Boston, cafe

When a woman his grandmother’s age entered the café, the boy saw a man’s head, with its dwindling foliage of grey and white, turn as if on cue. From the corner of his own eyes the boy noticed the man’s eyes sparkle. How long had they been together, the boy wondered, as the lady found her way to the man’s table and kissed him lightly on the lip. While they sat across one other, each with a book in a hand, the boy speculated if it was their first marriage or had they both been married once before. Or an adulterous affair, perhaps. Illicit passions acted upon. And every once in a while one of them turned the book over on the table and leaned forward to say something and they talked long and soft, laughing lightly and clamorously at different moments, before returning to their books gleaming below the cafe light. The boy wished for them to have been together since the time they first discovered love half a century ago, and how they must’ve trembled at the threshold of this labyrinth, only to venture ahead hand-in-hand, to learn that it was green and deep and endlessly satisfying.