The Chalk Circle the Kids Draw on the Pavement

You get to Starbucks at 10:15. The Sunday crowd is two families with strollers and a man grading papers. Your usual corner spot is taken by a woman with four empty iced tea cups arranged around her laptop like a fort. You sit at the tall table by the window instead.

The sunlight hits the screen wrong. You shift. A man at the next table, wrestling with a stroller, asks if you could watch his kid’s juice box for thirty seconds while he runs to the bathroom. You say sure. The juice box is apple-cranberry. The cap is one of those push-in straws. The kid, maybe three, draws on a napkin with a blue crayon. She pushes the napkin toward you without looking up. It’s a lopsided circle. You push it back. She pushes it over again.

Her father returns, thanks you. They leave. You fold the napkin and put it in your laptop bag. You finish debugging the onboarding flow. The next Sunday, you take the tall table without thinking. The sunlight is different. You get more done before noon than you usually do in the whole afternoon.

A habit forms. You become the 10:15 tall-table person. The barista with the septum ring starts your pour-over when she sees you walk in. You notice the chalk drawings outside on the pavement — hopscotch grids, suns with too many rays, that same lopsided circle. They get washed away by the evening sprinklers, reappear the next week.

Eight months in, you ship the app. It doesn’t change your weekday job. The Monday meetings are the same. The commute is the same. But Sunday mornings now have a geography: the specific patch of sun on the table, the hiss of the steamer at 10:42, the sound of kids arguing over chalk colors on the hot pavement outside. You don’t know their names. You know the cadence of their games.

You finish your coffee. Outside, a little girl is redrawing the circle. It’s a little less lopsided this time.