here & there

I order a cappuccino at my local café (the one I like so well because it seems not local with its selection of wines and its multilingual clientele), make a lame joke involving monks to my theologian companion, and push the rumpled bills across the marble towards the counter girl, saying there you go. The counter girl pushes the cappuccino back towards me, scoops up the bills and puts them in the register drawer, picks out the change and pushes it across the marble towards me, saying in her light accent there you go.

Five minutes later I am still wondering what she was saying in her mind, because I can tell she is doing what I am doing, using that same lame translation in an attempt to smooth this rough edge in human interaction, the thrusting of an object in the direction of another person. I have come to be annoyed by this edge, and in my mind I was saying gerðu svo vel or maybe vær så god. She cannot have been thinking those same words. But I wonder what she was thinking just then, where she was.