Of Literature and Lattes, page 8
Zach laughed. “This one too, if I don’t get in God’s way . . . I like this town, and my eldest will start school in the fall here.” Zach took a deep breath. He needed to address another issue that was causing nightmares. “What would you think of our congregations joining for a Labor Day potluck? They’ve had one here every year for the past twenty as far as I can tell, but the woman in charge moved away and I’m not sure whom to ask on such short notice.”
Father Luke chuckled. “I’m not a fan of potlucks. I got food poisoning from a quiche sitting too long in the sun. What do you say to a real barbecue? I’ve got a parishioner who is magic on a smoker. Best ribs and brisket you’ll ever taste. How about St. Francis will host this year, and you all can be our guests?”
“Thank you.” Zach laughed for the first time in three months. “I’d really like that.”
Chapter 11
“When it rains, it pours.”
Jeremy picked up the Morton Salt with its girl in yellow and tapped it back onto the counter next to his cell phone.
“What’s that, Boss?” Brendon paused, then pulled another platter of muffins from the refrigerator.
“You know this started as a proverb, became a brand slogan, got picked up in a country song, and who knows what else . . . Now it’s descriptive of my life.”
At Brendon’s befuddled expression, Jeremy waved his hand to the front. “Never mind.”
Brendon nodded and pushed out through the swinging door.
Lucky kid, Jeremy thought. Not a thing in the world to ripple your waters. Good home life. Great town. Most popular kid at school. The full package.
Jeremy rested both elbows on the cool stainless-steel counter and ran his hands through his hair. He had pushed too hard. Again.
“There are some issues. I can see that. She doesn’t read, Krista, even the most basic words and sounds, with any comfort.” He had meant to start calm and measured in his tone, but as the words landed just as he wanted them to, he toppled over them in his anxiety. “Do you ever read with her? Have you not heard any of this?”
“Yes, I read with her. I’m a good mother, Jeremy,” Krista rushed in. “And you have virtually no responsibilities here, so it’s easy for you to point the finger at me. It costs you nothing.”
“That’s not only not fair but it’s what I’ve been asking for the past three months . . . Give me responsibilities.”
Echoes of his conversations with Ryan and something unspoken but real passed between him and Krista. She shifted away—just as he had done to Ryan. Her voice confirmed it—just as his had—calm and in control, yet teetering on the edge of defensive.
“The doctor’s report isn’t in yet. I’m not going to make any decisions, and especially not label her in some way, until we know what we’re dealing with. Besides, people can get through life without being top-notch readers, Jeremy.”
“Of course they can. But this isn’t a label either. Teaching her differently, according to how her brain works, will help her in every way.”
He thought back to his own middle and high school years, and the classes he’d been required to take, not that he’d ever told Krista, or anyone. It wasn’t about learning for him; it was about recording, assessing, tracking. New home placements often came with new schools, and he was questioned, tested, and given special classes to either “come up to speed” or “acclimate more smoothly” each time. He always suspected he could track his school experience far better from his State of Washington files than from his high school yearbooks. If he were completely honest, he couldn’t separate the homes from the moves from the classes. The constant moving and endless transitioning were isolating. He feared the same for his daughter.
“You shouldn’t move.” He ground out the words.
“How’d you get back there?”
“She needs a stable home. You think moving will help, starting her somewhere new, but you’re changing everything at once. I’m not there, her grandparents won’t be there, you’ll be working all the time, and now they’re talking maybe a whole different learning track.”
Sparks shot through the air. He could feel them torpedo across the line.
“No one has said anything close to that. She’s seven. And we are not having this discussion.”
Jeremy blanched. He had heard those words and that tone only once before, and he would never forget when and where. They were delivered in a harsh staccato with a cadence unlike anything else Krista had ever said. The exact words she’d hurled at him when she walked, six months pregnant, out of their marriage. We are not having this discussion.
And they didn’t.
Nothing more was said. She didn’t engage. She didn’t relent. In fact, the closest he got as she flew home to Illinois was a call from the airport. “There is no shame in an imprudent and quick marriage, Jeremy. Think of this as a conscious uncoupling where two people are mature enough to part ways.”
