She uses short, quick motions to sweep the floor, ending each swipe with an upward flourish sure to send particles into the air. My sandwich and I don’t appreciate it, but the bits of dirt, about the right size for the spaces between boot treads, dutifully play along and allow themselves to be pushed into piles.
The earpieces on her glasses push into the side of her pudgy, pink cheek, but her young, taut skin refuses to wrap around them. Her tan shirt outlines the contour of skin on her back as she moves a chair out of her broom’s way. Dark brown hair, clean and neat, spills down just a few inches below her baseball cap.
Each metal chair skids across the tile floor, the heaviness of the sound belying its size. The area under that table clean, she noisily slides the chairs back into place and keeps sweeping.
She has about half the floor clean now, but a customer making her way down the sandwich line steps around large chunks of dirt.
Three men wearing bright orange t-shirts enter, welcomed by the automatic doorbell’s wordless ping. One of them stops and shuffles his feet on the welcome mat, but still his heavy boots drop tiny clumps of mud in a jagged trail to the sandwich line.
Sweeper’s expression never changes. She continues on her original course while they order, get their food, and leave. Sweep, skid, sweep, sweep.
“At least they didn’t walk in the part you already swept,” I say, and something tells me that was not by accident.
She knows the heavy traffic areas. There for my second time, even I can tell by now that most lunch hour patrons get their food to go.
A woman’s voice comes from the kitchen, where only a head of shaggy, dishwater blonde hair is visible. “That’s what you get in a farming community.” The hair shakes with each word.
The blonde head tilts back and reveals a middle-aged face. A gap-tooth grin spreads across it. “You just do what you can, when you can.” She laughs.
Sweeper remains expressionless and silent, methodically working her way across the floor. Sweep, sweep, sweep. She stops just long enough to look up and take a deep breath.
Her eyes are blue. More unexpected than fetching, they shine through her thin glasses, from below the ball cap, above those high, puffy cheeks. She looks back down and continues the task at hand.
I want to make her say something, but instead I wordlessly carry my empty sandwich wrapper to the fake wood box with the flippy door labeled THANK YOU. Out of habit from my days of wearing an orthodontic retainer, I check the tray one last time before pushing one end through the flap and sliding its contents into the shallow abyss. I stack it with the others.
Sweeper leans the broom on a chair and makes her way toward me with a full dustpan. I cross between her and the THANK YOU box and look directly at her. “You have nice eyes,” I say, trying to appear neither flirtatious nor furtive.
“You, too, sir,” she says as she looks around me at the THANK YOU.
I stand there, certain she heard something else. I raise one eyebrow.
“I mean, um, thank you.” She laughs nervously. “I just thought you said, ‘Have a nice day.’”
I smile. “That’s okay. Do that, too,” I say and turn to leave, back to my own work.
