The cocoa at half past one

The hot chocolate was still there when Greta Sonnenschein pushed open the door.

One-thirty in the morning, and the neon sign outside was doing what neon signs in Norristown always did: it flickered. S-U-N-O-C-O, then just S-U-N, then all of it again. The parking lot behind it was empty except for her Ford Tempo, which sat under the November sky like something forgotten. The air smelled of exhaust fumes and the beginning of frost, and inside, as soon as the door closed behind her, of machine oil and stale coffee from a machine no one had cleaned in weeks.

Greta didn't know that smell yet. That would change.

On the passenger seat of her car, neatly folded like something one wouldn't really want to touch, lay the divorce papers. Dale Sonnenschein's signature was ink-black and neat, just as he had always been: neat. Greta hadn't looked at them the entire drive. Still, she knew exactly where the pages were.

She had come in for cigarettes.

Or so she told herself. She hadn't smoked in four years, but there are nights when your hands long for something to hold, something that burns between your fingers, that gives you a reason to breathe and not to breathe all at once. Her leather jacket was the old one she'd had since college, the studs on the left sleeve gnawed down to the metal, the seams of the collar more faded than the rest. Dale had hated it. That was no longer an argument.

The man behind the counter looked up as the door let in the cold.

Twenty-seven, no, twenty-nine, as she would later find out, with dark hair he didn't comb because at one-thirty in the morning he didn't expect anyone to care. Blue Sunoco shirt, the top two buttons open. Eyes that remained calm, factual, without the sizing up or the silent invitation that men's eyes in gas stations sometimes do when a woman comes in at one-thirty. He looked at her like someone who sees.

"Marlboro," Greta said. Her voice sounded rougher than intended. Three weeks since the separation, four days since the papers, and she hadn't really talked to anyone, not about the weather, not about anything.

He turned to the shelf.

Greta placed her hands on the counter and only then realized she was trembling. A fine, barely visible tremor that comes when the body has taken hours to admit it won't sleep but still doesn't want to move. Her hands on the white plastic of the counter: unbrushed hair, no makeup, thirty-nine nights without proper sleep, even though she was only a thirty-six-year-old woman.

The man behind the counter hadn't turned around. Still.

When he stood there again, he held the Marlboros and also a cup of hot chocolate from the machine on the wall, which was cheap and sweet and smelled of childhood, of the kind of comfort that asks for nothing. He placed both on the counter. Stated the price of the cigarettes. Said not a word about the hot chocolate.

Greta looked at him.

He looked back: neutral, patient, without explanation.

She paid for the cigarettes. She took the hot chocolate. He asked for nothing.

Outside, in the Ford Tempo, she didn't smoke a cigarette. She sat there and drank the hot chocolate, which was made from powder and hot water and tasted of nothing special, except that it was warm and someone had made it for her without needing a reason. On the passenger seat lay the divorce papers. She looked at them. She didn't refold them. They rode home with her.

The next evening she came back. One-thirty, almost to the minute.

She didn't buy cigarettes. The hot chocolate was on the counter before she had even asked.

That's how it started.

---

Three weeks.

There's a word for what grew between Greta Sonnenschein and Danny Kowalczyk in those three weeks, but it's not a romantic word. It's a quieter word: habit. Or perhaps: reliability. The kind you don't discuss, because discussing it would break something that is just starting to sustain itself.

She came at one-thirty. He made the hot chocolate. Sometimes she bought something, gum, a pack of butter cookies, once, in a fit of honesty, a single banana, but that wasn't the reason. The reason was the linoleum and the flickering neon and the smell of machine oil and the fact that Danny Kowalczyk didn't ask her why she was there at one-thirty in the morning, but simply scanned her banana and said, "Have a good evening," as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

It took one night for Greta to understand what she had done. And then another until she stopped pretending she hadn't understood.

The first night was simple: she had been on her way home, had gotten onto I-76, and still had the taste of hot chocolate in her mouth, that cheap, powdery sweet taste that actually tasted of nothing, and had thought: I'm going to miss that tomorrow. Him. This knowledge had settled in her chest like a pebble in a too-tight shoe, and she had driven home and thrown the keys onto the kitchen counter and told herself, not today.

Maybe tomorrow. But not today.

