It Happened at Cafe Nix

Lunch Rush

Nix blinked and breakfast was over. She snuck a five minute bathroom break and the cafe was full of people ordering lunch, and how many times had she asked one of the waiters to toss those trashy gossip mags someone left behind? They kept reappearing. She scooped them up and binned them herself.

Her ears were still ringing from the squealing at table ten, talk about scare away the seagulls. They didn’t scare away Maria’s horrible fiancé, more’s the pity, though Maria seemed to find her feet anyway. She left the restaurant in better shape than the very, very sunburnt American who’d come in. Lobster had nothing on him. You could almost feel the heat radiating out of his skin, you could certainly hear the amused lilting Southern accent of his companion.

And then there was the woman who got sick, and the adventure bloke from that TV show, and the couple planning their wedding who’d forgotten where they were and canoodled—a tad passionately for midmorning in a crowded public place. They were obviously very much in love, and weddings were stressful, but making out in a cafe was stress of another kind, a floor show for the other patrons. She’d had to pour virtual cold water on them.

It made Nix think of Linc again. There was no talking herself around the fact she loved him. From the bottom of his big bony feet to the top of his never tidy hair. And she missed him and blamed him and was angry with him and oh God, she loved him. He rocked her boat and he’d done that since the day she’d presented him with a stray cat she’d been feeding and didn’t think she should keep.

He’d smiled at her in his lopsided way with his washed out blue eyes and the cat had purred in his hands and really it was game over from that moment. The cat turned out to be a beloved gone missing and Linc turned out to be the beloved Nix had never expected to find. And now she’d lost him, but not because he’d wandered away like a fickle feline, because she had.

She’d known he was committed to his practice, indebted to his eyeballs having newly bought and modernised it, and if that wasn’t enough, he was close to his family and they were all Melbourne born and rusted on.

At first it’d never occurred to either of them they had a problem. It was a Sutherland emergency and Nix had no choice but to move back to Sydney. Linc couldn’t have been more supportive, and she’d fully expected to be back in their shared terrace home in Carlton.

But when it became clear Dad would get sicker before he got better, if he got better at all, decisions had to be made. She’d talked about selling and they’d moved forward as if being separated during the week, with Linc flying to Sydney almost every weekend, was an acceptable way to live.

It wasn’t, and his practice suffered and then the arguments started. Not that it was Linc doing the arguing. He treated her like he might a nervous puppy, with a soft voice and gentle coaxing.

He’d been so patient and she’d been so difficult, but last night on the phone, he’d shown his impatience and she’d let him push her into a corner. She’d come out swinging and he’d stood his ground and there’d been tense silences, strained anger and lies, lies, lies. She wasn’t selling the cafe. She loved it. She’d always loved it, but she’d needed to leave it and learn how to live a different life to appreciate that.

She’d been lying to Linc for months. And he knew it. And he deserved so much more from her. She blinked and her eyes were wet. She wanted her father well again, she wanted to keep the cafe and she wanted Linc. But you didn’t get everything you wanted in life. She only had to remember Henry Jesus and study the patrons of the cafe to know that.

Wayan, one of the kitchen hands, tapped her on the shoulder. “Alvaro says lunch pronto.” He didn’t scurry away and when she didn’t move he said, “He told me to annoy you till you came.”