FULL WORTH

She was a small woman. Her hands were child-like. Even though Karen had reached the age of thirty, she was easily mistaken for an adolescent from a small distance. When she drove her white sedan, she would hang her arm out the window to make herself feel larger, more non-chalant, more “devil-may-care”, but from the man in the car behind her might just as easily think that someone’s child had taken the family car for a joyride.

Her hands were always moving swiftly, easily tucking her straight nut-brown hair behind an ear, carelessly brushing some imaginary pest aside, and that is what Kevin liked about her; those tiny hands working tirelessly away at his imagination. He was fascinated by those hummingbird movements and how the little jewels of fingernails might feel on his skin if she might accidentally touch him. She was so small. He imagined he could fold her right into his body and easily carry her around inside of his coat all day long if she would let him. Kevin liked to drink his coffee at the stand where she worked instead of rushing off to work just so he could watch her while pretending to stare out the window at the people bustling by. His whole morning routine changed once he found Karen. Before he even knew her name, Kevin began pressing his shirts in the evening and stopped buying ground coffee at the store so he could spend fifteen minutes each morning drinking coffee by Karen and her fluttering hands.

Karen made it a point to smile more than she spoke. She learned long ago that she was rarely heard. It made her so angry that even when people knew her age, knew how intelligent and sparkling her conversation could be, that they still assumed she was child-like. Their patronizing affirmations and the way they steered the conversation back into lighter subjects infuriated her until she stopped trying. She would sit politely by while they unconsciously took up a conversation on health-care or foreign policy with the statuesque woman nearby and easily included a man wearing a ripped t-shirt. “Was it their size? Is it my voice?” She would later chastise herself for not holding their attention, for not being more confident, but it was easier not to begin in the first place. She held a confused anger inside herself, anger for being dismissed so easily and for somehow letting it happen over and over again.

The cigarettes she had smoked since she was fifteen only made her light voice a bit raspy but no lower and had nearly destroyed the laugh she used to covet. So light and careless, her girlfriends used to tell her how much they loved it when she laughed, but she thought a lower voice would be a fair exchange for something she used less and less. But Karen dismissed this as soon as she thought of it. Banished the thought as useless and returned to the coffee counter to relieve Terry of register duty.

Kevin’s job wasn’t demanding, but that might have been the problem. A demanding job might have taken a specialist, and Kevin was just an anybody. He knew that if he failed to show up to work, they could replace him within two weeks, their only worry being "Would the next anybody play a radio in their cubicle or cook smelly food in the microwave". It kept him consistent, and consistency was what kept his feet on the ground, his butt in his office chair, and a respectable distance between himself and everyone else.

It was the safety he felt within time and boundaries that made him fall in love with poetry. He felt like he had been made for poetry; short or long lyrical lines of distilled meaning opened a little door in the back of Kevin's mind. He loved to read the lines of a poem over and over again imagining himself inside of it. Kevin would fly along the lines, suspended by their images; at one moment he was the speaker, then he became the object as quickly as that, he was the writer laying the words down on the page. He relished flying the poem from country side to country side relocating the people and places to new hills, valleys and cities where new people with different accents would take over the narration and plunge the scene into new shades of color.

Karen was his own poem. He watched her lines unfold, savored each moment and drew the words from the curves of her cheek. Something about the way she could slip in and out of his frame of vision was captivating. Half of her face might be visible around the great metal edge of the espresso machine and then it would be gone and for the next five minutes only an elbow would sneak around the edge in a flash of pale skin. These pieces of Karen dipping in and out of view could make his heart swell and tears come to his eyes unless he took a deep breath of the artificially chilled air and trained his eyes back down at his coffee cup. He had drunk his fill for the day and the clock told him he had ten minutes to find his way to his desk two blocks away.

Her days were a waiting game and she knew it. Karen was waiting to be noticed even if it was futile. She was upset by how easy it was for people to dismiss her presence and how she so easily let it happen. She knew she should be working in a real job in marketing, what she studied in school, but she hadn’t put a new resume out into the world in two weeks. Just one more way she let the world roll over her. Her weekly phone calls to her mother were always the same, encouragement to keep searching, keep filling out applications and the lecture about setting up face-to-face meetings with managers. This was easier said than done, and Karen knew how hard she would have to work to make them take her seriously. Thinking about it made her feel tired and heavy inside and it was just as easy to stop thinking about it and give it another week when her anger at herself might urge her into action. For now, she would just keep on showing up to the coffee stand and wait for another day to be measured at her full worth.