by Lisa Dale
Maybe then Jonathan wouldn’t have said, “Yes, but let’s make it a race.”
On the steely, cold rungs of the telephone pole, Jonathan’s boots squeaked, but the treads held firm. His muscles worked until he perspired beneath his snow pants. He wanted to beat his brother so bad it made little black stars creep in at the edges of his eyes. As the ground disappeared beneath him, falling away inch by inch, the frozen white sky growing closer—he heard Thea’s voice. She’d come out after all; she’d found them. She was calling up to them, her voice cracking the air, calling get down, and he looked to see that he was ahead of Garret—ahead!—higher and higher than his brother, and he thought, with the thrill knights must have felt climbing towers for maidens, I’ll win this one for her, for her, because she’s watching—
Right before he lost his footing and fell.
At the hospital, tucked into a hard white bed, his parents stared down at him in disappointment and shook their heads. “You should have known better,” they said.
And Jonathan could only close his eyes and pretend he was sleeping, because they were right: he should have known better. He always was supposed to know better—better than Garret anyway.
“Irina!” Thea called to her daughter, who was out on the floor, talking to Hollis and Dean as they set up their chessboard. She’d just come from practice. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail that hung down thin and straight, and her entire left side was a grass stain. She was telling them about it like a fisherman might brag about his catch of the day. “Irina!”
Irina glanced over at her, then looked back at the chess players, going on with her story as if Thea hadn’t just called her name. Hollis, who was placing black pawns one by one on their squares, rolled his eyes—just enough so that Thea would see.
Thea finished making a café breve of espresso and cream, and she set it on the counter for Claudine. “Will you take this to table six?”
Claudine smirked. Her big bracelets clacked together as she picked up the drink. “Mon Dieu. She’s a talker, that one.”
Thea didn’t bother to answer. She hurried over to her customers’ table to save them from her domineering kid, wiping her hands on her apron as she went. “Sorry about this,” she said, smiling sweetly. “She’s always been a chatterbox.”
“It’s fine,” Hollis said.
“Let’s just get to playing,” Dean said.
Thea tugged her daughter by the arm away from the old men. Later she would bring over a few little butter cookies, on the house, to thank them for their patience. But for now, she glared at Irina—embarrassed that she would so publicly and purposefully misbehave. “Irina, I was calling you.”
“I know,” Irina said.
“Your uncle Garret is going to be here any minute,” Thea said. “Now come with me.”
Irina didn’t simply follow Thea back across the room, she stomped. Once behind the counter, Thea bent until she was at her daughter’s level, where they were both hidden from prying eyes by the tall, refrigerated pastry case. She had to hold her daughter’s shoulders to make her stand still.
“Mr. Cooper and Mr. Gray don’t want to talk right now. They’re here to play chess and complain about coffee. Not to talk to little girls.”
Irina was petulant. “How do you know?”
“I just do,” she said.
“You don’t know anything!”
Thea frowned. Her daughter was never so surly. Thea could only guess that she was upset about having to go visit her father—not because she didn’t want to see him, but because she was reacting to the disconnect and pressure of having to make such a production about going to see the man she once saw every day. The only thing Thea could do was assure her: this would begin to feel more comfortable with time.
“You’re going to have a nice day today,” she said.
“I know.”
Thea let Irina go. “Do you have everything you need to go with Uncle Garret? Do you have your backpack?”
“Yeeeees.”
“Did you put all your toys in it that you want to bring?”
“Yeeeeees.”
“All right. So there’s nothing to worry about. Stay back here until your uncle gets here, okay? No more going out on to the floor today.”
Irina pouted.
“Understand?”
“Yeeeeees, Ma,” she said, and then she found a chair in the corner where she could kick her legs out and sulk. Thea picked up a clipboard and went back to work, counting the number of gallons of milk so that she would know how many more to order.
A moment later, Claudine was standing beside her. “She’s taking it hard,” she said under her breath.
“She doesn’t like being away from home.”
“Of course not. She gets it from her mom.”
Thea glanced at Claudine, not sure what to say. Claudine had never been catty, exactly, but she didn’t mince words. “I like my house,” Thea said. “It’s … where I live.”
Claudine draped an angular arm around her for a moment. “It’s a very nice house.”
“Thanks,” Thea said, and rather than reading into Claudine’s odd comment, she put it out of her mind.
Ten minutes later, Claudine had gone out back for her break and Thea was wrapping a blueberry scone in wax paper when Garret came in, his cell phone pressed to his ear and his mouth seeming to go at a million miles an hour. She swallowed her nervousness. He was wearing khaki shorts, a nice black polo that stretched snugly across his shoulders, and flip-flops. He pushed his dark sunglasses up to rest on the top of his blond hair, then snapped the phone closed.
“Where’s Irina?” he asked.
Hello to you too, Thea thought.
“Present,” Irina called out. She pushed herself off of her chair, slumped forward with cartoonish glumness. Her footfalls were heavy against the tile.
“Ready, kid?” Garret asked hopefully. But Irina didn’t so much as smile.
