He has one of those handshakes like forklift would have. It’s weird: he has such a manly face, yet it looks so pretty on his daughter, who totally inherited it.
“Hi,” he said.
No, wait. Actually, it was me who spoke first. I said, “servus,” because we were in Austria. This was yesterday evening. “Servus” means “hi,” more or less. I had seen him when I got out of the car to go into the DVD rental place, but only out the corner of my eye and hadn’t recognized him. I told him as much.
“Returning a video?” he said. He shook my hand.
I said something like, Yes, and asked him what he was doing there. He said it had been raining and gestured at his bike in the back of his station-wagon.
“Raining, huh,” I said. Everything was pretty dry, but there were puddles around. I assumed his wife had met him there to drive him the rest of the way home etc., cause there his bike was, right, in the back of the car.
“Well, it was raining pretty hard,” he said. As it had been. On my way home, I had noticed a huge rainbow in my rear view mirror.
“Isn’t that a great sunset?” I said, “Look at those clouds.”
It had been a great day. The sunrise had been nice too, and I didn’t know yet that I was going to suck badly in my cello lesson.
I said bye and he also did and I drove away. I saw him go into the drugstore and talk to someone who I then recognized as his daughter, my daughter’s friend. One of her friends. She has more than one.