by Lisa Dale
But she loved him. She knew him. She’d seen the tides of his interest in other girls swell and then fade, and she was not about to join their ranks.
And so in the hallway, when his hands strayed too far, when his hips against hers made her want to fall against the wall behind her, she forced herself to do the thing she wanted least in the world—she pushed him away.
For a long time, Thea had avoided giving the drinks at the Dancing Goat overly cutesy names. She served three types of coffee every day—the dark house blend, a mild blend that she changed up every week, and decaf. Coffees that were flavored with hazelnut or raspberry were not given silly monikers that appealed to happy tourists; they were simply called hazelnut coffee or raspberry. But in recent weeks Irina had been getting on her case about changing the names of her drinks, saying that zanier names would draw attention to the drinks they wanted to move, and Thea was beginning to wonder if her precocious daughter had a point.
Now, on the first scorching day of August, she sat with Dani, Lettie, and Irina at a table in the coffee shop while Claudine and Jules manned the counter. Thea had conceded that she would add three “drinks specials” to the menu that would have unique names—on a trial basis. If Thea’s lobstermen customers got tongue-tied and embarrassed while trying to order coffee, then the experiment would be considered failed.
“It’s gonna work, Ma,” Irina said. “Trust me.”
“What’s the first drink?” Dani asked.
Thea handed them each an espresso cup filled with a decaf sample of her latest concoction. “It’s a vanilla latte with a hint of cinnamon. I wasn’t going to put this out until the fall, but since we’re going public with new drinks now …”
“Oh, wow,” Dani said, her voice trailing off as she looked up from her cup. “This is delicious.”
Lettie closed her eyes. “Very good.”
“Now we have to think of a name,” Irina said.
Thea took her own sip—the drink really was good, comforting smooth vanilla, a little kick of cinnamon, and rich espresso as the foundation that held the other flavors up—but she wasn’t too keen on playing the name game. If Irina wanted a cute name for a drink, she would have to invent it.
“It’s like a hug from the inside out,” Dani said, cupping her hand around the tiny drink.
“No, it’s more like a snuggle,” Thea said. “Because it lasts longer than a hug.”
“It’s a huggle!” Irina said. “It’s a vanilla-cinnamon huggle.”
“How ’bout just vanilla huggle,” Lettie said, delighted. “And the cinnamon is a surprise.”
“Vanilla huggle.” Thea rolled her eyes, but wrote the name down. “Why do I get the feeling that none of my locals are going to be ordering the vanilla huggle?”
“They will, Mom!”
“What about the men?” Thea asked.
“The men can have it too,” Irina said. “Let’s do the next one!”
Thea pushed another set of coffees toward them, careful not to mix up regular with decaf. She didn’t want her daughter to be up all night. “This is coffee flavored with banana and walnut extract. Like, banana nut bread meets coffee.”
“I like it,” Dani said.
Lettie wrapped her hands around her cup, her thick knuckles pressed against the heat. “But what do we call it?”
Irina gave the drink her fullest concentration, her eyes closed to focus on the flavor before she swallowed. “Something about banana … nutty banana. Split. Like a banana goes crazy and splits up from a nut.”
Dani laughed. “I’m not sure that quite rolls off the tongue …”
“How about the No-Fault Split?”
Thea felt the blood draining away from her face. She hadn’t been talking to her daughter about the intricacies of divorce—the logistics of it all. But she should have known Irina would hear. She heard everything.
“That’s not a very cheery name,” Thea said. “I wouldn’t order it.”
“No—it’s a good name. It’s funny.”
“I don’t like it,” Thea said. She could feel Dani and Lettie watching her.
Irina threw her hands up. “Well, I don’t know what you call it then!” she shouted. She pushed her palms against the table edge, toppling cups and splashing coffee on the floor. Thea jumped, avoiding the flood, but a few ounces of coffee spilled on Irina, soaking her legs. Luckily it hadn’t been too hot.
“Oh dear!” Lettie got to her feet. “I’ll get some towels.”
Thea leveled a serious gaze at her daughter. “Okay, we’re done with this for the night. If that’s how you’re going to act, then we’ll have to finish this up when you can behave.”
“I am behaving,” Irina said. But her face was already turning red, and her eyes were already filling with tears. She was about to blow. “It was an accident.”
Thea took a deep breath. “Go to the bathroom and clean yourself off, and then we’re heading home.”
“But we still have one more drink!”
“Irina …” she said, her voice full of warning.
“Fine.” Irina stomped toward the bathroom to get what coffee stains she could out of her pants.
When she was gone, Thea stood still for a moment to close her eyes and regain her composure. Lettie returned with paper towels and a garbage bag; she and Dani set to work cleaning up.
“You don’t have to do that,” Thea told them.
“Nonsense,” Lettie said.
Dani wadded big fistfuls of paper towels in her hands, soaking a puddle of coffee that had landed on the floor. “She okay?”
“I don’t know,” Thea said. “It’s not like her to be so angry. I don’t know what to do to make her stop hurting. I feel like a terrible mother.”
“Stop that,” Dani said, standing. “You’re a great mother, and you know it. Irina’s just going through a difficult time. You all are.”
