Two Chairs

Frank had worked the overnight shift at the twenty-four-hour pharmacy for six years. He slept while the neighborhood was awake and woke when it was eating dinner. His friends had stopped inviting him places, politely, the way you stop calling a house where nobody answers.

At two-forty every night a woman in a gray coat came in. She bought one thing, usually gum or a roll of mints, and paid in coins. Then she sat in one of the two plastic chairs beside the blood pressure machine and stayed about twenty minutes, looking at nothing in particular. She never used the machine. Frank never asked. The rule of the night shift was that you did not ask.

For a year they kept to it. She sat. He counted pills. The refrigerators hummed and the automatic doors opened for no one.

One night in February Frank made himself a cup of the strong coffee from the staff room and, before he had really decided to, made a second. He carried it out and set it on the little table between the chairs. He said nothing. He went back behind the counter.

She looked at the cup for a while. Then she picked it up.

“Thank you,” she said.

“It’s not good coffee.”

“No,” she said, and drank all of it.

She stayed forty minutes that night. They did not talk much. She said her husband had worked nights too, at the rail yard. Frank said he had grown up near the rail yard. That was all.

In April she brought her own cup. In May she brought two.

At two-forty, the second chair was not empty anymore.