At the time he’d wondered where she’d gotten those words too. But he didn’t anymore. They had become part of her lexicon.
Yet this sentence, We are not having this discussion, still wielded power.
“We can take it slow. I won’t push—”
Krista had hung up.
Jeremy drew himself back to the present and his Morton Salt container, tapping it against the counter. He straightened as Ryan pushed through the swinging door.
“You got Brendon closing tonight?”
“Yeah, I forgot to tell you. I’m trying to take Becca more. I figure if Krista feels more supported, maybe she won’t move away.” He shook his head, unwilling to confide. “I’ve got to do something. She’s why I moved here, after all.” While he tried to make his words sound light, they fell flat.
Ryan spread his fingers on the counter. “This shop is why I moved here. I came to be your assistant. This kid has been here five days. Why wouldn’t I close?”
Jeremy pushed back from the counter. “Come on, man. You came ’cause you needed out of Seattle. We both know that.”
Ryan looked like he’d been slapped—and figuratively, he had.
“I shouldn’t have said that. But you’ve got enough on your plate, and face it, that kid is more pulled together than both of us on our best days. The luck of birth, right?” Again his quip fell flat. “Look, he said he wanted to stay on through his senior year, so I figured he might as well take on more responsibility from the get-go. We’ve been working unbelievable days this past week. You should appreciate a break.”
“It’s your shop, Boss.” The words were right, but the tone behind them cut.
That had never been an element of their relationship before. Boss and employee. Passive aggression. From day one they’d found a brother in each other. Jeremy reeling from a childhood in which all choices were made for him; Ryan recovering from a youth in which all the choices he made harmed him. Yet the bond that felt so strong when they’d packed the last of Ryan’s boxes into the back of their U-Haul and jumped into Jeremy’s Subaru Forester for the thirty-hour drive, during which they talked nothing but coffee, felt a lifetime ago.
Ryan gestured across the kitchen to the small office tucked into the back corner. No walls divided the space; it was delineated only by a change in flooring. The kitchen’s concrete gave way to wide plank wood slats.
In the remodel, Jeremy told the contractor not to touch that corner. He loved the small office. It felt grounded and wood warm. In the six-by-eight space, with the two corner walls lined by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, sat an old heavy oak desk, probably used and left by some accountant in the 1930s. It was beat up, massive, probably weighed more than the eight-burner industrial stove, and it was too big to get out the door. All of which pleased Jeremy. Something about its permanence and utility appealed to him.
The chair tucked under it was equally large, sturdy, and sat on brass balls. The seat also held the only pillow he hadn’t removed in the remodel. It was an accountant’s green fitted seat cushion, sensible, old, comfortable. It gave the impression that anyone who calculated numbers while sitting on it would always come out in the black.
“We’ve dipped too far into savings. We won’t meet operating expenses soon.”
“Impossible.” Jeremy sighed. “I set the budget. The bank even reviewed and approved it for the loan.”
“We way outspent on the remodel, and for the budget you calculated these first weeks at 80 percent previous revenue. You said that was conservative considering how great we made this place. We’re at 50.”
“So I was wrong. Is that it?” Jeremy stretched to his full height. The move would have been far more intimidating if Ryan hadn’t been only four inches shorter and fifty pounds heavier—and all muscle.
Ryan sighed. “Not wrong. I’m simply trying to tell you what’s up.”
“Do you think I don’t know what’s up? Do you think I don’t know I overspent, and that it’s actually not 50, that instead the shop’s only pulling 43 percent of the Daily Brew’s revenues? Do you think I don’t know that my ‘cushion’ isn’t so fluffy anymore? Do you think I’m oblivious to all this?”
“No. I—”
“No? No what? You think that for all my planning I can’t work out the math behind a simple coffee shop. Revenues have to be higher than expenses, right? It’s that simple. Or am I missing something?”
“Nothing.” Ryan stared at him. “You’ve got it all in hand.” Without another word, he pushed out the alley door.
“Take the rest of the day off,” Jeremy called after him. “That’ll save me twenty bucks an hour.”
