Paul noticed her right away. She was as incongruous in the coffee shop as if she had black, brown, or yellow skin. Boulder doesn’t have very many members of minorities, the largest concentration of whom may be found on the very successful football team at the University of Colorado. No, she was as Waspish as the rest of the clientele who were enjoying the smell of freshly ground coffee and the warmth of the shop. It was mostly the way she was dressed on a snowy day that had been, unfortunately, all too common in Boulder that particular winter.
She stood awkwardly just inside the door in her long cloth coat and pants which were crumpled over the tops of low-heeled shoes, not snow boots. Her head was uncovered and her hair was a nondescript color, something between light brown and blond. Her face was pale and drawn, the skin stretched tightly over bone. Good cheekbones. He couldn’t tell the color of her eyes; she had dropped them to count the coins in her hand as she stepped forward into the line for coffee. It was a shop in which one served oneself from clean and shiny containers which offered a variety of brews, from French vanilla coffee mocha to dark Colombian to something called a Denver blend.
He would not have kept watching her except that Sandy was prattling on again about how well her interview had gone, and how sure she was that she was going to be the next Paseo girl, doing a series of auto commercials for a Denver television station. She probably would get the role. From time to time Paul glanced at her to simulate interest. Sandy was a very attractive blonde, tall and leggy, and her cheeks were currently flushed prettily from the cold and her enthusiasm for her own apparent good fortune.
The woman had gotten her coffee and was looking around a little shyly and discovering no place to sit — it was very crowded, as it usually was on a weekend, and very few chairs were provided. It was a shop that sold coffee by the pound and the machines dispensing the various flavors existed primarily for purposes of sampling. She put a plastic cover over the cup in her hand and prepared to take it with her.
Idly he watched her progress through the door and back into the cold. Through the window he saw her approach an older-model car.
“Paul, where are you going?”
He was out of his chair and the coffee shop in a moment.
The woman had fallen to her hands and knees and was staring in misery at the large brown stain smoking on the dirty ice and snow.
“Are you all right?”
He carefully knelt on his bad knees beside her, afraid to do more than ask. She should know if she were badly hurt or not.
“Paul?”
He could hear Sandy behind him.
“The coffee,” the woman said desperately.
He helped her to her feet. He could see now that she was younger than he had at first thought, probably only a year or two older than himself. Despite the bulk of her coat, she seemed very thin. She steadied herself on the side of the car, which he noticed was filled with luggage and boxes.
“I’m all right,” she said.
She didn’t look all right. She looked paler than ever and was holding onto the car, which had Texas plates, as though it were a tree in a high wind.
“Don’t go away,” he said. “I’ll get your coffee—”
He turned before she could make an objection and hurried back into the shop. Sandy followed.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked, momentarily distracted from recounting her triumph of yesterday in the studio.
“What does it look like I’m doing? Mission of mercy.”
“Really, Paul.” Sandy’s disapproval was clearly expressed by her tone.
He paid for the coffee and returned to the woman, who had managed to unlock the car and was sitting sideways in the front seat, brushing the snow from her pants. There was a small tear in one knee. The gloves she was wearing were cotton, and though it was now snowing only lightly, it was a very cold January day, and the cloth could offer her hands little protection. He realized that his discomfort had less to do with the cold than with her poverty. The quality of the expensive parka he was wearing now embarrassed him.
He handed her the coffee, and she sucked at it greedily. After a moment, she looked up at him, and he met her eyes with a sense of shock. They were green, green the way the sea is green before it breaks into deep water. He could see the tears of pain in them.
“Thank you,” she said. “You’re very kind.”
“The least I could do for a fellow Texan.”
Paul was starting to feel cold. Sandy had already retreated to the interior of the coffee shop.
The woman had dropped her eyes and continued to drink the coffee, but made no move to swing her legs inside and close the door of the car.
“Drive straight through?” It didn’t look to him as though she could have afforded a night in a motel.
She nodded. “I am... relocating,” she said. “Boulder is prosperous these days. Texas is not.”
Her soft voice had more of a southern accent than the nasality he associated with west Texas, so it surprised him when she told him she was from San Angelo and had come to seek employment in Boulder. He doubted what she had told him. A woman her age was more likely to be running away from something than uprooting herself to seek an opportunity as vague as “prosperity.”
He really was getting cold now. He glanced at the coffee shop and saw Sandy watching them through the window.
“You have a job here?”
“No, I’m looking. Will be looking,” she amended.
Paul stamped his feet against the chill and dug into his parka pocket.
“Here’s today’s paper,” he said. “For the classifieds,” he explained. “I’m finished with it. Look, I have to get back.”
“Thank you,” she said, looking at him again with her arresting eyes as if she were faintly puzzled. “You’ve been very kind.”
“I hope you like it here,” he said and turned away, back to the warmth of the coffee shop and to deal with Sandy’s displeasure. She had driven up from Denver to spend the weekend with him, and he supposed he should be more attentive.
“Finished playing Galahad to the homeless? I’m surprised you didn’t offer to let her move in with you.”
“I doubt she would have accepted the invitation,” he said and realized that he thought that was probably true. Her voice had been educated, cultured. He didn’t know any homeless people, but he didn’t think they routinely sought Boulder in the winter. Or looked and sounded like that. “Lighten up. Like they say, ‘A good deed a day keeps the chaplain at bay.’ ”
“You just made that up.”
To mollify Sandy, he very carefully did not look in the direction of the parking lot again, and by the time they had finished their coffee and made their purchases and left, the car with the Texas plates was gone.
He didn’t see the woman again until the next weekend. Sandy had landed the job representing the car dealership and had declined to come up. There were a dozen things she said she had to do before beginning a new job.
He hadn’t pressed her. He and Sandy had been involved, lived together off and on, for two years, and he was very much aware that it was time either to ask her to marry him or to let them drift apart. Past time really. But he kept putting it off. He found her an agreeable enough companion, no more selfish than many girls her age, and she came from a good family — her father was a state senator whom Paul liked very much. The senator had a fine sense of humor and seemed to have no more expectations in a son-in-law than Paul could satisfy, even though Paul was almost ten years older than Sandy, his second daughter. Paul owned his own business and was reasonably successful, but he had reached his late thirties without feeling the necessity of a wife and family. From what he had read and what Sandy and his mother had told him, this made him a severe risk as a marriage partner. The older he got, the less flexible he would become, or so he had been told. After all, he didn’t want to wind up all alone in life, did he?