The next time Susan visited the French Café, he was there, of course. She passed his table on her way to order her drink: the usual. As she passed by, she nodded, this time with a deliberate smile. But he did not look up at her. His eyes were on his notebook, his hand scribbling. A page filled with writing, one that must have slipped out of his notebook, lay on the floor in front of her. She didn’t dare pick it up, look at it, and ask him if it was his. If she had, would she have been rattled? Taking her order back to the table and passing him again, Susan looked at him with another friendly gesture. No response. He continued to write. From deep inside, Susan sensed a surge of clairvoyance, and of something off kilter. Once or twice, she felt him looking; no, he was staring at her. But when she looked up, his eyes were still on his notebook. The loose page was nowhere to be seen. Susan could not stay in the café any longer, she felt uneasy. With haste, she walked out the door, leaving her half-filled coffee in the dish bin, whiskers from the cat face peering through the cocoa powder. Although an unusually warm Berkeley spring day, a chill ran through her.