Alone he sank into the chair and dropped his head to the desktop. The pounding in his head backed off to a dull thump, and his heart soon steadied its beat. And a sliver of truth broke in so softly he let it wind its way through his thoughts.
He hadn’t known.
He knew Andante was in trouble. That was obvious. Only one full week open and nothing looked like what he’d expected. But he’d made up the 43 percent number. He’d made it up and thrown it out there with anger and bitterness because he had overspent and was caught off guard, and was embarrassed, and was ashamed. Bottom line, he was lost.
He lifted his head and caught sight of Ryan’s worn paperback resting on the edge of the desk. He’d worked after closing yesterday, not asking for or probably even expecting pay, baking another five batches of those semi-dreadful from-a-box blueberry muffins. He must have forgotten it when he stayed late.
He stayed late.
Jeremy repeated this reality as he bent the thin copy of Of Mice and Men in his hands.
And that was how you thanked him, he thought—and dropped his head to the desk again.
Chapter 12
Janet let the cat out the alley door and had just turned to walk back to her studio when a knock echoed through the office. She pushed the door open.
Chesterton scurried across her feet and Alyssa faced her. “He was frantic to get back in.”
“Silly thing, I just let him out.” Janet poked her head out the alley door. Other than a few teenage boys standing with Jeremy’s new hire, Brendon, at the far end of the alley, it was empty.
“What—” Janet stopped. She was about to ask, “What are you doing here?” It was the very question her own mom asked every time she visited her apartment, and it set the hairs on the back of her neck straight on end—not unlike the cat’s when Janet used to try to pick him up.
She rolled the question into a quick statement. “What a lovely surprise. I’m so glad to see you. Come in.”
Alyssa stepped past her and stood in the center of the dark office. She looked smaller to Janet, less formidable than she had when she stormed out of her bedroom two days before. The whole episode, including the circa 2004 clothing, had reminded Janet so much of Alyssa’s high school years that she had spent the rest of that day vacillating between laughter and tears. They’d lasted three minutes in the same room. It did not bode well for the summer or for their relationship.
Now she watched Alyssa look toward the front of the store as if calculating her exit options. Light poured in through the front bay windows, making the books look lit internally, as though their stories were too bright, too colorful, and too alive to remain between their covers. The store glowed. She smiled and glanced to her daughter. Alyssa too held that look of wonder—until she directed her attention back to her mom.
“Remember when you sent me here for my college essays?”
Janet did remember. She remembered all their yelling matches. She remembered every standoff. In the past few months each memory had washed over her anew. And, while revisiting each was painful, the insights gave her hope. What before she had regarded as instances of Alyssa’s ingratitude, obstinance, and petulance were recast in light of her own issues of control, manipulation, and anger. The wave of memory should have broken her, if it hadn’t also become freeing. And if looking back and accepting the past felt freeing, how much better would forgiveness and resolution feel? Janet struggled to hold herself back. Alyssa wasn’t there yet.
“I still have a lot of the books Mrs. Carter gave me.”
Janet straightened. Back then one issue was that Alyssa wanted to handle her college applications herself. But Janet had wanted them to be the best. Mrs. Maddie Carter, the retired English teacher who owned the bookshop and tutored out of a storage closet, was their compromise. But she never knew Maddie had given Alyssa books. Granted, she only became friends with Maddie once she herself started working in the shop three years ago, and only two before Maddie died, but still . . . She’d never known.
“What books?” Janet held her breath in anticipation. Maddie never suggested books without a reason. Her suggestions were personal, indicative, instructive, and life changing. To have such insight into her daughter was both enticing and terrifying.
“The Catcher in the Rye, Bridge to Terabithia, Where the Red Fern Grows . . . I liked that she didn’t give me books I ‘should know’ rather than books I’d enjoy. From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler was one. Kid books, middle-grade books, adult books—age didn’t matter. I’ll never forget Ramona, Katniss Everdeen, and Antonina Zabinski.” Alyssa’s voice sounded wistful, as if she had forgotten them and was only now remembering.
“Voice, courage, companionship, place.”