Thea held open the garbage bag for Dani. “Sue thinks Jonathan and I are being reckless. That we shouldn’t do this so fast.”
Lettie’s voice was gentle as she blotted the coffee rings that had formed under their cups. “Of course she has to say that. She’s concerned about her family. And rightly so. But only you can know what’s right for you in the end.”
“I’m not so sure that’s true,” Thea said. “Maybe I should try harder. Tough it out. For the sake of the family—for Irina, but for Sue and Ken too.”
Dani shook her head. “You can’t stay married to Jonathan because you’re afraid of losing his family.”
“I don’t want to be the cause of anyone’s pain,” she said, and strangely enough, she didn’t find herself thinking of Jonathan and Irina, but of Garret—of all the years he’d stayed away from his family because of what she’d done. “I’ve been there before. I don’t want to do it again.”
Dani took the garbage bag away from Thea. “Here’s what it looks like from where I stand—and keep in mind that I’ve been through this before. You’re in a good position to stay friends with Jonathan right now. But not if you keep drawing things out until they get messy.”
Thea nodded. “You’re right. You know that? You’re right. I think Irina will feel a lot better once we get into a routine.”
“Let us know what we can do to help,” Lettie said.
Thea glanced toward the hallway, where Irina was walking as slowly as she possibly could, foot over foot, to rejoin them in the shop. “I may take you up on that.”
Dear Thea,
It’s come to my attention that before we turn in the divorce papers and make it official, we should probably meet—just to make sure we both have a clear vision of the road ahead. Hopefully this e-mail will find you before you drop the papers in the mail.
Garret said he’d be willing to watch Irina tomorrow evening, if you can get off work and you want to meet. A year ago I wouldn’t have let him—since he doesn’t have much experience with kids. But now that I’m getting to know him again, I promise Irina will be in good hands. Frankly, she’d
probably rather hang out with her uncle Garret than her dear old mom or dad.
So, are you amenable? Can we meet?
Jonathan
From “The Coffee Diaries” by Thea Celik
The Newport Examiner
Serious coffee drinkers know the importance of decaf coffee when it comes to round-the-clock consumption. But how does coffee get decaffeinated, since caffeine is so vital to the life and protection of the coffee seed?
Don’t think that a label indicating that a bean is “naturally decaffeinated” means that the bean was engineered to grow without caffeine.
In the early days, the process of decaffeinating coffee was horrifying: coffee beans were steamed in brine, then given a dose of benzene—but the method was deemed unsafe. Not surprising, given that benzene was an ingredient in early napalm.
New methods include steaming the beans and then washing them with ethyl acetate or methylene chloride. When the ethyl acetate is derived from plant sources, the beans are said to be naturally decaffeinated.
Health food stores have begun to stock coffee that has been decaffeinated by soaking green coffee beans in a mix of water and coffee itself.
Whatever the method of decaffeination, most decaf coffees still contain some small amounts of caffeine. There’s just no way to get rid of it completely. Nature insists.
NINE
To be with Thea during their senior year was not what Garret expected—it was pushing a boulder up a hill. It was swimming upstream.
For brief moments between classes, when he could be with her, touch her, he felt as if he was seizing for himself something illicit and dangerous. The notion that a friend, his friend, could have been hiding within herself the ability to give him so much unthinkable pleasure was more than he could understand. How could he not have seen it before? Thea, going breathless under his hands, gave him the same incredible adrenaline rush that he felt on the soccer field. He wanted more than quick, fumbling gropings between classes—he wanted to see how far he could take her, if he was good enough to make her lose herself to him. But how much longer could he stand to be held at arm’s length?
At night, he went to her house, climbed the drainpipe as quiet as a mouse, and his whole body became a bundle of nerves even before he’d reached her window. Mostly, he wanted to make out. And it was what she wanted too. They’d spent their whole lives talking. He knew her soul-deep. No amount of conversation could knit their souls more tightly together than they already were.
He campaigned hard for permission for every new kiss, for the first time she let him taste the skin above the button of her jeans, the first time she let him slide off the strap of her bra. Always, she resisted—as if he was asking something she didn’t want to give even as he knew by the tremble in her voice that she wanted to give it. She left him confused and—when the pain of frustration built nearly to bursting—angry.
Who was this girl who seemed to be such an innocent in the dark? Thea—his Thea—was not timid. He’d seen her volunteer to light firecrackers on the beach while other girls cowered and squealed safely in the shadows. He’d seen her climb the steep face of the cliff wall at the edge of the ocean—no rope, no hesitation, no fear. When Garret had broken his arm playing Frisbee, so severely that the bone showed, she barely flinched, but instead calmed him down and held his good arm as she walked him to the nearest open store to call Sue and Ken.
But on the floor in her bedroom, she seemed half terrified of his hands—at least, there was no other way to read her reticence. When Thea wanted something, she went for it. And yet she did not give herself, no matter how he pleaded and coaxed and demanded, with words and without. Her hesitation could mean only one thing—she was unsure of him. She didn’t trust him. He guessed she was a virgin and—with a kind of desire that was almost too embarrassing to own—he wanted her virginity.
