These little things got lost so easily when there was no one to snatch them up with. The lady with the oysters for example, would be lost, was being lost right now, as I watched her. I can be funny and I can be a good time I told the bags in front of me, but quietly and with my mouth mostly hidden by my coffee cup so I wouldn’t be seen talking to my shopping.

A woman with a little dog under her arm hit the back of my chair with her purse and I slurped my coffee. One big gulp down the hatch. I looked up then across the street, and saw Nell, walking arm in arm with the man I had seen in the park. It was just the two of them. Couples have a certain way of walking, when they have children but their children aren’t with them. Well they do, and they were walking like that. In that way. She was laughing with her head tilted back, openmouthed. Just as I watched, she almost stepped in something. I couldn’t see what, and he picked her up, actually picked her all the way up in the air and lifted her away from it, whatever it was. Saving, maybe, maybe probably, her shoes from something terrible and awful and unmentionable on the street.

She looked at me. For the second that she was up in the air, her eyes flew across the street, across the tops of the heads of all the people, through the glass windows of the cafe, past the woman with ice-blonde hair who was still not touching the man she was with, all the way to me. Zip. A little spark. We knew who we were.

I grabbed the bags and ran out of the cafe after her. I can’t explain it. She wasn’t asking me to follow her. I bumped into a couple as I ran out. It seemed for a moment that everyone was intertwined and between all the linked arms and hands holding on to one another that I would never be able to get away. Smiles usually work in those sorts of situations though and I took out one of my best and apologized to the man for knocking the hat out of his hand with all the bags in mine and I was free.

I arrived out on the street shaking, heaving under all my bags, looking for her. I was like a bride. I had that many yards of white fabric piled up around me. I thought I had lost her, that I hadn’t been quick enough and I really thought of screaming. I stamped my foot a little and the pigeons ruffled and fussed but then I saw her, heading towards the lake, and I ran off in a burst and flurry.

She didn’t want me to follow her. I could see that. She looked over her shoulder once, and saw me chasing after her and she frowned but I kept following. I can’t say what I meant to do. She was wearing a dress that should have showed her shoulders but she had a heavy scarf draped over them, one you couldn’t see through even if you tried. He had an arm around her waist. I couldn’t seem to catch up to them even though I was almost running. Almost but not quite.