Emily picked up the pencil. It was a yellow school pencil, chewed once near the ferrule and then abandoned as a bad habit. The point was sharp. She rested her other hand on the edge of the table. She could feel the cool of the chrome and, under it, the faint stickiness where a rag had missed. Caleb was not breathing in any way that could be called casual. Denise’s gold watch ticked against the table when she set her wrist down, a bright insect-sound. Somewhere a register drawer opened.
“Then don’t blink.”
Emily lowered the pencil toward the paper. The point stopped a finger’s width above the second line. It made no mark. The graphite hovered over the wrong number, over the copied sentence, over the boy’s hope and the woman’s sport, and did not touch. The pot on the table sent up a last thread of heat. Nobody at the booth moved. The pencil waited in her hand as if the page had become a surface that could not be trusted with ordinary contact, and the lunch rush, for the length of a held breath, failed to reach them.
What broke the stillness was not Emily. It was Dennis, who had no reverence for stillness and a ticket in his hand. “Club, no tomato, side soup,” he called, and the call was for the two-top by the pie case, not for the window. The sound arrived like weather arriving at a window you had forgotten was open. Emily did not look toward the pass. The pencil remained where it was, a yellow diagonal, a held decision. Caleb’s eyes had gone to the point of it and stuck. Denise, who had been dared not to blink, blinked, and the blink was small and furious and human.
“Well?” Denise said. The amusement was still in the word, but it had to sit beside impatience now, and the two of them did not share the chair gracefully. “The trick is usually faster than this. That’s why people like tricks.”