A Table for Two

Dorothy Keane had been waiting tables at the Harbor Light Diner in South Boston for twenty-two years, and if there was one thing she could recognize from across the room, it was a first date going badly. What gave it away was never the silence itself. It was the way both people kept studying the menu long after they had decided what to order.

The couple in booth six were a textbook case. He was in his late thirties, wearing a tie he had clearly tightened in the parking lot, and he had already mentioned, twice, that he was an accountant. She had arrived ten minutes late, apologizing in a warm Colombian accent, and had then spent a quarter of an hour nodding politely while he described the joys of quarterly tax returns.

"So what is it you do, exactly?" he asked eventually, as Dorothy refilled their water. "I'm an architect," the woman said. "Camila, by the way. I'm not sure you caught my name." He went pink to the tips of his ears. "Graham," he said. "Sorry. I did catch it. What I didn't catch, apparently, was my breath." Camila laughed, but it was the kind of laugh people offer out of kindness rather than amusement.

Things did not improve. Graham ordered the clam chowder and knocked over the pepper. Camila mentioned a public library she had designed in Medellin, and Graham, in a panic, asked whether libraries were tax-deductible. Behind the counter, Dorothy winced. It wasn't the question itself that bothered her so much as the look on his face afterwards: the look of a man watching his own evening drive off without him.

By eight o'clock, Camila had checked her phone three times and Graham was folding his napkin into ever smaller squares. Dorothy knew the signs. Within five minutes, one of them would ask for the check, and that would be that. She had seen it happen a hundred times. What she had never done was anything about it.

She walked over with two forks and a slice of Boston cream pie that nobody had ordered. "On the house," she said, setting it down between them. "But there's a condition. You have to share it, and you each have to tell the other the most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to you on a date. He goes first." Graham stared at her. Camila raised an eyebrow, and for the first time that evening, she looked genuinely curious.

"All right," Graham said slowly. "The most embarrassing thing that's ever happened to me on a date is happening right now. I spent all week preparing interesting questions, and the only one I've actually asked is about tax deductions." Camila put down her fork. "That," she said, "is the most honest thing anyone has ever said to me on a first date. Mine is worse. I once walked into the wrong restaurant and had dinner with the wrong man for half an hour before either of us noticed."

Graham laughed so loudly that the couple in booth five turned around. After that, it was as though someone had opened a window. They talked about her buildings and his terrible taste in music, about Bogota and Worcester, about why neither of them had ever learned to cook. Dorothy kept her distance, which was, she later told her sister, the hardest part of the whole job.

They stayed until closing. Graham left a tip that made Dorothy look twice, and a note written on a napkin: "It was the pie that saved us. Same table next Friday?" Dorothy pinned it to the wall behind the register, where it stayed for years, long after the two of them had stopped asking for a table for two and started asking for a high chair.