Before and After

She met him under a leafy tree that blocked the wind.

She was having coffee and he’d come to her table and said, “Good morning.” After she said nothing, he sat down. She’d slept hard, from eating too much the night before. She’d skipped her lunch yesterday, rising late. She’d slept badly the night before that and eaten spottily. Two days before, last week, clearing Customs at De Gaulle, she’d found her passport missing. She must have left it somewhere earlier. She’d worried for weeks about something like that happening, since she first thought of this trip, months and months ago, and before that, when it was just an idle dream of escape, her thoughts threatening to break in the Kansas drifts.

She turned her back to him. He rose and said, “Meet me tonight,” and pointed a way beyond her.

That night, he took her cold, long hands and kissed them. Then he left her, dark on dark, down the darkened street.

She can’t now recall the name of the street. “Rue” something.