People Watching Backstory

I was sitting in Urban Bean this afternoon doing some work. I was unable to listen to music, because, like always, I had forgotten my one pair of headphones at work. This always makes for some great people watching.

Normally, the people watching gets up to a moderate level of interesting: I've seen cartoonists, graphic designers, study partners, couples fighting, and any number of lone laptop hunchers. I can generally figure out what's going on, more or less, and it generally seems pretty benign.

Today, however, I saw two people I couldn't quite figure out.

A man, maybe in his early or mid twenties, was sitting next to a woman somewhere between twice and three times his age. He was a husky build: not fat, exactly, but not lean. Even in his chair he seemed tall. His hair was cut short but was obviously thick. He was loud.

She was almost his exact opposite: She was meek in stature. She had fine, white hair in a pony tail. When she leaned over to speak to him I could not hear her--her mouth barely even opened.

They both pecked and squinted at laptops; the man's looked about 5 years old, the woman's looked about 10 years old. He shouted into a phone, giving an awkwardly large ramble of information to the person on the other side before asking if they had any studio or one bedroom apartments available. He was asking for openings immediately, or, failing that, the first of May. "I just moved to town and I need something as soon as possible." He made many of these calls, each time asking for the same standard information from people who want to sell it to him; yet, he remained uneasy and spoke quickly, tripping over his words at times.

They seemed to have only two qualifications: they need it cheap and they need it now.

Why don't they have a place to live? And where did them come from?

They don't have a place to live because they picked up and left where they were without a plan. The were in a hurry. Their only change of clothes was probably bought at Wal-Mart at 3am.

They are obviously lovers on the run. They came from Elsewhere--the town where her Old Man started asking too many questions. The man was almost insistent on giving his nonsuspiciously generic name before anything else: a little too eager to cement his new alias, perhaps.

Did they kill her Old Man? Or was he so scorned that he is after them with an ax? Whatever the reason, they fled to Minneapolis, a city small enough to be a less than obvious refuge, big enough to melt into the background.

And then he said "I'm going to MCTC this summer and my mom is going to cosign my lease."

A likely story.