Like a love letter left in a tip jar

She said tell me how we met. She was always asking me questions like this, the ones she knew the answer to, probing my recollection. I wondered if she was hoping to find some seam to pull away, exposing baseboards or rotting out foundation or what. I said you tell me.

And the story she told while we drove in the midnight rain weary from all day in the car and neither of us bothering to change the music when it ended, well, that story was one worth telling, it had a beginning and a middle and no end. It was about youth and love and tripping over honesty unexpectedly. All these little details. She had liked my shirt. She had thought it was funny when I had dropped my keys while trying to put them in my pocket, but she hadn’t said it. She had thought I seemed warm when I laughed but that it was somehow hard for me to do.

Lightning spread out from the clouds, leaving us both momentarily lost in the pattern fading out into that closed-in darkness. She stopped talking long enough for me to consider what I would have said. It was lousy. That much I knew. It would be blunt and factual without any truth. She hummed a few notes from the song that had ended half an hour before. Then she started in again, and in between her sleepy words there were seams, and if I pulled at the seams, I would see what it was to be good and human and happy.