She is sitting alone, at a maple-stained round table in the back of the cafe. The red nail polish on her fingernails is badly chipped. The woman holds her mug between her palms and takes big sips. It’s sweet, the coffee, mixed with heavy cream and three packets of brown sugar crystals. She comes here in the late afternoons, only on Sundays now, impressed that she’s finally found a real job and isn’t serving homemade treats in plastic bags to dogs at the bakery, like she’d done in school. Both of these jobs asked her for appropriate attire, words which bothered her. She likes showing her knees and wearing her hair the way it falls, in uneven curls. It makes her feel sexy.
There is a young girl at the table next to her, maybe four years old, crayoning-in flowers in her coloring book and showing her mother. She takes little licks of the whipped cream atop her hot chocolate and keeps laughing over her mother’s phone call. The woman is obsessed with how small the young girl’s feet are and keeps trying to position hers beside them, to see how different in size they are.
The radio is playing softly in the cafe, on the French station as usual, but sometimes on the Spanish station instead, or the Portuguese, or the German. It makes the patrons feel as if they are somewhere far away, and she likes that. She likes most things about the cafe—the music, the thickness of the ceramic mug, the brick, and the mirror. She likes to sit at the table in front of the mirror, so she can stare into her own eyes and watch the door, all without turning her head.
On Friday, her boss said chipped polish is unprofessional, she said women shouldn’t show signs of damage or wear. So now she is picking off the polish and bits of her fingernails are coming off with it. This is what she used to do at The Yappy Barkery while she waited for dogs to drag their humans and beg. She’d always hoped the dogs would lick up the chippings so she didn’t have to clean them up, or really, so she didn’t have to leave them there and feel something adjacent to guilt. It had been her last year in college, and she’d known couldn’t stay there forever, but also thought she’d never leave. So, she’d toyed around with fireable offenses—giving the cuter dogs fuller bags of treats, offering samples of pupcakes, and she even slipped a few twenties from the cash register.
Toward the end of the year, she had picked up extra shifts. Some days she’d show up in torn jogger pants and slippers, and some days she’d pretend to be something else and show up a little self-conscious, a little glamorous, dressed in silks and high heels. She’d tell the customers she was coming from an event, or an interview. The shop was small, covered in pastel paints and photos of smiling animals. Terry, a large man, and Sully, his golden retriever, came in every Thursday, and she liked to look nice for them. Usually they stayed to talk, but that Thursday afternoon Terry was in a hurry, and he came alone. Once he’d left, she wiped down the counters, sprayed the mirror behind her, put out more napkins, although none had been taken since she’d arrived that morning.
The next man who walked in that Thursday was tall, slim, and he’d spent the morning with his neti-pot, obsessively cleansing. He took full inhales, making sure he’d irrigated effectively. He looked nice, shy. She didn’t say hello, or smile, because despite her costume—a lace trimmed slip and her grandmother’s pearl choker—she didn’t care much that day.
He didn’t have an animal with him. “I have a weapon,” he said.
“Right,” she said, and she saw his pockets were empty, his pants were slim.
“Turn around,” he said, “Don’t move till I leave.”
She turned around, leaned her back against the glass case of baked goods, and watched through the mirror as he reached into the treat jar on the counter, stuffed a handful in his pocket, and placed a few in his mouth. It was silent for a moment, and then there was the thick crunch of human teeth on a stale, cinnamon, bone-shaped cookie, and the click of the door closing behind him.