THE DEADLINE CAFÉ EPISODE #5

It was the way this young woman parted the sea of tables and chairs and winter coats and long legs with UGGs and readers and pools of sotto voce conversations or the starers who just sat there and gazed straight ahead at nothing in particular, that caught Hank’s attention.

But it was the way she stopped right in front of the startled student sitting in the back and said in a voice you could have heard in the last row of the upper balcony at the Lyric Opera that made the whole café stop, look, and listen.

“You jerk! I’m late!”

Even if you’d been knee deep in a book, slipping out your Kindle, or waist deep in a conversation just before she uttered those four words and heard only “I’m late!” you didn’t need to be named Holmes, Wallander or Warshawsky to know she’d just told the guy that she was … well … late. And boy was she ever mad.

 “What are you going to do about it, Mister Engineering Big Shot?!”

The young man, who’d been transfixed like a deer in the headlights or a treed raccoon, looked quickly around the room and saw that the spotlight was on him. He was on stage without a script and this was real life now unfolding all around him, and the only words he could cough out were,

“Oakey.  What?  How?” and after he’d gathered his thoughts and come up with a script,  “Can we talk? I mean quietly. Here. Somewhere?”

“How?” she countered, “How? You know how! What I want to know is what, as in what are you going to do about it?” 

At which point she broke into the most heartbreaking puddle of sobs and—as she told Lissa who’d come out from behind the counter and was standing right behind her, ready for this denouement—it was just then, when she thought about that word “it” and the fact that “it” wasn’t an “it”, “it” could be a tiny little helpless baby the size of a bean, right there inside her, that the immensity of the situation hit her.

“I can’t believe I’m having a breakdown right here in the back of a dumpy little café ... Oops, sorry,” she said to Lissa, “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

“That’s OK, you’re upset. Besides some days I feel just the same way.”

“You do?”

“Oh, believe me, you don’t know the half of it.”

So they talked that way back there in the back room, with Hank poking his head in every 10 minutes or so and Lissa waving him away with a flick of her wrist, until the girl, Oakey, a Northwestern student from Seoul, had told Lissa her life story and Lissa had told Oakey hers and they had both melted into a second pool of tears, together, and bonded like two brothers in a trench at war.

When they emerged from the back room together, Lissa told Hank, “We’re going to the drug store.”  She added, whispering, “to get a pregnancy test,” and then in a louder voice, “ and when we come back, Oakey’s gonna start working for us. It’s winter quarter and that’s the coffee quarter. And we need help.”

So that was that.  And that’s how Oakey learned from Lissa that there are lots of other reasons why a woman might be late. And it’s how a quiet guy studying engineering learned about how love and responsibility go hand in hand. 

And it’s when Hank started thinking about Lissa in a new way.