“Right,” he said. “But what about the bill?”
She looked at him across the table. The candle between them had burned down past the paper collar and was working on the tablecloth now, a slow brown ring expanding outward. Neither of them had mentioned it.
“What bill?”
“For this.” He gestured vaguely. At the plates, the glasses, the two hours they’d spent agreeing with each other about things that used to matter. “Someone pays.”
“We split it.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
She knew what he meant. The bill wasn’t for the food. The food was fine. The bill was for the fact that they’d sat here long enough for the conversation to become comfortable, and comfort had a cost she hadn’t agreed to. Comfort meant they’d stopped surprising each other. Comfort meant every point she’d raised was one he could have predicted, and he’d agreed too quickly, and she’d let him.
The brown ring reached her napkin.
“You think agreeing was expensive,” she said.
“I think it was free. That’s the problem. When something’s free you don’t look at the receipt.”
She picked up the napkin. The ring had left a faint mark, a circle that stopped where the fabric started. She folded it in half, which hid the mark but doubled the napkin’s thickness, which made it harder to set back down flat.
“We used to argue,” he said.
“We used to be wrong about different things.”
“And now?”
“Now we’re wrong about the same things. Efficient.”
The candle found something in the tablecloth that burned faster — a thread, a stain, some old sweetness baked into the weave. The flame changed color for a moment. Orange to blue to orange. Neither of them moved to put it out.
“The bill,” he said again, quieter.
She signaled the waiter.
“The bill for the conversation is that the conversation happened,” she said. “You can’t send it back. You ate it.”
The waiter brought the check. The total was reasonable. They split it evenly. They left a good tip. Outside, the air was cooler than either of them had expected, and they stood on the sidewalk for a moment doing the thing where two people who have nothing left to say check their phones to avoid saying so.
“Same time next week?” he asked.
“Sure.”
The candle, inside, was still burning. They’d forgotten to mention it. The waiter would find it, eventually, and pour water on it, and the table would have a mark that looked like something deliberate — a ring, centered and dark, that a future diner would assume was part of the design.