He sat up straight and raised his hand like a schoolboy. “I do know that one. It’s informality as an expression of intimacy.”
She experienced a brief moment of wonder that a father who hadn’t taught his son basic Urdu had still thought to teach him this word. “I wouldn’t say intimacy. It’s about feeling comfortable with someone. Comfortable enough to forget good table manners. If done right, it’s a sort of honor you confer on the other person when you feel able to be that comfortable with them, particularly if you haven’t known them long.” The words rushing out to cover how her voice had caught at “intimacy.”
“Okay,” he said, as if accepting a proposition. “Let’s be comfortable with each other beyond table manners.” He pushed his plate toward her. Extravagantly, she dipped the crust of her sandwich into his pasta sauce and leaned forward over his plate to bite into it.
At the end of lunch—a lunch that was relaxed, swift-flowing—he stood up and said, “See you here again one of these days? I’ve discovered that when the coffee machine is working, this place has the best cappuccino in town.”
“I only have afternoon classes, and this is my favorite place to spend my mornings,” she said. In fact, she sometimes went to her second-favorite café when it seemed too crowded in here, but really, what was the need for such fussiness?
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The siblings watched one another, and watched one another watching one another. At least it felt that way, though in all probability she was far more aware of the twins than they were of her. She raised her eyes briefly from the screen to see Eamonn at a table neither too close nor too far away from her, so intent on some story in the local paper that he didn’t take his eyes off the page even as he lifted his mug of coffee and drank. Existing in another world entirely from the one she now inhabited for these few seconds each morning at eleven a.m. Her brother had always been a creature of habit, and that at least was something to be grateful for, else hours of every day might go like this: watching Aneeka waiting for Parvaiz to come online, then that moment when the green check mark appeared next to his name, Isma wondering, What is he saying is he telling her something that will upset her is he asking her to become part of this madness he’s joined oh no please he wouldn’t do that but why can’t he just leave her alone; but every day it was only a few seconds before his name moved into the offline column again. Just after, Aneeka would text Isma to say: he checked in. Check in, one twin used to say to the other when there were school trips or sleepovers that kept them apart, and at some prearranged hour a text would arrive saying nothing more than checking in.
When Parvaiz logged off, followed shortly by Aneeka, Isma felt herself released of the day’s burdens and texted a steaming-mug emoji across the room to Eamonn, who in response went upstairs to buy them both fresh cups of coffee. This too had become part of the morning routine over the last week or so—why pretend she wasn’t keeping track? It was nine days since he decided they should be informal in intimacy together. “What’s happening in the world today?” she asked when he returned and sat down across from her, and he presented her his highlights of the local news stories: a bear was reported clawing at a garage door, traffic in the adjoining town was briefly held up because of a three-car accident in which no one was injured, a statue of Ronald McDonald was reported missing from a family’s garden. She said it was clear the Ronald won gold medal for “most local” of the local news stories, but he disagreed on the grounds that Ronald was a global icon.
Daily, after their elevenses, he’d set off to “wander” by wheel and on foot, a Christopher Columbus of modest ambitions, retracing childhood paths and discovering new ones. He would sometimes arrive at the café the next morning with an offering from his journey: a jug of maple syrup from a sugarhouse, a one-dollar bill he’d found nailed to an oak tree with an oak-leaf shape cut out of it, a rubbing from Emily Dickinson’s gravestone, with its peculiar wording—“CALLED BACK”—which he said made Dickinson sound like a faulty product. She learned more about this part of the world from his retelling than from her own living, but when she asked him the point of it all—imagining a travel book—he said surely experience and observation were point enough. What would happen when his savings ran out, she asked, and he said, actually, those savings he’d mentioned were his mother’s—she had recently semiretired and decided that people gave too much of their lives and relationships to work; while there was no talking her daughter out of her seventeen-hour days, she had quite easily convinced her son to try to find other ways of constructing meaning in life than via paychecks and promotions. Isma found this idea compelling and Eamonn’s less-than-halfhearted pursuit of it disappointing. Surely he should be learning a new language, or piloting a ship through waters where refugees in search of safety were known to capsize in their pitiful dinghies.
In the first few days she had thought he might suggest they do something together past elevenses—a movie, a meal, another walk—but she now understood that she was just part of the way he divided up his days, which had structure in place of content. Between “morning newspaper” and “daily wander” there was “coffee with Isma.” Even the fact that spring break had now started and she’d made it clear she had time on her hands hadn’t changed that.
His father was often a topic of conversation during coffee, but always as “my father,” never as a man in the public eye. The picture Eamonn conjured up, of a devoted, indulgent, practical-joking parent, was so at odds with Isma’s image of the man that she sometimes wondered if the whole thing were an elaborate fiction to disguise the truth about his father. But then she’d observe Eamonn’s unguarded manner and know this wasn’t true.
One morning he was late to the café. She thought it was because of the weather—winter had returned. Snow slashed across the windowpanes, the sky was white, cars alerted cops that they’d overstayed their two-hour parking limit by the depth of snow on their roofs. Just as she’d got past the distraction of his absence and submerged herself in the problem of missing variables for her statistics course, a text arrived from Aneeka: