During my study-abroad year in London, I worked as a bartender, the latest in a string of unglamorous minimum-wage gigs that kept me afloat through college. Henry, a working-class Londoner, was my manager.
Even with a scholarship to attend Smith College, I still needed paychecks and student loans to cover costs. I was used to money being tight; my parents’ small farm was their life’s work but never very profitable. Most years, my sisters and I qualified for free lunch at school. I can remember my mother tearing up at the grocery store checkout once, when she saw the total.
In London, when my school’s monthlong exam marathon began, I picked up bar shifts that the other students had dropped to study. The nights I used to spend Skyping with my boyfriend in Massachusetts I now spent with Henry in a mostly empty bar.
I loved my London life and wanted to stay, but I had a flight home at the end of May, a summer job, a year left at college and a boyfriend waiting for me. It all felt so mundane, especially when the alternative was falling slowly in love with the handsome, moody bar manager.
Henry and I never crossed any lines, but we talked for hours. He told me about his life, his hardships and his Type-1 diabetes, which he had to manage carefully. My classmates were preparing for summers in Ibiza, but Henry was like me — working to live, earning his way. He felt like a little oasis, a piece of London I could afford. The day I left for home, he texted: “Coffee at Paddington before your train leaves?”
