Mary hides, She hides behind glasses the size of doll saucers, in oversized, shapeless men’s t shirts under baseball caps of indiscriminate color through which her curls escape. Mary hides in the unnecessary kitchen, in a bar that wouldn’t even have a kitchen if the law here didn’t require it. Mary comes through the back door at 5 sharp, clocks in, then pulls a barstool up to the stove where she sits with a book hiding most of her face, waiting, maybe, for an order of nachos to come in. Sometimes she cleans. Sometimes she makes me a snack of grilled cheese without comment, and if the owner stops in, she hides her barstool and lowers her head deep into her cap. The window that separates the kitchen from the bar is a low, short rectangle, just big enough for a show of plates and hands, so if you want to tell Mary something, you have to bend down and cock your head sideways, sort of peering up at Mary on her barstool. To connect with Mary, then, is to somehow pierce the wall, the book, the glasses, the hat, the layers of stained fabric and hair and determined silence. One night, right over the piano playing at the bar, I hear from the kitchen a belch as clear as trumpets, and when I go to check on Mary she mumbles “my stomach’s gone sour” and excuses herself to the bathroom, leaving her barstool knocked over and a puddle on the kitchen tile. Did she pee? Did she vomit?  I grab a mop, and Mary doesn’t walk to the bathroom, she leaves right through the back door in shiny houndstooth pants, soaked and clinging to her legs, and I most remember, after the belch, her little stick legs under those giant cook pants, tiny fragile legs that I find out later carry Mary nearly a mile to the emergency room at Denver Health where she births the baby that she didn’t know she was carrying, and I never saw Mary again.
I did hear from her –once– when she called in sick for Saturday’s service. “I guess I have a baby now, she said, so I won’t be coming back”

And she never did