Alyssa shot her a glance.
Janet shrugged. She should have kept her mouth shut. “That’s what I get from those books and those characters, but it’s probably different for everyone.”
Alyssa nodded, more in a synthesizing information way than an I agree way. “I think I owe you an apology for yesterday.”
Janet felt a snarky You think? rise within her. Her snappy anger still felt like an old comfortable coat she often longed to wear. It was familiar, almost soothing, and for years, she would have let the comment fly and enjoyed the sting it brought both her and Alyssa. My oh my, she ruefully thought, this changing stuff is hard work. She tilted her head to her studio. “Come in here and we can talk.”
Alyssa stepped through the doorway, and Janet watched as a series of emotions played across her face. Alyssa’s first flash of awe and delight made her smile. Yet a sharpness lingered last, and Janet felt her face drop into a frown mirroring her daughter’s.
She trailed Alyssa’s gaze, trying to imagine what she saw, what it said to her, why it irritated her. Janet’s heart sank, because her art was the purest expression of her very self. Her creations covered the walls, some in charcoal, some in delicate watercolor, others made from huge swaths of bright acrylic paint. Two new oil paintings were propped along the walls, and a stack of canvases blocked the doorway to the shop’s powder room.
Alyssa’s eyes drifted up. Janet’s followed. A skylight bathed the room in natural light, and through it she caught a glimpse of cerulean blue. It was going to be a beautiful day.
“What—” Alyssa did not finish her question, as the answer arrived with the asking and she was reminded of a verse that had struck her long ago: For now we see through a glass, darkly . . .
She was under no illusion that the verse referred to a daughter seeing her mother, but the truth of it still applied. She had “seen through a glass darkly.” No, worse than that, she hadn’t seen at all.
The reality of the room clarified so much in her life, and her interpretation of it. Even though she’d never seen her mom hold a paintbrush or doodle with a pencil, she recognized her in every brushstroke and line within the room. And they did not reveal a mom she knew or a life she understood and lived, but a world she had somehow missed. One that should have existed, but never did. Her senses were captured by the creative cacophony. Forget the window displays, she thought, this is where someone shot sunshine and infused all with its life and color.
“You’re an artist,” Alyssa said softly.
She faced her mom and fully absorbed what she’d seen in Chris’s eyes as he met her at the side of the road. He had known her by sight, and looking now, it was so clear why he had. In the three years since she’d moved, Alyssa knew her face had thinned—she was perhaps too thin now. Too much work, too much stress, too little sleep . . . But her mom—she looked better than she had in years. It felt as if across time and space their ages had crept closer together rather than running parallel.
This was not the Janet of three years ago—wan, thin, with dark circles and angry eyes pink from perpetual crying. This was not the Janet of Alyssa’s high school years either, almost brittle in her own need to manage every moment. She was something entirely new, animate, happy, alive—and completely disconcerting.
The rest of the verse drifted to Alyssa’s mind . . . But then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. Again, not about a mother and a daughter, nor about revelations here on earth, yet to see someone or something more clearly than ever before, as if seeing their essence, not just their being, felt as revelatory and consequential.
Janet had always had a certain flair, in decorating, in dress, and in a vocabulary she wielded like a weapon. Despite striving with every single breath of every single day, Alyssa had never measured up, never quite felt secure in Janet’s love. There was her second-grade self-portrait. They’d been studying Van Gogh and other artists, and Alyssa could still feel the pressure of each word delivered during the parents’ tour of their art exhibit. Proportion, dominance, realism, abstraction, and exaggeration. Somehow she’d missed each one. Then, in fourth grade, they got to pick any subject to paint they wanted. She’d painted their house, hoping it could hang in the kitchen over the light switch. But that attempt brought new and different words. Shading, relief, focal point, composition. Some of the words her teacher had taught the class, but clearly Alyssa had again missed in their execution. In response, or maybe retaliation, she had switched to an extra math class in the fifth grade and for her art requirement signed up for choir after school. In fact, her mom never knew about that one art appreciation class she’d taken in college—her only one. Just like Mrs. Carter’s books, that class had been her secret and savory delight.
