I’m sitting at a coffee shop reading. A couple of seats over, a man sits down next to a cute twentyish girl. He is probably fifteen years older than her:
“Do you mind if I sit here?”
“I had trouble finding a place to park.”
“I’m from the East Coast.”
“Your haircut is very stylish.”
“So you like to party!”
“There’s a nice little vegetarian restaurant over there on Olive, called The Green Cat Cafe. Would you like to go over there and sit with me for awhile?”
“Where do you work?”
“I could go over and have lunch there.”
“Would I be able to get, maybe, baked beans in a flour tortilla, like a burrito, with guacamole.”
“But you’d be my server. So that would be okay!”
“I’m a very good tipper.”
“Would you be able to tell if a guy sitting next to you were rich?”
“You live with your dad? I’ll bet he makes sure he meets all the guys you date.”
“Well, time for me to go.”
My eavesdropping was obviously detected, he pointed over at me and said, “He looks like a nice guy . . . Well?”
I look up from my book. “Yeah. I’m okay.”
As soon as he’s gone, she turns to me and says, “Can you believe that?”
“Yeah. He was really something.”
I’m sure he could picture what we were saying about him after he left. And for some reason now, I’m imagining that he liked being the subject of that type of disbelief.