So I am looking for opinions.

It has been a while since I have written any fiction, but as my poetry has indicated, something is rustling beneath the surface. Yesterday as I sat down to write, this (below) came out. And I find myself thinking “This could be a novel. Or this can stop here as a short story.”

So what do you think, Does reading this make you want to read more? Or is it enough (or too much if you think it’s terrible!) as is?

Be well. Travel wisely. And thank you.

Tom

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         He was at the same table. She would have guessed he was in the same shirt and comfortably worn jeans, the color blue only years of wear bring to fabric. A small A5 notebook lay on the table. A hardback. Black covers. A red spline. She remembered that too. She had gone and looked it up the first time she saw him. It was British.

She carried one with her every where she went now. The paper was thick and smooth and easy to write on. The hard back meant you did not need a table to jot down your notes. She never would have known they existed had she not noticed it the last time she was here.

She had not spoken to him then.  She had wanted to; wanted to tell him what he had meant to her in two lives. But she had not.

She was unsure if it was because she lacked courage, or if then, three years ago now, she lacked the words. But a lot had happened to her in three years. She was famous now, or at least a little famous. Her bylines lived in a lot of papers now. The New York Times. The New Yorker. The Boston Globe.  As well as papers and magazines in England, France, Spain and here in Italy. If news and facts mattered, then you knew her name.

She certainly had the words. And considering the places and people she had reported on, no one could accuse her of lacking courage.

         Still. Something was holding her back, just as surely as it did three years ago. She could not have told you what. Not then. Not now.

He was not intimidating. He had never been intimidating. Not when he was powerful. Not when he was famous. Certainly not now, years after he had simply stopped and disappeared. How old would he be now? Over seventy. Easily.  Old enough to be her grandfather.

A waiter appeared. The two had an easy conversation. It was more than a brisk order. Banter. Back and forth. The waiter knew him. He knew the waiter. You could tell.

His eyes. They were just as she remembered. Clear. A green hazel. Hardly any wrinkles until he smiled. Then the wrinkles were deep and long. Somehow, he looked younger with the wrinkles.

His eyes. There was a strangeness to them. When he smiled they looked young and joyful and yet somehow melancholy at the same time. She remembered that from the last time she saw him. Maybe it was the mixed messages of his eyes that had held her back before. And now. She did not know what to do with eyes like that. How would you know who you were talking to?

Three years. And here he was. At the same table as before. She had assumed he was a tourist like her the first time she saw him there. But a second time? And exactly the same table, at the same time of day, even, she felt certain, in the same chair? He must live here now.

The waiter brought him a large cup and a saucer. Cappuccino. At this hour? She did not live here but she had been here enough times to know that was not done. Cappuccino was a morning drink. After lunch you had espresso. She smiled, remember the look on waiters’ faces when she had first ordered cappuccino at two in the afternoon here.  She did not know what she had done wrong but she read faces well enough she had done something. She suspected it was a local kind of snobbery, the look the waiters wore.

But this waiter showed nothing. The waiter smiled. They laughed together. Comfortable. He was a man at ease in this world that was not his.  And his ease rubbed off on those around him. She remembered her father saying that about him. It meant nothing to her then, but now, a woman instead of a girl, she understood it. Five tables away, she could feel it.

She thought about getting up and going to his table. Introducing herself. Thanking him for all he had done for her and her family. And maybe asking him why he was here. Why he had disappeared. There was a story there. She knew it.

And stories were her life now.

Still, she hesitated. He sipped his cappuccino, savoring it. She could tell. She could feel his contentment. He sipped. He wrote a bit in his red and black notebook as she watched.  He wrote slowly. Stopping now and again. To think, gazing into the square full of tourists. She hesitated and then it was too late. He shut his notebook. He put his pen in his pocket and got up. In a minute he had disappeared into the crowd. 

She was angry at herself. No, not angry. Disappointed, sure somehow she had missed something important. Something she might never have the opportunity to have again. A little uncomfortable, she sipped her espresso. Wishing suddenly it was cappuccino.