Thea crouched down and spoke softly. To her dismay, she saw tears swimming in her daughter’s hazel eyes. “Listen to me, sweetheart. You’re not staying there overnight again. You’re just going to go hang out with Daddy for the day. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”
Her lower lip trembled. “Why can’t you come with us?”
Thea took Irina’s hand and led her around to the side of the counter where Garret stood waiting. “I bet you and Daddy are doing something really fun today.”
Irina tugged her hand hard. “But you should come too. I want to see Daddy and you. At the same time.”
“Irina …”
“Why can’t you come with me?”
Thea faltered, and amazingly enough, she found herself looking to Garret for help. She didn’t expect him to be good with kids—though at one time she’d believed he wanted to be a father—but even a complete numskull would know how to help with this if he knew how to take a hint. “Garret? Why don’t you tell Irina what you’re doing today?”
He answered without hesitation. “Playing mini golf,” he said, and he flashed his big, charming smile. “Have you ever played mini golf?”
Irina nodded.
“Do you like it?”
She nodded again.
“I bet you’re not very good at it though,” he said. “Your mom never was.”
“I’m good at it!” Irina said, and she let go of Thea’s hand. “I’m awesome at it. I’m the best in my school!”
Thea glanced at Garret, thankful—and trying not to remember the night he kept hiding her golf ball under windmills and fiberglass stones. “Irina, why don’t you go use the bathroom before you get in the car?”
“But I don’t have to go.”
“Try,” Thea said.
Irina dragged herself in the direction of the small unisex bathroom. Thea’s heart ached for her daughter. What kind of family didn’t see each other? And what kind of parents could communicate the duties of parenthood only through a messenger like Garret? If Jonathan didn’t get in touch with her, personally, soo
n, she would get in touch with him.
She glanced at Garret, the blue of his eyes so sharp and disarming. She crossed her arms. “So, are you really going mini golfing?”
“We are now.” He flipped open his phone, stared at the screen. “Excuse me,” he said.
“Oh. I just remembered. I have something for Sue—” Thea hurried over to the locker and retrieved a silver pen from her bag. When she returned to the front of the counter, Garret wasn’t on the phone. He was watching, waiting for her.
“What’s this?” he asked, taking the pen and turning it in his hand.
“Sue left it when we had lunch the other day. If you could give it to her when you see her, that would be great.”
He scoffed. “You had lunch with my mother.”
“We always do.”
He shook his head. “Not anymore, you don’t.”
“Jonathan knows about it,” she said. “He’s fine with it.”
“Jonathan doesn’t know what’s good for him right now.”
“And you do?”
“Thea—you’re not a part of this family. Jonathan left you. You’re not attached to us anymore.”
Thea felt her eyes burn. “It’s not that easy.”
“What’s not easy about it?” he asked. “Jonathan needs his mother right now. His family. You owe it to him to steer clear.”
She stared at him, and for the first time, it occurred to her that she had no idea who he was anymore. Though she hadn’t seen him in ages, she’d assumed that the deep fundamentals of his being would still be recognizable. She thought she might still know him and understand him if only because of how close she’d been to him years ago. But now she saw that maybe she’d been wrong—that he’d changed so much that he was no longer the same person in any way. When she looked at him now—the strong bones of his face, the familiar shape of his hands and fingernails, the unaltered blue of his eyes—she was no longer looking at the boy she’d once loved.
“Are you really such a monster?” she asked.
He was quiet for a moment. She thought his voice would be mean, cruel, when he spoke again. But it was not. “Are you?”
Irina came back from the bathroom, dragging her feet, and Thea put on a cheerful smile. “Did you go?”
She nodded.
Thea bent down and tucked a strand of her daughter’s pale brown hair behind her ear where it had fallen out of her ponytail. “You’re going to have a great time.”
“How do you know?”
“I asked the coffee grounds in my cup this morning.”
“Really!” Her eyes brightened. “What did they say?”
“They said you’re going to get a hole in one.”
“Told you so,” she said, glancing at Garret.
He laughed—a real, unpracticed, and not at all sarcastic laugh. His face seemed ten years younger. It tugged at Thea’s heart.
Irina kissed her on the cheek. “Love you!”
“Love you too, sweetheart.”
When she stood, she saw that Garret was watching her. Staring. The anger had melted from his expression, replaced by something quieter, more forlorn than mad. She wondered what he saw, what he was thinking. She wanted to go to him, to wrap her arms around him and hold him—to clasp all that anger and sorrow that she saw in him and heal it, somehow.
But all she could think to say was, “You’ll bring her back this evening?”
“At eight,” he said. He looked down at Irina, who was now holding his hand. “Ready, kid?”
Irina smiled, enchanted by her uncle. Like mother, like daughter. There was no hope for either of them. “Have fun,” Thea said. She watched them walk out the door—her daughter and the man who might have been her husband, if life had taken a slightly different turn all those years ago.
Thea was on the Harvest Dance decorating team during the fall of their junior year, but much as she loved school dances, she didn’t think she would attend. She’d had to play her cards close to her chest: Of course I’m going, she told her friends. I don’t need to have a date to go.
