She’d gotten the long distance number from Information and dials it carefully. This time she hopes to stay on and speak, to not change her mind and hang up. She focuses on the phone in front of her while waiting for the call to go through, willing him to be home. On the second ring, a hand reaches over her shoulder and firmly disconnects the call.
“Unless you’re calling me, you don’t need to be on the phone.”
Without turning around, Maris closes her eyes. He takes the receiver from her hand and returns it to the telephone cradle, his hand staying on the receiver, reaching around her and blocking her in.
“Maris. Hey, what are you doing?” Jason asks quietly.
He steps close behind her. She can’t move at all unless she turns into his arms. But the anger, and disbelief, comes through in his words and it stops her.
“I’ve been out of my mind worrying about you. What did you think,” he asks from behind her, his mouth close to her ear, “that I wasn’t waiting to hear from you? To see you?” He takes a long breath before pressing his mouth against her hair. “To hold you? Jesus Christ, I’ve been all over the state looking for you.”
She’s glad he can’t see over her shoulder, can’t know her eyes close tightly against the thought of him panicking.
“Talk to me,” he tells her.
“I was calling your house,” she begins, fighting the burning tears. “I didn’t have your cell number.” She turns, but he keeps his hand on the telephone, walling off the other callers. There is no room between them. She can only look at his eyes. “Please believe me.”
“To say goodbye? Is that it? You were going to see me off over the telephone?”
“No,” she says, crying now as his arm moves around her and pulls her closer. “I was afraid. I didn’t know what to do.”
He hesitates before holding her head to his shoulder and rocking gently, embracing her tighter until she feels like he’ll never let go. “Do you know there’s an A.P.B. out for you?” he asks, gently stroking her hair.
It seems like he still doesn’t believe that she is here in his arms, with the insistent way his hand moves over her head. That, and the thought of her friends searching for her, worrying about her, has her give up on the tears. They keep coming. She feels Jason shift his stance, feels his head lower, his mouth near her ear. “Don’t go, Maris.”
She can’t talk. She can only feel him move closer still, turn his head away and take another deep breath before he turns his face back to her.
“Don’t leave me,” he says.
“No,” she whispers. She pulls back and touches his face. “I’m not. I’m not leaving.”
His fingers tangle in her hair. “Do you know how scared I was?” he asks, searching her eyes. “For you?”
“I thought I had to get away, it was all too much. Just too much. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Shh. It’s okay, sweetheart. Of course I do.” His thumb catches a tear on her cheek. “Let’s go sit down.”
When she nods and steps back, he picks up her duffel and slips an arm around her shoulder, glancing down at her and speaking quietly. His gait shows fatigue. They walk to a coffee shop at the other end of the airport. Inside the café, an entire curved wall of windows faces the wide airfield. Dreams and lives take flight there, she knows. Hers have in the past.
It takes a moment for Maris to compose herself in their booth. She sets down her handbag, twists her watch into place, wipes her face with a tissue. When she looks up, Jason leans across the table and slips her hair behind an ear, then takes off his long sleeve shirt and hands it to her to put over her shoulders.
“Jason,” she says from behind more tears. “I’m sorry. I am so sorry for doing this to you today, for making you worry.”
He reaches for her hand and holds it on the table. “Don’t apologize, sweetheart. I’ve been there, too. Just let me help you.”
“You know, earlier I was thinking how I couldn’t stay, that every single day here was all because of my mother’s car skidding on black ice. That everyone I know at Stony Point I sadly only know because of that one November afternoon when my mother died, and I wasn’t sure how to handle it.”
He doesn’t speak, and she senses that he won’t. Not until she’s said everything.
“And then, I knew. Somehow, I knew that you, and everyone at the beach. You know. The whole gang.” She smiles through her tears then. “You’re all what saved me.”
Jason leans over the table, holds her face and kisses her then. “Have you eaten at all?” he asks when he sits again.
“Not since breakfast.”
“We’ll have a coffee here. Then you need something good to eat. But first a hot coffee,” he tells her as the waitress sets down a silver carafe and two large mugs.
“How did you know I was here?”
“It was something you said about Chicago, remember?” He lifts the carafe and fills her mug. “That troubles can’t find you there?”
Maris nods and adds cream to the black coffee.
“I thought that whatever went down at your attorney’s office shook you up pretty bad. Bad enough to chase you back to Chicago.”
“It almost did,” Maris says quietly. “But what it really did, after I thought about it, was make me realize how much things have changed this summer.” She touches her star pendant. “How things can really change in an instant. Life can pivot on one moment. I just didn’t know how to face all that I learned today. Everything, I mean. It’s too huge.”
“About Eva?”
“Yes. I still can’t believe it. I have a sister.”
“She knows.” He takes a long drink of his coffee, then tops off his mug. “Everybody’s pretty surprised. And we thought the worst about how you’d taken the news.”
“Oh I love the idea, but it hurts to think about what I’ve lost, too, for the past thirty years. I mean, thirty years!”
“I know. But it could have easily been so different. Imagine if you’d never known Eva.”
“How is she?” Maris asks, taking a sip of her steaming coffee.
“Eva?”
“My sister.” She smiles then. “I can’t say it enough. My sister.”
“She’s worried sick about you,” he tells her. “Everyone is, really. Kyle, Lauren, Theresa and Ned. They’re all at Eva’s house.” He pauses, his thumb stroking her hand.
