The Bench by the Pond

There's a bench at Lafontaine with a view of the pond and the ducks that have given up migrating.

Today it's a woman in a trench coat with a German magazine folded the wrong way, a coffee, and a phone face-down on the slats that buzzes about every ninety seconds.

I know the arrangement. Reading material, coffee, body angled out. It looks like solitude and it is the exact opposite.

"Sprechen Sie Deutsch?" My accent kills it.

She looks up. "Only when I'm homesick."

Berlin winters, then Montreal winters, then the winter in her marriage, which took four minutes to get to. Her husband thinks she's at yoga. The mat is in the car.

The phone buzzes twice more. She doesn't turn it over.

At ten past she stands up, says something in German I don't catch, and goes toward Rachel.

She leaves the scarf. I don't go after her. I sit there another twenty minutes with it beside me and then I hang it over the back of the bench where she'd see it.

I check the next Tuesday. It's gone. That's all it proves.