“Can you remember what you were doing the day before we met Larry?” She lifted her coffee cup to her mouth with both hands and looked at him through the steam.

Over her shoulder he saw an elderly couple walk through the front door of the diner. They were covered in fur. Huge fur coats down to their ankles and big round fur hats. They shuffled to the counter like they’d walked in from the bear sanctuary in the National Park.

She was smiling but he could see uncertainty in her mouth. He noticed the spidery lines that were gathering around her eyes as she passed her prime. Crockery clattered around them as a waitress cleared tables. The mid-morning rush was dying down.

She loved to do this, he thought, it was one of her things. There’d be a lull in the talk and she’d come up with a task. It felt like homework.

“Gina I don’t know. How about you?”

“Sure I do. It was my birthday remember? You said you wished we’d met the day before, then you could have bought me a present. I worked my birthday in that shitty diner. Another goddamn twelve hour shift being looked up and down by greasy truckers while I put plate after plate of burger crap in front of them.”

“You’d want to forget a birthday like that.”

She smiled a little. “Jesus that was the lousiest job I ever had.” She glanced around the room then back at him with nervy flicks of her eyes. She was waiting for something more.

“Let me think,” he began, looked away, tried to remember, tried to think what she wanted to hear. The grizzly bear couple were sliding into the table behind Gina, grunting and squeezing their fur-clad bodies along the vinyl seats. “So yeah, what was it six months ago? I was probably having one more shit day too.”

He spooned sugar into his coffee. Buying time. Now Gina was staring at him. He stirred the coffee.

“I just got to thinking,” she said. “We were both going along doing all the usual things. Drinking coffee, working, talking, eating and we didn’t know, did we? What was going to happen next. It all changed just because I went to Sarah’s party after my shift. I didn’t want to go, I was exhausted. Then we met. I met you. You met me. And here we are. This might not have happened. We might not have happened.”

Larry remembered the party. Her lush friend Sarah, pressing her gin-soaked thigh against him in the kitchen while her husband did Travolta impressions in the living room. Gina caught his eye over Sarah’s shoulder while she poured herself whisky and tipped her glass at him. Sarah told him it was Gina’s birthday then slumped onto a kitchen chair and passed out. Half an hour later he and Gina were swaying back to her place.

The male grizzly was slurping coffee and shovelling apple pie and cream into his beard. Somewhere in there he must have a mouth. Larry couldn’t concentrate on what Gina was saying. The fur people were talking now, grunting to each other.

“Larry? Don’t you think that’s amazing? Think about it. Millions of people living their lives, going along their own way and having chance meetings with other humans that change their lives forever.”

“Yeah Gina, it’s amazing.”

They were watching TV that night. At Gina’s. Mountains, glaciers, forests, lakes. Her head on his shoulder. Two bears lumbered along the shore of a lake. Her hair on his cheek. His eyes drooped. His head fell. He woke with a start.

“Hey Larry. Come on, let’s go to bed.”

She took him by the hand to the bedroom. Dark shapes hulked in the corners of the room.

“Hold me Gina,” he whispered.

He fell into her arms.