Her townhouse on Elm Street, Conshohocken, was what real estate agents liked to call "spacious for one person": four rooms, two of which she had filled with boxes she would never unpack, because unpacking would have meant she was settling in. The hallway smelled of fresh paint and the old carpet underneath. The kitchen had a window overlooking the alley, and when Greta stood at the sink, she saw the back of the neighbors' houses, their trash cans, the light in a window that sometimes still burned at three in the morning, and she sometimes wondered if someone else was sitting there, unable to sleep.

She made instant coffee. The coffeepot stood on the stove: old, a wedding gift that Dale hadn't wanted during the separation because he had a better one. Greta had taken it, for no other reason than that it was still good. The coffee she now drank from it was from the cheapest jar on the shelf at Giant, spoonful by spoonful, and it tasted of hot water with a hint of bitterness, just like the night that was just beginning to drag on.

The phone hung on the wall next to the refrigerator and didn't ring. It had rung three times that week: once her sister Bea, asking if she was okay and actually wanting to know if it was about Dale, which Greta answered with a "Sure." Once her landlord about a form. Once someone had hung up without speaking.

She drank the coffee and looked at the boxes.

On the top box, in her handwriting, with the red Sharpie that hadn't dried out back then, was written: KITCHEN MISCELLANEOUS. Below it: BOOKS. Below that: BOOKS 2. Three boxes of books, and none of them were open, because having the books on the floor would have meant the shelves still had to be hung, and that was a decision, a decision for this house, and decisions for houses came after decisions for men, and decisions for men.

Greta put the coffee mug in the sink.

A man behind a gas station counter in Norristown, Pennsylvania, who had given her no reason to think anything. He made the hot chocolate because he had such a machine, and because it was one-thirty in the morning, and because that's what you do at one-thirty in the morning when you see a woman who looks like she needs something to warm her up. That was all. That was the whole story.

She went to bed. She didn't sleep.

The next evening, she didn't drive to the gas station either.

The evening after that, she got up at a quarter past one, put on her leather jacket, grabbed her keys, and then sat back down on the edge of the bed and let the keys fall to the floor. He was twenty-nine. She was thirty-six, fresh out of a divorce, and had two rooms full of boxes waiting for her like unspoken accusations. There were certain doors in life where you knew, before you opened them, that you might not be able to close them again. Greta knew those doors. She had opened one at twenty and walked through it for thirteen years.

She left the keys on the floor.

Danny Kowalczyk noticed the empty counter at one-thirty, like one notices a gap on a shelf where something once stood that one would never have claimed to like. He made the hot chocolate anyway. At two-thirty it was still there. At three it had cooled, and Danny had poured it out and made a new one, just in case, without thinking why. At four he drank it himself, because it was pointless, and it tasted too sweet and of nothing special.

On the second evening, he didn't make it.

On the third evening, after his shift, he drove slowly down Elm Street.

He didn't know her address. He had never asked. What he knew was the direction: she always turned left out of the parking lot, always toward Conshohocken Road. He drove slowly, house number by house number, telling himself he would just drive until he recognized her car. It was a dark blue Subaru with a scratch on the passenger door. He had seen it often enough.

Elm Street was quiet enough just after midnight that Greta could hear the hum of the streetlamp as she drove up the driveway. The car was already stopped before she knew what she had seen: a figure in front of her doorstep, dark against the dim light, hands in his pockets, and next to him a small brown paper bag, sitting on the step like something that had been waiting for a while.

Danny Kowalczyk looked up as the headlights hit him.

He had told her that last Saturday, in that truncated half-sentence she had at first taken for a ploy and then put away, there, in the area where you put things you don't quite want to categorize: *first free Saturday since October*. She had nodded and taken the receipt. Now he stood on her doorstep, and the receipt had actually been important all along.

She got out. The air smelled of grass and damp asphalt, and somewhere a dog barked once briefly and then gave up.

"I'm off today," he said. No apology, no question if it was okay. Just the statement.

"You told me that," Greta replied.

"Yeah."

She looked at the bag. He said, "Hot chocolate powder. The good stuff, from the store." A short pause. "The machine stuff was the other one."

Greta stood three meters away from him, keys in hand, her leather jacket over her arm, and in her chest was something that felt like dizziness, but more upright. As if someone had rearranged all the boxes in the hallway, and now the path to the door was different, and she had to recalculate briefly.

She opened the door. She let him in.

