Four Hours of Strategic Follow-Up

December sixteenth. It started with a paper coffee cup and the phrase 'there's someone I've been talking to,' said with the specific casualness of a person who knows what they are doing.

Simone delivered this information approximately forty minutes into our shared break, in the break room, between the corkboard with the outdated flu-shot notice and the coffee maker that makes a sound like it's working very hard. She said it the way she says most things, level, almost incidental, like she was noting the weather or confirming the schedule had changed. And then she picked up her cup and waited.

I want to be clear that I did not spiral. I asked follow-up questions. There were several of them. They were organized and reasonable and I spaced them across the remaining three hours and twenty minutes of the shift so as not to appear invested, which I was, extremely.

the follow-up question posture

The thing about Simone is that she will give you one sentence and then let you work for everything else, and she does this with the patience of someone who has all evening and absolutely knows it. By the end of the shift I had a first name, a general occupation, and the information that they had been talking for 'a few weeks,' which is not nothing and is also not enough.

She laughed at me, eventually. I laughed too.

the part where it got funny

I wrote none of this down on the bus home because I was busy thinking about it, and then I wrote all of it down when I got in, because that is the honest order in which things happen. The box from Carol is still on the counter. Gerald put out a new leaf sometime last week that I noticed this morning. The framing shop will be closed this weekend for the holiday. These are the other facts of December sixteenth. The one I keep coming back to is Simone, the cup, the one sentence, and the look on her face that said: I know exactly what I just did.