“Do you live here?” the guy asks me.
“Temporarily,” I confess. “Learning how to cook with the chef.”
“Well, the food is excellent,” the guy remarks. “Truly. Brilliant. I stuffed my face.”
The woman nods enthusiastically.
“I’ll tell the chef. He’ll be overjoyed.” As am I, having helped to cook some of it.
They’re intrigued that I’m an American in Italy, ask me about places to visit, where I recommend, how long I’m here for. The woman makes me laugh and punctuates her sentences with the odd swear word. I sense she’s had a bit to drink. I like her immediately.
The guy gets up and takes his coffee with him, tells both me and the woman next to me, “Nice to meet you both. I’ll keep an eye on the time and check your friend comes back safely,” he tells her.
The woman picks up her friend’s phone, slips it inside her own handbag for safekeeping, and tells the guy, “Thanks.”
“Nice to meet you,” I say in return. I wonder if that’s my cue togo too, but I don’t want to leave this woman by herself, so I don’t. I stay awhile longer.
The singer moves into her next song and I’m strangely transfixed, calm. I have no idea what this song is, but the woman I’m sitting with hums along a little, takes a sip of her coffee. “Oh yes, this isn’t Nespresso, is it?”
I laugh. “Lavazza.”
She nods wisely. “This is, without question, a five out of five. And I hardly ever score a five.”
I turn from the opera singer, give this woman my full attention while my mind processes what she’s said. A pause, just for a beat, and then I ask, “Is grading coffee a British national pastime or something?”
The woman laughs and smiles awkwardly, a mix of proud and embarrassed. “No,” she confesses. “It’s a sport that I and my next-door neighbor indulge in. My husband thinks we’re nutters, standing in the cold, rating Nespresso flavors out of five. He, not so secretly, thinks we should grade them out of ten, or at least create a more cohesive scoring system, rather than picking a number out of thin air.”
I nod, take a sip of my coffee, but my brain has gone somewhere else, back in time to a conversation I had long ago with someone else about grading coffee. “Your neighbor?” I ask.
“Yes, it’s the only time I get to see her really, over the garden fence.”
I think. My brain isn’t catching up, not yet. Maybe because I’m so tired. And I don’t want to ask the question. I don’t want to mention her name, so I don’t ask what her neighbor’s called. Because it can’t be Hannah. Her neighborcan’tbe Hannah. So I don’t ask. I don’t let myself think it.
They say each person is connected to everyone else in this world by only six other people. Six degrees of separation. Sixpeople stand in the way between me and every other person on this planet. Allegedly. And I look at this woman to my right, this woman I’ve just met, and I dare so tentatively to think that she’s not six people away from Hannah, she’s so much closer to Hannah than that. And when my silence goes on too long and I can’t hear the opera singer anymore, because all I can hear is the beat of my heart in my chest getting harder, faster, I turn to her, dare to ask…“Is your name Joan?”
She stares at me and I think the air just got sucked out of this garden as she replies, “How on earth did you know that?”
—
Ten minutes later, Joan’s gripping my arm hard as she pulls me away from the table, toward the bride and groom. I can’t speak, can’t think. I’m barely walking. So Joan’s doing it all for me, since we established that she is who she is and I am who I am.
The bride steps forward and accuses Joan of “bagging off with a fit waiter while Geoff sleeps off his lunch.”
Joan shakes her head and, with wide eyes, she says to the bride, “I need to borrow you for five minutes.”
Joan and this newly married woman move away from the small circle of friends we’ve interrupted and walk toward the portico. Then Joan looks at me, beckons me over.
The bride sweeps her eyes over me, once, twice. I feel self-conscious now, even more so than before.
And then Joan speaks. “Miranda, this is Davey.”
Miranda smiles at me, extends her hand. “Hi, Davey. Are you one of Paul’s friends?”
“No, I’m from the restaurant,” I say automatically. I’m not here right now. Leave a message. This isMiranda.This isHannah’sMiranda.
“The food is great,” Miranda says. “I can’t wait for the cake,” she goes on.
“Thank you. I’ll pass on your compliments to the chef.” I’m more than automatic now. I’m not even aware I’m speaking.
