On Anzac Day, I woke up in a wet sleeping bag in a wet tent, put on my wet hiking boots and hitched out of the local forest park and back into town to catch the train home to Wellington, where there would be just as much rain but far less mud.
The train ran all day and I wanted to stretch my weekend out as long I could, so I spent most of the day meandering through Upper Hutt, a spot of concrete on the southern plain known for not being known for much of anything. For an hour or so, I sat in a cafe with chalkboards on every wall, The Best American Short Stories of 2005 open beside the mocha on my table, watching the Huttites dwell around me in their natural habitat.
A man and a woman ordered dessert and each one was served a different kind of cake. The waitress departed their table and immediately the man sloppily scooped away the pointy end of his crumbling slice and scraped it on to his companion’s plate. She split her own piece in half the long way and held a dainty bite up to his lips. While he chewed, she neatly slid one half of her cake off of her plate and on to his. They exchanged flavors, one dark and smooth and one white and fluffy, without so much as a pause in their conversation about a movie or the weather or the holiday weekend or whatever (I’m not an eavesdropper, just a people watcher).
Tonight, I am sitting in the Haymarket in Northampton. On my right, a man and woman sit with their knees interlocked, not in dining foreplay, but because their table is quite small. They lean into each other, laughing over the wrought-iron garden table, and underneath, they have the same napkin spread across their laps.
Another pair of women just left the cafe, smiling down at me and wishing me good luck on my homework, which I’ve been half-heartedly glancing over while I surreptitiously observe the people around me, under the guise of the concentrating student. These fellow patrons were so friendly because about forty minutes ago, they laughed hysterically at Kara when she not-so-subtley stole a candle from another table for me to hold over my textbook and not go blind from reading in the dim, ambient light.
They probably thought that they had observed a simple favor between students, but Kara stole that candle out of love. What would I do without her? Maybe I’d get more homework done.
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