In Over Her Head by Elsie Russell - Parnasse.com

stuck out from under his arm, catching the light from the door. And
there was the black ponytail.
She retreated as silently as possible, locked herself in her room
and rang Sandro, who answered on the first ring.
Penny didn't wait for him to talk. "He's here, snooping around
the boiler room, I swear. With a roll of bubble wrap under his armwho'd
you think, Santa Claus? Ramón and Bobby aren't around. Come
down? I don't want you to have to go to Mexico again." He was silent
for a moment.
"I come down. Ula is in the bathroom."
Thirty seconds later he was at her door armed with a flashlight.
He was all dressed up with a tie and that new suit of his.
Of course by then both Ng and his bubble wrap were long
gone.
Penny was about to thank Sandro and go into her place when
he whispered, hesitantly, "We go to a café. We must talk. In private.
Obviously you can walk. Do not bring your phone."
They marched in silence through the blinding flurry to Untitled.
He hurried past the front, where you could smoke, to the sunlit back,
where you could talk, although the music discouraged that. The
Japanese tourists shook out umbrellas, surveyed the contents of their
shopping bags from a day of furious shopping, and yelled into their
phones. Tables of doll like girls nibbled at huge pieces of cake and
giggled and nodded back and forth between them.
She sat in the orange swivel chair at the Saarinen table Ula
raved about, under the black sky light, between two wispy Ficus trees.
He went to the counter to order. The table was a little wobbly from
years of abuse, but the wood was still soft as satin. Sandro came back
with a doppio, and an Earl Grey for her, both in paper cups.
He sat in a flimsy old fiberglass chair, his elbows resting on the
wood, hands steepled like a priest about to give a sermon, but he said
nothing for a long time and just looked at his fingertips.
"O, Dio," he whispered to himself and to God.
While she waited she noticed a white mark where his ring
should have been, and the raw redness around the knuckle where it had
scraped the skin during its hasty removal.
"Please forgive give me for what I tell you now."
He looked around the room, and picked at the skin of his lips
with his teeth. Still, people in the room rested their eyes on him as they
ate their cake. He didn't see them. New techno music blasted over the
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