The Morning Light in San Miguel

The sun came through the window of the casita in a long stripe across the bed. Ari woke up in it and lay still for a minute, blinking, not sure for a second where she was.

She was forty-seven years old and she knew exactly where she was. That was the problem. She just hadn't done it in a while.

The room smelled faintly of lime and cigarette smoke from the cantina, still on her own hair. There was a man asleep beside her, on his stomach, one arm hanging off the mattress. Big man. Gray at the temples. A tattoo on his shoulder blade she hadn't noticed in the dark, some kind of compass.

Ari stared at the ceiling. There was a crack in it that ran from the beam all the way to the corner. She counted her own heartbeats and waited for the anxiety to either pass or get worse.

It did both. That happened a lot with her.

She'd come to San Miguel de Allende alone, the way she did most things. Solo trip, rented casita, a plan to do yoga on the terrace every morning and figure out what the hell the second half of her life was supposed to be about. She'd been at that cantina maybe an hour when he sat down two stools away and asked her, in careful English, if the mezcal there was any good.

She'd said no, it was terrible, and slid hers over so he could verify it himself.

And now it was morning.

Olaf stirred. He rolled onto his side and opened his eyes, and the first thing he did when he saw her was smile. Not a big smile. A small, slow one, as if a door were opening a crack.

"Good," he said. "You are still here."

"I'm still here."

"Good," he said again, like it was the only English word he was sure of. Then, working for it, "I think... I was worried I dreamed you."

"Well. I'm not a dream. I'm sore in places I forgot I had, so I'm pretty sure I'm real."

He laughed at that, a real laugh, deep in the chest. He was fifty-six, he'd told her last night. Retired engineer from somewhere cold that she'd had trouble pronouncing after two mezcals. Minnesota, maybe. She'd have to ask again.

"Sorry," he said, and he did actually look a little sorry. "I hope I was... how do you say. Not too much."

"You were not too much." She sat up against the headboard, pulling the sheet with her, mostly out of habit. "Were you?"

"I hope not." He reached over and touched her arm, just briefly, then pulled his hand back like he'd checked with himself first. He was polite about it in a way that made her chest hurt a little.

"Olaf," she said. "How do you take your coffee?"

"Black. But I make it. You rest." He sat up slowly, the way big men do, and found his pants on the floor by the door. "You like eggs? I can do eggs."

"You don't have to..."

"I know I don't have to. I want to." He said it simply, no weight on it, and went out to the kitchen part of the casita still buttoning his shirt.

Ari lay there a minute longer. Then she got up, found her dress from last night draped over a chair, and pulled it on. There was a staircase at the back of the casita and she could see sky at the top of it, so she went up.

* * *

The rooftop terrace was small, just a few feet of tile with a low wall around it. Bougainvillea spilled over one corner of it, magenta and ridiculous. Below, the street was already awake. A vendor was calling something out in Spanish, the words rolling up between the buildings. Somewhere off toward the center of town, church bells started, slow and spaced out, like they had nowhere to be.

Ari stood at the low wall and breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth, the way she told her students to do it forty hours a week. Her shoulders dropped about an inch.

The light here was different. Everybody said that about San Miguel and she'd thought it was tourist talk, but it was true. It came in gold and sat on things. It sat on the rooftops across the street and on the laundry lines and on the big church over there with the pink stone, and it made even the satellite dishes look intentional.

So why do you feel like this, she thought. Why do you always feel like this the morning after.

She wasn't sad, exactly. She'd had a lovely night. Olaf had been kind and careful and funny in that dry, slow way that men who don't talk much sometimes are. And they'd walked home slowly, sharing a bottle of water from the corner shop, and at her door they'd both said out loud that they were sober enough to know what they wanted, and then asked each other again to be sure, and that was fine too.

It was more that she'd woken up alone so many mornings in the last seventeen years that doing it next to somebody felt like wearing a coat in the wrong season. Not bad. Just unfamiliar. Heavy in a place she wasn't used to carrying weight.

At thirty she'd had that thing with the traveler, the one that ended the way you're supposed to end things, with a hug and an honest conversation at a bus station. Since then, a few casual things. All fine. All gone by morning, mostly by choice, hers.

And here she was, forty-seven, standing on a rented roof in Mexico, feeling something she didn't have a word for.

"You are up early," Olaf said from the stairwell. He came up with two cups and a plate of eggs and set them on the little table by the bougainvillea. "Coffee. Black, like I said."

"Thanks." She took the cup. It was good, strong, better than she expected. "These eggs look great. You didn't have to go to all this trouble."

"I told you. I wanted to." He sat down on the bench and patted the spot next to him, then seemed to think better of it. "If you want. Sit. Or stand. Both is fine."

She sat. She left about a foot between them and he respected the foot, which she liked more than she could explain.

"So," she said. "Last night. The cantina. You asked me about the mezcal."

"I asked you if it was good."

"And I said it was terrible and gave you mine."

"Yes!" He smiled into his coffee. "And then you bought the next round. To prove to me that you were... what was the word. Brave."

"Stubborn."

"That also. You said stubborn." He laughed again, quieter this time. "I thought, this woman is trouble. Good trouble."

