The Thing the Stranger Left

End of a long Thursday shift. The floor was quiet, the way it gets in that last twenty minutes when everyone is moving through the close on autopilot, wiping down, restocking, not quite talking. I was near the back when I heard Simone say, flatly, 'huh.' Not a question. Not alarm. Just: huh. The specific syllable she uses when the world has done something she didn't prepare for.

A man, nobody either of us recognized, not a regular, not someone who'd been in the building long enough to develop a face, had walked up to her, held something out, and left before she could say anything back. A folded piece of paper. No explanation. He was through the door before the moment had time to arrange itself into a sentence.

We ended up in the break room for longer than we needed to. The paper sat on the table between us for a while without either of us touching it. It wasn't alarming, it turned out to be a handwritten note, clumsy and genuine, thanking her for something she'd apparently done on a shift two weeks ago that she had no specific memory of. A small thing, probably. The kind of thing you do without cataloguing it. But the man had clearly catalogued it.

The paper. Neither of us touched it for a while.

Simone had a theory, naturally, something about how the gestures people decide to make are never about the scale of the original thing, they're about whatever was happening in the person's life when they finally decided to act on it. She was gesturing with her mug and laying it out like she'd been thinking about it for years. I watched her and thought: she's going to be right and it's still not going to answer the question of what you do with a folded piece of paper from a stranger who already left. We stayed until the kettle finished and then we went home. I'm still a little turned around by it.

Simone had a theory. She always has a theory.