But she would not give in.
As he lay in the darkness of her room, the hard floor under his shoulder blades, Thea buttoning herself up at his side, he began to wonder if he’d made a mistake. Perhaps they were meant only to be friends after all. He vowed to himself that he wouldn’t get any closer to her—that he would keep his options open with other girls if he needed to—because if her hesitation was real, and she really didn’t trust him, then he didn’t know how he would be able to stand it when she finally, completely turned him down. Thea had the power to wound him more deeply than any other person on the earth; he needed to be careful not to put too much of his heart in her hands.
Thea leaned against the warm grill of Jonathan’s black sedan, her toes getting dusty from the gravel parking lot, and Jonathan leaned beside her, popping green grapes into his mouth and occasionally sipping iced tea from a blue plastic cup. Far below the hill where they stood, the water of the bay was an opaque, shocking blue punctuated here and there by swells of land and polite, tree-covered islands. All that was left of the sun was a sliver of pinkish gold over the far edge of the horizon, and from Thea’s vantage point, she had the strange sense that she was closer to the sky than the sun was.
The high ridge had always been Thea’s favorite when she and Jonathan needed to talk. They’d agreed early on that discussions and arguments should always happen in neutral places—in restaurants instead of their kitchen, in sleepy parks instead of in their bedroom. From the beginning, they’d approached their marriage as a thing to be accomplished—almost a job. When he’d asked to meet her here—in the place where they’d hashed out whether or not to send Irina to private school, whether or not Thea should work or be a stay-at-home mom—she knew that he hadn’t thrown over his thoughtful and logical nature simply because of the looming specter of a divorce. And she knew that this time, he wanted to talk without fighting. To approach their divorce like he’d approached their marriage, with reason and convenience leading the way.
“More iced tea?”
Thea looked into her cup—the yellow gold of green tea that had been infused with hibiscus and mint. Her standby for hot summer days. “No, thanks.”
He poured a bit more for himself. So far, they had tiptoed around each other, chatting about inconsequential facts, gingerly testing the conversation as if poking a wound to see if it would reopen and bleed. They hadn’t talked about anything overly significant—Irina’s summer schedule, Sue and Ken’s volunteer work with the Newport Historical Society, Jonathan’s overbearing boss—no mention of their reason for meeting today.
“So what did she do?” Thea asked, smiling.
“Who?”
“Sue. Did she threaten to cut off your inheritance? Will everything to Garret instead?”
Jonathan laughed. “Not exactly.”
“So how did she get you to come out here?”
Jonathan rolled a fat green grape between two fingers. “She asked me to,” he said.
Thea nodded. In some distant and invisible place, children were playing, squealing, their happy cries carrying upward into the sky. Of course Thea knew that Sue would never threaten. But she wanted to tease Jonathan a little, to let him know she wasn’t mad.
“Sue wants us to reconsider,” Thea said.
“I know.” Jonathan crossed his arms, the dark hairs rising slightly in the breeze. “She told me to ask if I could move back in with you. Temporarily. Just to see.”
“Do you like living with Garret?”
Jonathan looked out over the water, hundreds of feet below, his expression thoughtful. “I miss Irina. And I miss you.”
Thea smiled gently.
“But, yes. I do like living with him. It’s hard work—to be alone. But I feel like I need to stick it out. To see …”
“I know what you mean,” she said. She squeezed her plastic cup, and when she let go, it snapped back into shape. The sudden urge to tell Jonathan what she was feeling—what she was going through—was inescapable. In some small way, she wanted his permission to move on.
Their marriage had never been especially passionate. They’d married young and waited until
after their wedding to have sex. Thea hadn’t expected much. Her love life with Jonathan hadn’t been like jumping headfirst into a bottomless pool but instead like creeping inch by inch into deeper waters, until she was just deep enough to feel like she was submerged without getting in over her head. At some point, the pressure to work toward a healthy sex life vanished entirely, and Thea was almost glad when it did. She felt that her job as Jonathan’s wife was to offer him comfort and refuge—he felt the same way toward her—and they set about making their lives easy for one another. Somewhere along the line, good intentions had eroded into complacence like stone becoming sand.
Thea couldn’t help it; she put down her cup and embraced him, hugging him tight, and she felt his arms come around her back, those same arms that had held her so many times when she was upset—a good friend’s arms.
“Oh Jonathan.” She buried her face in his shoulder. “How could we have messed things up so bad?”
It was a moment before he replied. “Maybe we didn’t.” He let her go, pulled away to look into her eyes. “Maybe we did everything right. Maybe we were meant to get married, have Irina. And now maybe we’re meant for this too.”
“There are so many stories of people who get divorced and they mean for it to go well, but then it all goes wrong.” She squeezed his hand. “I don’t want that to be us. If you have something to say, if you’re upset about something, if you think something isn’t fair, then come tell me. Talk to me. Jonathan … of every couple I know, I think that you and I have the best shot at staying friends.”
He nodded. “I feel that way too.”
She let go of him, leaned her backside against the hood of the car once again. The sun was gone now; it had vanished while they weren’t watching.
“So I guess this is it,” she said.
He nodded.