eggs and burgers, waffles and salads, nibbles and entrees, and, from time to time, the occasional four-course tasting menu. It is all things to all people, at a low-to-medium price point. Harriet’s casts a net wide enough to catch Owen, the early-morning corporate crowd, the mid-morning grannies, the old men with non-ironic moustaches, the young mums and babies, and the rest of the neighbourhood hipsters who are already more conversant with Arabica growing altitudes and avocado varietals at the age of twenty-one than Owen will ever be. Every so often, he considers finding another breakfast place that is more authentic, that is less obviously pandering. But the restaurant can only survive for so long, with its foie gras toast triangles and its greasy grilled cheeses, so he might as well enjoy it while he can. Though there are always lineups now.
Once he’s seated, Owen awaits the server with an impatience that nettles him all the more for being unexpressed. He straightens a crease in his paper placemat, noticing at the same time that there are words on the back. He flips it over. The reverse of the placemat is for kids: a picture to colour, a maze, a tic-tac-toe grid, and a connect-the-dots puzzle with so many dots crowded together he can make out the image at once—a grinning fish with a bow tie.
Owen tries to catch the eye of his preferred waitress, while wondering if connect-the-dots is a lost art. When he was a child, there was an old book of them around the farmhouse from the forties or fifties, and he remembers doing them with his cousin, and how far apart the numbers were spaced. The pictures remained unfathomable until they began to trace lines in arcs across the page to reveal a dog, a hatching chick, a Christmas stocking. With another look at the puzzle in front of him, he wonders if he has only forgotten what it’s like to be a child, how not to see at a glance the shape of an ending before you begin. Before images, ideas, events, and even people began to be as predictable as the alphabet. Maybe a child today would find this puzzle just as difficult. If only there was one near at hand he could ask.
When the waitress comes—an acerbic redhead about whom he occasionally fantasizes—she sets down a cup of coffee and confirms his regular order. Poached eggs, sourdough toast, an arugula side salad. During the first forty-three years of his life, he never ate poached eggs, and he never ate arugula, at least not on purpose, though he consumed it willingly enough if Rachel put it on his plate. But Owen, through no inclination of his own, is the recipient of a new life, a new start. Perhaps not really so new anymore, four years in, but only now does it finally feel like his own. A new apartment, new furniture. No new friends, but he has managed to keep the few he had, which is more than most men his age can say. He has a new book out that is also not really new, but it is still being talked about because of its tenacious snail’s pace up the bestseller lists. It is what his agent calls a phenomenon, mainly because he can’t understand how it became such a success, though Andy has alternately tried to attribute it to excellent word of mouth or, given the subject matter, existential despair. Five years ago Andy was surprised to hear from him again, but now he is busy making esoteric deals for Owen’s phenomenal book that Owen barely even comprehends, like the one with the video game studio he’s going to visit after breakfast.
He has a new routine, too. His small-town homebody ways from his years in Lansdowne are gone. On mornings he has appointments, Owen likes to go out for breakfast at this diner-bistro. On other days, he gets up early and goes over to Greenpoint, where he keeps his ocean shell, the same one that Rachel bought him when she still loved him, and rows out from the creek into the East River, going up and back or down and back, depending on the current. Even the river here—really a saltwater tidal strait—is more dynamic than what he’s used to. It changes direction every six hours.
While he waits for his breakfast, he searches in his bag for a pencil and then traces through the dots until the fish and its bow tie are clear