She wasn’t listening. I could tell just by looking at her. She had what I liked to think of as her “lizard eyes” on, where she leaned her head back and let her eyelids half closed while she watched you out of the lower half, paying only enough attention to nod and smile at appropriate intervals. I stopped talking in frustration, having forgotten what I was trying to make a point about.
“Why’d you stop?”. She rocked her chair forward and plopped her skinny elbows on the cracked wooden table-top. “Because you weren’t listening anyway” I said in the tone of a sulky child. “Oh, darlin’, of course I was”. She called everyone Darlin’. I got up and walked across the room to the 4-cup Mr. Coffee , my bare feet sticking to the linoleum with every step. It was almost ten of the clock and it was still so hot that I had rivulets of sweat running down my back. There was no coffee left. I sighed and put the pot back.