“What do you think of it all?” she asks him. “Isn’t it crazy?”
“I think it’s amazing. Theresa and Ned are to be commended. So they made some mistakes, okay, but look what they accomplished, too. You’re one lucky lady, and so is Eva.”
“I have to talk to her.”
“It’s late now, and you’re tired. I’ll call and let her know you’re all right and you can rest and think about things tonight. We’ll go have dinner somewhere quiet, okay?”
She nods. “What about my car?”
“I’ll come for it tomorrow with Matt. That’ll give you the afternoon with Eva. But I want you with me tonight. I thought I’d lost you, Maris.”
Maris looks across the room at a jet lumbering into the sky, climbing slowly past the large windowed wall, the sounding might of its engines pressing its way into the room.
“Your flight?” Jason asks.
She reaches into her handbag, slips out her airline ticket and slides it across the table without explanation. “Read it,” she says.
He picks it up and scans the details. It clearly notes her destination. JFK Airport. “New York?” he asks, looking up from the ticket.
“I know it’s close enough that I could’ve driven, but being on a plane, with that sense of being removed from everything, well, I thought I needed that.”
“What’s in New York?”
“That design job I told you about? They’ve offered it to me but are holding it open only till the end of the week.”
He looks at the ticket again, longer this time.
Maris waits for him to realize what she’s done. The airl
ine and flight number are listed, as well as her departure time. It passed two hours ago. She had never gotten herself aboard the plane.
“Don’t close the door on this,” he says, and hands her the ticket back.
“On the job?”
He pauses for a long moment. “There’s room for two in that barn of mine, you know.”
“Well I just might take you up on that, because seriously? I’m never leaving you,” she says, tucking the ticket into her bag. “Never,” she whispers.
Jason stands and reaches for her hand again. “Come on, sweetheart. I’ll bring you back.”
As Maris turns to leave, catching a glimpse through the window of the diminishing lights of a jet, or of starlight in a vast sea of constellations and wishes, wishes from hearts opening to the stars while standing below on earth and looking up, longing for something, or someone, a voice, a touch, a memory, she knows.
These stars are the very same stars above Stony Point. The same stars she rises to each time she boards a plane. The same stars she looked at with her mother, thirty years past, caught on an 8mm home movie. The same stars where her mother is now. Stars, stars all around us. Celestial stars above and ocean stars on the water. Silver threads of stars stitched onto denim. Stars on gold chains. In the end, they are mere glimmers of light. Hopeful and illuminating, as we’re wanting still another day.
Acknowledgments
I’m so grateful to work with my amazing team at CreateSpace. Thank you for your continued enthusiasm and for sharing in my vision for Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans. You make the process exciting.
To the wonderful readers I’ve connected with on the writing journey. You motivate and inspire me.
To my daughters, Jena and Mary, and to my husband Tony. For everything.
To Point O’ Woods, the little Connecticut beach that started it all.
Questions With Coffee
A Reader’s Guide
In the novel, Neil is known to say that the sea air and salt water “cure what ails you.” How does the setting of Stony Point cure the characters? Do you find yourself soothed by water?
When Maris watches old home movies of her mother, she realizes that she captures the same emotions witnessed on the screen in her denim fashion sketches: “ … the clothes covering human shapes that care, that move with feeling, that know love.” Is Maris looking to “design” something more than fashion sketches?
During her vacation at Stony Point, Lauren reminisces about her time with Neil and begins to doubt her life with Kyle. With the tension in their marriage growing palpable, Kyle finally asks, “Then why didn’t you cut me loose back then?” Why didn’t Lauren break it off? And why did Kyle stay with her?
In Foley’s, the old beach hangout, the music of a vintage jukebox evokes nostalgic memories. Why do songs have such power to transport us in time? What song moves you?
Throughout the story, Eva steals mementoes from homes she lists as a real estate agent. Do you think she will ever return, or dispose of, those items? Or will she be driven to hold on to them still?
Often, we wish we could go back and re-do certain moments. Jason is haunted by a few of these: grabbing the keys Neil tossed him, and not clarifying details on the police report documenting the motorcycle accident. Would it have helped him to cope if he’d corrected the error in that accident report all those years ago?
Is Neil a hero?
Did Maris’ father, Louis, make the right decision? Will Maris and Eva ever find Elsa?
What does the future hold for these beach friends? Where will the “driftline” take them?
Maris’ fall campaign, Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans, captures the reality she lives at Stony Point Beach: “The sketched figures … sit on a penciled boardwalk, toss driftwood down a long watercolored beach, skim stones over the pastelled Sound, catch Frisbees mid-air, ink strokes freezing the moment, and walk along the high tide line, sipping coffee side-by-side with old friends.” Describe your favorite pair of blue jeans. What memories are tied to your denim?
About The Author
Joanne DeMaio is an award-winning author of contemporary fiction. Her bestselling novel Whole Latte Life won First Place in the 2012 Discovery Awards and was selected by Kirkus Reviews as a Critics’ Pick. It has been featured in USA Today, The Huffington Post and other outlets. In addition, Joanne’s music essays have appeared in literary journals, celebrating her passion for song. Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans is her second novel.
Joanne lives with her family in Connecticut and is currently at work on her next book. She enjoys connecting with readers at …
Facebook: www.facebook.com/JoanneDeMaioAuthor
Author Website: www.joannedemaio.com
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