His wife owned a bakery in Pittsburgh and he was on his way back from Romania where he’d attended his mother’s funeral.
“You are Romanian then?”
He said “I am American now,” and she said “You are an American baker then?”
“I am a musician then,” and he told her that in his wife’s shop he had a corner with a stool where he sat and played Verdi’s Four Seasons for his wife’s clientele who were sometimes in line for only a short time and who sometimes stayed and listened and ate more because he played.
Amelia commented on his fingers and the dimples, how she would not have guessed and he turned his hands over and opened them so she could see the callouses and then he turned his hands palm down so she could see how short his nails were, and clean, on one hand and how long they were on his other hand, “For picking,” he said and she said, “Of course,” and “thank you for the magazine.”
They both deplaned at JFK and in a little while they were standing on a curb outside the terminal and he was accepting a cigarette she offered. For a long time they had circled before the plane landed and now they had missed their connecting flights to California and Pennsylvania and the snow on the road beyond the curb was piling up on the cabs that came and went while they smoked two more cigarettes, said nothing about how quiet the snow made everything, how no one called “Taxi!” but the taxis came and went, doors opened and people got in and doors closed but the voices weren’t there. They had cocktails inside; he showed her a picture of his son and she showed him a picture of her grandson and his gold tooth winked at her, his flight was called to board and she watched him away down the concourse, had been watching him in a different way over Kansas when the steward brought a small foil of pretzels and nuts and asked if she wanted another chardonnay, which she didn’t but nodded yes and smiled. She closed her lips quickly over her teeth because she felt something reflected off the steward’s expression, a slip of utter boredom into something akin to surprise, as if he had seen a wink of gold, a glimmer of hidden delights disguised in a weave of age.
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