But the truth was, she’d been hoping that Garret would ask her. And when she’d heard he’d asked Carin Woodhouse instead, she knew she wouldn’t be able to stand watching the two of them slow dancing under the basketball hoops, which had been decorated with a garland of paper pumpkins that she had made.
The night of the dance, Thea bailed without telling her girlfriends. She and Jonathan rented a handful of prom slasher movies, and they curled up under blankets on opposite ends of Sue’s couch. Thea had spent the afternoon making chocolate-covered espresso beans with her mother—the caffeine and chocolate combo was her mother’s prescription for Thea’s bad mood—and she and Jonathan sat crunching beans between their teeth and laughing at campy murder scenes until at last Garret came home.
He was wearing nice clothes—grown-up clothes—and unlike other boys his age, he wore them well. To Thea, he looked like a prince—or some dignitary from a different time, come to visit their century. He took off his jacket and hung it behind the door.
“Hey!” Garret leaned on the arm of the couch, glancing at the Farrah Fawcett haircuts and polyester gym shorts on the TV screen. “Is this Carrie?”
“Yeah,” Jonathan said coolly.
“Why didn’t you guys tell me you were watching movies tonight?”
Jonathan glanced at Thea. Her heart went fluttery in her chest, and she found herself going quiet—as she so often did when Garret was around these days.
“It was a last-minute thing,” Jonathan said. “Sit down if you want to sit down.”
Garret did. He plopped on an overstuffed armchair and began to take off his shoes. Thea was rapt by the muscles moving under his shirt, the way his gold hair flopped forward as he leaned down. When he looked up, his eyes found hers immediately, as if he knew she’d been watching.
“I thought you were going,” Garret said to her. “Everyone was asking me where you went. Are you sick or something?”
She shrugged. “I’m okay.”
Jonathan threw a handful of popcorn at him and told him to shut up and watch TV. Now that Garret was with them, the atmosphere had changed. Jonathan clammed up around his brother these days—he was a totally different person. It wasn’t long before he excused himself and went to bed.
Later, when the movie had ended, and Thea was getting her jacket on to go home, she knew the subject of the dance was about to come up again. Garret had never been one to give up easily; she would have been disappointed if he was.
“You did such an amazing job on the gym,” he said. The light from a black-and-white movie flickered in the otherwise dark room, and the house was so quiet Thea worried he might hear the beat of her heart—too fast for explanation. “All those little white lights. And the hay bales and cornstalks. It must have taken you forever.”
“It did,” she said. “Thanks.”
“That’s why I don’t understand why you didn’t go,” he said, his eyes narrowing suspiciously. “I get why Jonathan didn’t. He just doesn’t ‘do’ dances. But you … You didn’t really want to sit around and watch TV all night, did you?”
She focused on the buttons of her windbreaker as she snapped them closed. Oh please let him not know, she thought. Oh please let me not do something stupid.
“Is it because you didn’t have a date?” he asked.
Kill me, she thought. “No. It’s because I wanted to stay here. Keep Jonathan company. I didn’t want him to be alone.”
Garret nodded, but she could tell he didn’t quite believe her. “Well. It would have been more fun if you were there.”
She felt her face flushing and she could barely speak. “Did you have a good time?”
“It was okay,” he said.
She wondered what that meant—if he wasn’t in love with Carin Woodhouse after all. She picked up her backpack and pulled it onto her shoulders. “Are you going out with her?”
“No.” He looked down at her face as if he was look
ing for something. She hoped that whatever it was, he found it. “Maybe next time I’ll skip the dance to stay in with you and Jonathan.”
She smiled, warmth blooming within. “You’ll always be welcome,” she said.
From “The Coffee Diaries” by Thea Celik
The Newport Examiner
Much as people love coffee today, rulers of the past had every reason to fear coffeehouses. Coffee causes trouble. It gets people riled up. It incites.
One theory holds that coffee changed the way people interacted socially on a grand scale. Prior to coffeehouses, much public socializing was done in pubs, where beer made conversation apathetic and sloppy. When coffee arrived in public venues, it sparked alertness and intellectual debate.
Coffeehouses became places of radical thinking and political uprising—and those in power feared them. England’s Charles II attempted (unsuccessfully) to ban the existence of coffeehouses. Frederick the Great mandated that his people forgo coffee for beer. Some regimes and leaders went as far as punishing coffee drinkers, with repeat offenders paying the ultimate price: death.
In this country, coffee maintained its revolutionary reputation. Coffee became the symbolic drink of the patriotic due to the British tax on tea. Coffeehouses, which sometimes fused with pubs in colonial America, were places of uprising and revolt.
Though perhaps the scale has diminished a bit, the dramas of our lives continue to play out in coffeehouses today.
FIVE
Every year on the Fourth of July, the Sorensens took Ken and Sue’s sailboat out into the Narragansett to watch the fireworks. And every year, Thea had looked forward to it—to packing a picnic basket with grapes, crackers, hard white cheese, juice boxes, and wine. She loved the moment just before the fireworks went off, when the water that cradled the boat’s hull turned black as coffee under the night sky.
But this year, Thea had not been invited along.