“What’s cooking back here? – That’s what she would say, every time she came in the store. I thought it was some lame kind of humor, because I assure you there was no cooking going on in my shop!” Lars set his coffee mug clumsily onto the metal table, so some of the pale, sugary coffee spilled onto its thin bars and dribbled onto the sidewalk below.
“What kind of books did she buy?” Moira asked, watching the coffee puddle on the sidewalk to see if any ants would step in it and get burned.
“Cookbooks, mostly. Lots of baking books too. Though one time she came in and asked me about Scandinavian murder mysteries. She read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for about 20 minutes, put it back on the shelf, and left without saying anything to me.”
“Well—she must not be from around here,” Moira added, watching the coffee puddle spread thin and begin to dry.
“Yeah, I heard from Lisa Kron, you know her from that little charity concert she organized in my shop a couple years ago, she said she was from New Jersey.”
“Plenty of people are from there, I guess,” Moira wondered if the cafes in New Jersey had tables outside all year, or just in the summer.
“I guess she moved back. You know sometimes I think the way the roads are so straight here, and the way the farms only grow corn or soy, that stuff drives certain people crazy, you know,” Lars picked up the mug, stopping short of his lips, “they just can’t take it.” He sipped the coffee too loud and Moira laughed.
“No one would leave because of that,” she said.
“No—well, they would never tell you that that’s why they left. They would tell you they got a new job, or have a sick parent, or something. But deep down, it was all the damn right-angle roads that did them in.” Moira imagined a crazed woman driving a car with New Jersey plates, becoming increasingly deranged at each four-way stop, until it was all too much and she started heading for the interstate. She could sympathize with that. She could see how a right angle could drive you crazy, in the same way a man coughing during your entire flight could, or seeing the deer eat your phlox before they bloomed for the third year in a row. The ones that managed to bloom—probably the fat deer had just missed the one or two stalks just to spite her—they were left untouched until winter. So she knew how a little thing was never as little as it seemed.
“After three weeks went by and she hadn’t come in once, that’s when I started asking around. The problem was I didn’t know her name, since she always paid cash, and we never talked that much.” Lars picked up the mug too fast and a little coffee fell onto the sidewalk, making a new puddle. “Well we talked, as people do, but we never talked enough that I would ask her what her name was.”
“What did you talk about?” Moira poked hesitantly at the limp almond croissant on her plate.
“The cookbooks, that’s all. She always knew exactly what book she was going to buy when she came in. She must have researched them before. And she told me about the food she made.” Lars wrapped his hands around the coffee and leaned forward over the table. “You know what’s funny, for all the cooking she did? I got the sense that she wasn’t very good at it. She would tell me how all these recipes went wrong—she would dice the tomatoes instead of chop them, or she would use salt when it called for sugar, or Italian parsley instead of cilantro, and she always tried to save the food instead of starting over. It sounded frustrating to me. I just thought, why would you keep putting yourself through that?” He leaned back in his chair, causing the table to shift legs with a metal squeak.
Maybe she was obsessed, Moira thought. Maybe it was the only way she knew how to live.
“Well, I envy people with that kind of commitment,” she said, not believing she did. They watched the cars drive by slowly, filled with people going somewhere other than here. They watched people walk by the café’s tables—tourists with bags and high school kids with mischievous expressions. They watched for the woman, for her New Jersey plates, or her crazed eyes. Moira thought she understood why she would leave all the sudden. Why she would leave the little condo she rented from Moira, the one with a view looking onto a forest. A condo she had found to be littered with cookbooks, strewn about like candy wrappers on a windy day. She left because she was never here, because she didn’t know how to be here and not somewhere else.
Lars drained the last of his coffee and set his car keys on the table with a clang.
“Leaving so soon?” Moira eyed her croissant—she yearned to throw it away.