You wouldn’t think he was an artist with such broad shoulders. But if you paid attention, you saw the ink stains settled into his fingertips, the way his eyes just took everything in.
He came to the café at least twice a week. The girls would fight over him so they could flirt with him. But he finally asked for Beth’s section, realizing she wasn’t making a fuss.
Beth could appreciate a good looking man, but she was more into nerds and intellectuals. So she treated him like the old man he would talk to occasionally, the one who kept asking for her phone number, making them all chuckle good naturedly.
At first, he doodled on the café napkins. Leaving an image of a flower or a kitten with her tip. Then he started a small notebook, penciling the skyline or other café dwellers.
As time went on, his sketching became more elaborate, larger books to draw in, charcoals messily strewn on his table. The café was positioned for some great people watching under the Park Avenue overpass in Pershing Square. From business men to bike messengers speeding by. Everyone in a hurry, but slowed down to a single frame by his skill.
Beth never hustled him. He always tipped well and never came during the lunch rush. He didn’t even mind the running commentary from Stan as he drew the spires of Stark Tower. Beth wondered if he might be an architect student the way he dedicated page after page in his book to it, like he kept trying to find something different each time he drew it.
Then one day the sky opened and the world cracked wide and there were aliens. Honest to god aliens. And heroes. Hero. Her hero. But she knew, she’d seen his resigned eyes outside the bank, he saw her, too, his lips quirked and he squared his shoulders and threw himself back into the fray.
She was on the news, pretty blonde waitress, why not. Captain America she called him. That’s what they called him. She thanked him, but never said what she knew, that he was a hero and an artist.
It was a year before he came back, Steve Rogers, with his notebook filled with Stark Tower now with a glowing ‘A’ for Avengers. He lived there she’d read. Along with Iron Man and the others. Protecting the city, the world.
Beth poured him his coffee, nodded her thanks and left him to his art and Stan’s latest fake alien theory.