The hallway smelled of paint and the old carpet underneath, just as always. Danny stepped in, looked briefly at the boxes, said nothing, and Greta turned on the light in the kitchen, because the ceiling light in the hallway was still that one switch she hadn't found. The light in the kitchen was the best in the house: warm, a little yellow, the window to the alley dark and fogged.

He placed the bag on the counter. She took off her jacket.

It was a moment, one of those that are actually nothing and yet everything. His back was to her, he was reading the back of the hot chocolate packet, though he didn't need the instructions, and Greta saw his neck, the way his hair ended there, and the breadth of his shoulders under the simple flannel shirt. She thought of all the nights she had been that counter, all the glass between them, and how that had protected her.

She approached him from behind, placed her hands on his back, felt his breath catch. He turned around. She pushed him against the refrigerator.

He allowed it. His hands rested for a second too long at his sides, then they came up, and he had her at her hips, firm, with a grip that asked nothing but knew everything. Greta felt the cool metal of the refrigerator against the back of her hands as he moved forward, and then his mouth was on hers, and it tasted of nothing special and of exactly that.

He kissed slowly. Deliberately slowly, as if he had time, as if this was a decision he had already made before he had stood at her door. She unbuttoned his shirt, fingers on warm flannel, and he slid her jacket off her shoulders, and then there was little fabric between them and even less patience.

He lifted her onto the sink.

She managed to briefly see the window, the alley outside, the quiet slice of Norristown at one in the morning, and then her legs were around his hips and his hands were at her waist, and the thought of the window had become irrelevant. He pulled her shirt over her head. She felt his lips on her collarbone, on her shoulder, on the spot below her ear that silently and directly drove her out of her mind.

"Danny," she said.

He lifted his head. Looked at her. Those eyes that always just saw, without judging.

"Yes," he said. An answer.

They took off the rest of their clothes, there in the kitchen, somewhat awkwardly, because sinks are not particularly good places for that, but neither of them minded. He was slender, but not narrow, and had a scar on his left forearm that she would later ask him about, and on his shoulder blades, when he leaned forward, she actually saw dimples. Anatomical. Truly.

He had had no choice, the bed had been too full of boxes.

Greta had it first, he had carried her, and then together they had placed two boxes in the hallway, one of them the one with BOOKS 2, and he had lost his shoes and she her composure, and then it had continued, quietly and not quietly, with pauses in between, in which the bare light bulb on the ceiling bathed the room in that subdued yellow that Greta had always wanted to change and never had.

The pauses were the best.

In the first, Danny lay on his back, his arm under her head, and Greta saw the dimples on his shoulder blades. She said it aloud: "You have dimples. Even back there." He laughed, short and genuine, a laugh without performance, and the sound of it in this room with the unpacked boxes was so unexpectedly normal that something in Greta gave way, something she hadn't even known she was holding onto. She laid her head on his chest and listened to his heartbeat, slow and persistent, like everything about him.

In the second pause, they talked. About nothing important, as he said. About everything, as it felt. He asked her about the townhouse, how long she'd been there, and she said: four months. He nodded. She asked him about the scar on his forearm. He showed it to her, an old thing, a tool, nothing dramatic, and she traced it with her finger, a gesture without meaning and yet with it.

Around six, the light behind the curtain changed. Greta noticed it first, that shift from black to a muted grey, and then she got up and pulled on Danny's flannel shirt, which had been on the floor.

He came into the kitchen shortly after, in his jeans and shirtless and without apology for it, and she saw him take the brown paper bag from the night before from the edge of the sink and pull out the hot chocolate powder. He knew her kitchen well enough by now to find the pot in the second cupboard. The water from the tap ran cold a second too long before it warmed up, and he waited, without wasting time, because he was a man who waited.

Greta sat at the kitchen table and watched him.

Two mugs, both from the shelf on the left, the only shelf she had unpacked, because you need mugs before you need books. He stirred both, placed one in front of her.

"You're looking at me like you're about to run away," Danny said.

Greta took the mug with both hands. The warmth passed through the clay, through her palms, into her wrists. Outside, Conshohocken began to begin itself: a car somewhere, the muffled routine of a Saturday starting.

"I'm still here," she said.

He sat opposite her. The silence between them was one that didn't need to be filled. Greta slid the mug across the table to him, placed her hand on his, and looked at him, and the smile that came belonged to no one but the moment: "Next week, I'll make the hot chocolate."

Danny turned his palm over and held her fingers tight. Outside, Norristown slowly brightened.

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