Saroya, Diminished but Not Defeated

She came to the café on Friday, which was the day Iyla had, for two months, set aside to be found at her wobbly table by the window. Iyla had not gone back to that table since the afternoon Saroya first sat down at it. On Friday morning she went, because she had decided, in advance, that she would not let the table become a place she avoided.

Saroya arrived at twenty past eleven. She did not look around the room first. She walked to the table as if she had been told it was hers, and sat down in the chair opposite Iyla, and set her bag on the floor in the careful way she set everything down. She was wearing the same grey coat she had worn at the bend in the river, and the coat had a small fresh mark on the cuff that Iyla decided not to ask about.

"Tea," Saroya said to the boy who came over, and then, to Iyla, "May I?"

"You're already sitting."

"I am asking anyway."

"Sit," Iyla said.

The tea came. Saroya wrapped both hands around the cup without drinking from it, and looked at Iyla for a moment in the way of a person taking a reading.

"You changed the margins," she said.

"Yes."

"All of them?"

"The ones that mattered."

Saroya nodded once. "That was well done. I mean it as the thing it is. Not as a compliment."

"I took it as the thing it is."

She looked down at her cup. "We have spent the week trying to find out how it works. We will keep trying. You understand that."

"Yes."

"It will take a long time. It may take longer than either of us."

"I had thought about that."

Saroya almost smiled. "Of course you had."

Outside, a bicycle went past. The boy behind the counter dropped a spoon and apologised to nobody.

"I came to say two things, and then to go," Saroya said.

"All right."

"The first is that I am not going to argue with you today." She turned the cup a quarter-turn on its saucer. "It is a choice, not a surrender. In three months, or in a year, I may make a different one. Don't mistake the interval for the end of it."

"I won't."

"Good."

"What's the second?"

"Tomas." The name landed on the table between them like a coin. "He would still like to meet you. He asked me to tell you the invitation does not expire."

"Tell him I heard you. Tell him I have not said no."

Saroya's eyebrows lifted, very slightly. "Have you not?"

"I have said not yet. They are different sentences."

"They are." She considered her cup. "He will be pleased by the distinction. He likes distinctions."

"I noticed."

Saroya took, finally, a small sip of the tea, and set the cup down with the same care she had set the bag down. She looked at Iyla across the table, and Iyla looked back, and what passed between them was not friendship and not enmity but a kind of mutual acknowledgement that they were, now, in something with each other that would not be quickly over.

"This is going to be slow," Saroya said.

"Yes."

"And permanent."

"Probably."

"I had hoped for a different shape."

"I know you had."

Saroya stood. She picked up her bag. The cup, still nearly full, sat between them in its small ring of water from the saucer; she did not glance at it. She put a coin on the table, more than the tea cost, and nodded to Iyla once — not warmly, not coldly, the nod of one person to another at the start of a long walk — and went out through the door. The bell above it made its small bright sound, and Iyla sat at her table by the window and watched the grey coat go past the glass and turn at the corner and not look back.