Cecelia Ahern - Short Stories - The Every Year Collection

He looked her way and gave her a small smile. He wore a long navy-blue cashmere coat, with a brown Burberry scarf wrapped around his neck. His hands looked cold as he rubbed them together and glanced around the restaurant. Lucy’s heart danced with delight at the man’s request. A young man. Ordinary-looking. No rings on his fingers. A table for one! He had said it proudly, strongly, as if there was nothing at all wrong with it. Lucy loved to hear it roll off his tongue. She wanted to hear it again. A table for one! Halleluiah !

‘I’m sorry, sir, if you don’t have a reservation I’m afraid we can’t accommodate you,’ her colleague apologized.

‘What?’ Lucy snapped, her head turning to face her colleague. It was as if the record she was dancing to in her head had abruptly scratched to a stop.

‘Lucy,’ he hissed, pulling her away from the desk and out of earshot of the gentleman. ‘What are you doing?’

‘We have one table free,’ she defended herself. She pointed down the restaurant at it. There it was by the window with a beautiful view of the park.

‘That’s a table for two,’ her colleague said, dismissing her. ‘We’ll fill that by the end of the night.’ He took a step back towards the desk to the man.

‘We’ll fill it now,’ Lucy said far louder and sharper than she had intended.

‘Excuse me one moment, sir.’ Her colleague spun around on his heel with a face like thunder, ‘What are you doing? he hissed. ‘Are you mad? We’ll make more money with a table for two.’

More money. Lucy’s eyes filled with tears. ‘No.’ Her voice shook quietly. No, she couldn’t let this happen. She couldn’t let being alone lose out to being in love. While she was lost in thought she heard the door open, she looked up and saw a couple approaching them.

‘A table for two, please.’ The man smiled.

‘Do you have a reservation? her colleague asked.

‘No, we don’t.’ They smiled stupidly at each other. ‘This was all very last-minute.’ They gazed into each other’s eyes, their fingers entwined.

‘Certainly, allow me to take your coats.’ He held out his hands and said very softly to the lone man still waiting at the desk. ‘I’m very sorry, sir, we’re fully booked.’

Tears spilled over the brim of Lucy’s eyes. She felt the warm salty water run down her cheeks and drip from her chin. No one noticed her. No one ever did.

She just rattled along, shuddering occasionally through life, doing the same routine, helping people, bringing them from A to B but never joining them, stopping and starting, starting and stopping. Never being allowed to go her own pace or change route.

Well not this time. She dried her eyes.

‘Excuse me, sir?’ she called out loudly to the man pulling the door open.

He stopped and turned.

‘There seems to be a mistake,’ she said politely to the couple before her. ‘This man was here before you and he will be seated at our last table. I’m very sorry for the inconvenience, but my colleague was confused.’ She smiled sympathetically at them.

Her colleague’s jaw dropped and he was faced with the awkward situation of apologizing to the couple.

‘Allow me to take your coat, sir,’ Lucy said, eyes shining as she held her hand out to take the lone gentleman’s coat.

He took her hand in his, it was warm. ‘Thank you,’ he said softly. Lucy blushed.

‘You’re welcome,’ she whispered back.

She took his coat, led him to his table, handed him the menu and lit the candle in the centre of the table.

That night, on the 14th of February, the day she always hated, thirty-year-old Lucy fell in love for the first time, with the man at the table for one.

It quickly became a table for two.

‘Seven and eight, seventy-eight.’

Her age.

Mags threw her eyes up to heaven and grumbled under her breath, in her raspy voice.

‘What’s that love?’ Agatha shouted, moving her ear closer to Mags’s head. ‘You’re going to have to speak up, love, it’s me deaf ear you’re sittin’ beside.’

Mags wrinkled her nose up in disgust as she watched the black wiry hairs clinging to Agatha’s chin bounce up and down as her mouth opened and shut. Her teeth became loose from her palette and were quickly clamped back into place as Agatha’s bloodshot, tired, grey eyes darted around the table to see if anyone had noticed.

Mags threw her eyes up again and mumbled questioningly to the Good Lord.

‘Wha’?’ Agatha’s blue rinse brushed off Mags’s forehead as she leaned in to hear. Mags shook her head and swatted Agatha’s head away as though it were a fly. She concentrated on what was going on ahead of her again.

‘Two and two, twenty-two.’ The year she was born.

She gritted her teeth and exhaled loudly. She leaned slightly to the left in her chair to sneak a glance at how her neighbour was progressing. The woman slowly raised her hand and covered her card. Mags raised her eyes slowly from the wrinkled hand blotched with brown patches, and came face to face with a tight smile.

Mags cleared her throat awkwardly, sat upright in her seat and tried to look insulted as she covered her own card with her hand as if to accuse her neighbour of cheating. The woman grunted and pulled her chair away from Mags. The steel chair legs, which had long lost their rubber grips, screeched along the tired oak floor. Faces winced and looked up. Her neighbour’s face reddened and became buried in her hand as pained expressions stared at the cause of all the noise. Mags ‘hmmphed’ loudly as though she had been victorious in that particular round.

‘WHAT’S EVERYONE LOOKIN’ SO MOANY FOR, MAGS?’ Agatha shouted, while looking around confused. ‘DID SOMEBODY FART?’ She sniffed the air and moved her head around animatedly, not wanting to be left out of the group’s obvious discomfort. ‘I CAN’T SMELL IT, MAGS,’ she shouted again. ‘IS IT AWFUL? IT MUST BE AWFUL.’ She sniffed the air one last time, then shook her head, looking defeated. ‘CAN’T GET IT OVER HERE AT ALL.’

‘AAGH! JAYSUS, I’M DEAF, NOT NUMB, MAGS. WHAT’S WRONG WIT’ YA?’ She looked at her friend with a horrified expression while rubbing her sore side.

‘Would you ever shut your trap, Aggie O’Brien,’ she hissed.

‘WHA’?’ Agatha yelled, moving her head closer to Mags.

Mags stared at the blue-rinse mound of curls that had been shoved in her face and tutted at the patches of pink skin that were visible through the thin wispy hair. After not hearing a reply, Aggie turned to face Mags in order to read her lips. The two thin red lines were pursed, the deep cracks in her skin gathering around her mouth as though being pulled by a drawstring. A crooked finger stood perpendicular to her lips with a bright-red nail ordering her to, Stop!

‘Sshh!’ was all Aggie could just about make out. Then she realized what her friend meant.

‘OH JAYSUS, SORRY, MAGS,’ she yelled a little less loudly but not so much that the surrounding tables couldn’t hear. ‘I DIDN’T REALIZE IT WAS YOU THAT DONE IT. SURE I CAN’T EVEN SMELL IT MESELF AND I’M RIGHT BESIDE YOU.’

Mags’s cheeks pinked as they always did when she was embarrassed, looked as though she had dabbed two balls of baby-pink blusher onto her cheekbones. Her father used to say she was as pretty as the pink carnations that grew in her mother’s flower garden of their country home. A circus clown, her mother had always used to rant angrily as though the very vision of them offended her. Her mother would cover her face in clouds of white powder before Mags would head out to the local dance on a Friday night. No daughter of hers would find a man with awful pink cheeks on her face, especially not her only daughter. The bristles of the powder brush used to scrape away at Mags’s cheeks, causing her eyes to water and her irritated skin to redden even more. Faster and faster her mother would brush, nearly scraping the layer of skin away so it would reveal pure whiteness. The angrier and angrier she would get, the redder and more sore-looking her daughter’s face would become.