"Well." She drank her coffee. Down in the street, the vendor had moved on and a dog had taken up the argument. "I don't usually do this. The staying-for-breakfast thing. In case that matters."

"It matters to you, I think. Not to me in a bad way." He turned to look at her, and his eyes were a gray-blue she hadn't gotten a good look at last night. "I also don't usually. My work, I moved too much. Two girlfriends, long time, both ended because I was always in a new city. Now I am retired and I travel and I thought, maybe I am done with... people. Close people."

"And then?"

"And then you gave me your terrible mezcal." He shrugged, like that explained everything, and maybe it did. "I am glad you were here, Ari. Whatever happens now. I am glad."

Ari looked out at the pink church and the bells finished their round and the morning was warm on her face, and she didn't answer right away, because she was forty-seven years old and she had learned that sometimes it was better to let a thing sit there in the air before you touched it.

Ari finally reached over and touched his arm, just briefly, then took her hand back.

"Me too," she said. "Glad, I mean."

He nodded like that was enough, and for a while it was. They ate the eggs. They were good, actually. Better than she expected from a man who admitted he'd eaten in restaurants for twenty years.

"Engineers," he said, waving his fork at the plate. "We follow instructions very good."

"You followed an egg recipe?"

"There was a card in the kitchen. From the owner. In Spanish and English." He shrugged. "I read the English part twice."

Ari laughed and got up to fetch the sugar bowl off the counter, and when she came back he was holding out his hand for it, and their fingers bumped around the little ceramic dish. It was nothing. It was a hand brushing a hand over a sugar bowl on a rooftop in Mexico. But her arm stayed warm where it happened, and she sat down a little closer than a foot this time, and he didn't move away either.

"Do you take sugar?" he asked.

"Two spoons. I have no illusions about myself."

"Two spoons is honest. One spoon is what people say when they want to seem like the kind of person who takes one spoon."

"Oh my God. Exactly. It's a whole personality."

"My mother took four." He stirred his own coffee. "In Minnesota this is normal. It gets to minus thirty and you drink your four-spoon coffee and you go outside."

"Minus thirty. That's not a real number."

"It is a real number and I grew up in it and went back every Christmas. So now, Mexico." He spread his hands at the rooftops, the bougainvillea, all of it. "I earned this. Every frozen winter, I earned this."

Ari looked at him sideways. Big man, gray at the temples, compass tattoo she'd seen last night when his shirt came off, which had surprised her more than anything else about the evening.

"Can I ask about the tattoo? I didn't ask last night because..." She waved a hand. "Distractions."

"Because we were busy." He said it dry, no heat in it, and she appreciated that. "Ask. A compass. I got it in Tulsa when I was thirty-one. First job where I moved every year. I thought, this way home is always on me."

"Did it work?"

"No!" He smiled. "But it looked good and the girl who did it was very impressed with herself, so. Not a total loss."

Ari laughed so hard she had to set her coffee down. "Okay. Fair."

* * *

They walked down into town around ten. The streets were already busy, tourists and dogs and old men on corners who looked like they'd been assigned those corners for life. Olaf walked slow, which suited her, and he kept stopping to look at doorways like they'd tell him something.

"The colors here," he said. "Nobody in Minnesota would allow this. The paint committee would have a meeting."

"The paint committee."

"There is always a committee, Ari. In every town. This is my life's discovery."

The mercado came up on them in stages, first the smell of cut fruit and then the noise and then all at once they were inside it, stalls packed shoulder to shoulder, somebody's radio competing with somebody else's radio. Ari's Spanish was restaurant-level at best and Olaf's was basically hola and gracias, so they muddled through with hands and eyebrows and the patience of vendors who'd seen worse.

Olaf wanted avocados. He picked each one up and squeezed it with the focus of a man defusing nothing in particular, just an engineer evaluating fruit.

"That one," he said finally, holding one up to Ari like a jeweler.

"It looks the same as the others."

"No. This one is ready. You feel here." He pressed the spot near the stem. "See? The others are lying."

"Avocados lie now!"

"Everything lies. You press and you learn what is true."

She bought tomatoes from a woman who laughed at Ari's accent, kindly, and corrected her twice, and Olaf stood by watching Ari's hands do the talking and didn't try to rescue her, which she noticed and liked. When she got her change she turned around and he was gone, and for a second her stomach did the thing it does, and then he reappeared out of the crowd with a strange look on his face, half pleased, half caught.

"Close your eyes," he said.

"Why?"

"Close them. One second."

She closed them. She heard him say something to somebody in English, slow and loud the way people do, and a woman's voice answering in Spanish, and then a rustle.

"Okay."

In his palm lay a bracelet. Beaded, blue and orange and white, the kind of thing a dozen stalls in this market were selling, and not one of them like another. He held it out a little awkwardly, like he wasn't sure of the protocol.

"The woman there." He pointed. "She makes them herself. She told me. Well, she showed me her hands, and I understood." He cleared his throat. "It looked like... the color of the light here. The gold one. The one this morning. So."

Ari held out her wrist.

"You noticed the light," she said, while he fumbled the little clasp. "The light I was looking at on the roof."