvia looked up but it was not her sister, just a delivery man with packages. At the next table, there was a man about ten years older than herself, his hair white, thin, wispy, neatly combed. He was gesturing decisively but speaking in a voice that was too low for Sylvia to hear, though she tried. The woman to whom he was speaking was young, probably a student at the university. She held her coffee cup in her hands, sat very erect and attentive, and looked at the man as he spoke. Under the table her feet were together, neatly, like a schoolgirl. Now she put her coffee down and said, “We are never quite prepared for death. I don’t think.” There had been a lull in the music when she spoke these words.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry! Have you been here long? Sorry!” Marg pulled off her jacket and slung it on the back of the wooden chair. “It was one of my students. Just wouldn’t leave. A train wreck of a paper but he couldn’t understand that. And then it was a mess getting here. The snow just keeps coming down. A cosmic joke.” Marg smiled tentatively as if she were gauging Sylvia’s mood.
“It’s fine,” Sylvia said.
She watched as Marg ordered her coffee at the antique bar, which had inlaid stained glass and a burnished brass globe of lights overhead. The effect was cozy and old-fashioned despite the high-end equipment on the other side, the whir of the grinder and the industrial sounds of the Italian coffee maker. Beyond the bar was the used bookstore, a small buffer from the bustling outside world. It had opened three months ago, just after the new year, and already it was so popular it was often hard to find a seat.