The Pen That Wouldn't Write

The café on Linden Street had changed its name twice since Ezra and Soraya had first met there, twelve years earlier. It was called Ground Floor now, and the old velvet chairs had been replaced by metal stools, but the table by the window was still there. It was at that table, at eleven o'clock on a gray Thursday, that they had agreed to sign their divorce papers, with their lawyer joining them by video on Soraya's laptop.

Neither of them had brought a pen. "Who carries pens anymore?" Ezra muttered, and Soraya almost smiled before she remembered not to. She waved at the waiter, a stooped man with gray hair and a spotless white apron, who brought them a pen from a cup by the till. Ezra pressed it against the first page. Nothing came out. He shook it, scribbled on a napkin, breathed on the tip. It stayed stubbornly dry.

The waiter apologized and brought another, and then a third. None of them worked. On the laptop screen, their lawyer kept glancing at his watch. "I've got another client at half past," he said. "Surely someone in there has a pen?" Soraya asked the woman at the next table, who searched her bag and shook her head. Had it not been so absurd, Soraya might have found it irritating. As it was, she began to laugh, and after a moment, so did Ezra.

It was the first time they had laughed together in over a year, and it caught them both off guard. Ezra looked out of the window at the rain. "Do you remember the first time we sat here?" he asked. She did. They had argued for two hours about a book neither of them had finished, and missed the last bus, and walked home in the rain. "We were terrible at ending conversations," she said. "We still are," said Ezra. Not until the lawyer cleared his throat did either of them look back at the screen.

In the end, they agreed to sign the following week instead. The lawyer, visibly relieved, logged off. Neither of them stood up. Ezra ordered two coffees, and they sat there without the papers between them for the first time in months, talking about nothing in particular, which was the thing they had always been best at.

Only when she went up to the counter to pay did Soraya take a proper look at the waiter. Twelve years had made him grayer and slower, but he was unmistakably the same man. That rainy night, he had brought them a second pot of tea and refused to let them pay for it. He caught her eye and said nothing. Then, as she watched, he took a handful of pens out of his apron pocket and dropped them, one by one, back into the cup by the till. On the napkin beside the cup, someone had tested them. Every one of them worked.