by Lisa Dale
He looked at her; he wanted to hold eye contact, but she wouldn’t let him. He studied the slope of her nose, the gentle curve of her jaw, her high forehead. Did she know how beautiful she was—even more beautiful now than when she was eighteen? As if she heard what he was thinking, she turned away.
“Why are you still here?” she asked.
The waves crashed on the rocks along the shore, a persistent roar. Strains of frivolous music floated from the old mansion’s bright windows through the salt-heavy air. He supposed he’d known, all along, that if he ever saw her again—this woman who had broken him so unforgivably—he wouldn’t be able to pretend. Desire had been incubating inside of him like warm coals, heat that needed very little tinder to flare back to life. When he spoke, words fell with shocking easiness from his tongue.
“I still want you,” he said.
He watched the emotions dance across her features, but he couldn’t read them. Her lipstick had worn off, and he wanted to kiss her with a need that verged on pain. For a moment, he thought she might let him. Her eyes were clouded, her lips parting on a breath. But then her expression turned hard—and a wall went up in his face.
“We’re not doing this again,” she said. And she was marching away in her heels, walking over the lawn with difficulty, back toward the lights and sounds of the party. This time, he knew not to follow again.
From “The Coffee Diaries” by Thea Celik
The Newport Examiner
That anyone ever drinks a truly good cup of coffee is nothing shy of miraculous. There are simply too many variables that can go wrong.
The soil might be too heavy with minerals, such as salt, or too depleted. The cherries can mature too quickly in full sunlight, instead of being slowly shade grown. The farmers might inadvertently pick green cherries along with the ripe, red ones—tainting the lot.
The beans might ferment or grow slightly moldy if not washed and dried properly. If left to sit too long, they will take on the flavor of the bags they’re stored in.
When the roaster gets the beans, he might over or under roast them (each type of bean is best served by a unique type of roasting). Then, once roasted, the beans might sit on the shelf too long before being brewed. Or the delicate process of infusing water with the essence of the beans might be mishandled.
And even if nothing in the whole process goes wrong, brewed coffee will go stale in less than three hours, so that the time for drinking the perfect cup is incredibly brief.
When you do find that perfect cup, savor it. There’s a miracle in the making of the drink in your hand.
FOURTEEN
In an alternate time and place, the day before graduation goes differently. Thea does not meet Garret in the old barn. She doesn’t despair over the concrete floor veined with thick cracks and crumbling by the door. The smell of cobwebs and dirt doesn’t dissuade her. The old rusted shovels, dusty ropes, and the light—the ominous and accusing light that slices the boards of the old barn in neat vertical lines—doesn’t make her second-guess. She doesn’t smile nervously when Garret takes her hand; she doesn’t put all her faith in an idea of perfection.
When Garret lays her down on the bundle of blankets and pillows that he’s stolen from his mother’s house, she doesn’t feel a lump in the back of her throat, doesn’t give in to the feeling that what should be a beginning is instead an end. She doesn’t notice that he’s rushing. That he’s greedy, loutish, and obtuse. She doesn’t feel tears come into her eyes when she tries to tell him to slow down, even—halfheartedly—to wait, but he can’t seem to hear her. She has no choice but to pretend she’s not there. She doesn’t feel the pain—no sharp, stinging stretch, no blunt bruising and unwithstandable invasion. She doesn’t feel that she’s just given her most vulnerable moment to a stranger. She doesn’t notice that there are tears running into her hair.
And when it’s over, Garret doesn’t pull on his clothes, doesn’t bullshit his way through niceties, doesn’t take off running and leave her in the old, ghostly barn. No—in the alternate timeline, he holds her. Says sorry. They talk about what went wrong, and then they try again, they figure it out, and Garret doesn’t stop calling her. Thea doesn’t spend the next weeks of her life making excuses because she’s stopped eating, because she can’t bring herself to face the sun through the blinds in the morning. The story moves backward, through all the what-ifs, possibilities collapsing on themselves, a house of mirrors teeming with choices—but only one way out.
The apartment was nice—two bedrooms, a small balcony where Jonathan and Irina could eat their dinners and watch the sailboats on the harbor, wood floors, high ceilings, and plenty of sunlight. After days of looking, Jonathan was beginning to suspect that they’d finally found the right place.
“Well?” Garret said, opening the refrigerator door to peer in. “Is this the one?”
“Maybe,” Jonathan said, and he couldn’t keep the excitement out of his voice. Overall, he liked living with Garret—their evenings spent talking about old memories and making new ones. Garret was good for him—he thought—and vice versa. Garret pushed him to jump feetfirst back into life-after-divorce, and Jonathan felt he and Irina brought a kind of happy disorder to Garret’s once perfect and overly neat life.
But much as he loved living with his brother, there were plenty of reasons that he needed to get his own place too—Irina being the most pressing of them, since he wanted to get a place in Newport that would make it easier for her to stay with him on school nights. And of course, there was also his desire to get back on his own two feet.
“Listen.” Garret shut the refrigerator door and crossed the room to stand before his brother. The Realtor had honored their request to be left alone to talk, and Jonathan could tell that his brother had something on his mind. “Are you sure you’re ready to move out? That it’s not too soon?”
“I’ve more than overstayed my welcome.”
“Screw that,” Garret said. “You can stay as long as you want. What I’m trying to tell you is that … that you don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”
“I think I’m ready. I feel okay about being on my own.”
Garret motioned for him to sit on the couch that was still in the apartment. “I’m not going to lie to you. Living alone is hard. I don’t know if you’re ready for it.”
“I’ll have Irina—and not just for the weekends either. I’ll have her for a few days a week now that I’ll be able to take her to school.”
“Yeah, but it’s different. Trust me.”
He looked at his brother—Garret’s soap opera–star face, his salon-cut hair. Jonathan was only just beginning to know Garret again and understand what made him tick, but one of the fundamental traits of Garret’s personality seemed to be a die-hard commitment to living alone. And yet now Garret was saying—almost asking him, it seemed—not to move out just yet.
In a way, Jonathan was glad to see a crack in his brother’s armor. It meant he was human—subject to loneliness—after all.
“You don’t like living alone?” Jonathan asked.
“Oh—I have no problem with it,” Garret said, puffing up a bit. “But you’re not used to it like I am. It’s going to be a jolt.”
“What else?” Jonathan asked.
Garret stood, sighing heavily. “Look. Here it is. Once you move out, that’s it—you move out.”
“So … ?”
A muscle in Garret’s jaw tightened. “I don’t want things to go back to the way they were.”
Jonathan resisted the urge to smile—the wrong reaction. But he was touched by what his brother was saying: Garret liked living with Jonathan after all. “That won’t happen again,” Jonathan said. “I’m divorced from Thea now, so we’re fine.”
“You sure?”
Jonathan stood. “Hey, of course I’m sure.”
“Can you promise?”
Jonathan felt a slight shiver go up his spine. “What could happen that would put our friendship in jeopardy again?
I mean, what could be worse than what we’ve already gone through?”
“Nothing, I guess.”
Jonathan reached out, clasped his brother by the wrist. After months of needing Garret’s reassurance, it felt good for once that the tables were turned. “We’re fine. From here forward. We’re brothers. Nothing can come between us again—not money, not a woman, not even geography.”
Garret smiled, but it was not the beaming-with-confidence smile that Jonathan would have liked. He let go of his brother’s arm. “Let’s get the Realtor and write him a check.”
If cell phones had been common when Thea was eighteen, she would have been checking hers constantly the day of graduation, the day after the barn. She would have felt the heaviness of the phone pulling down her pocket, the gentle bump of it against her thigh, but instead, since the possibilities promised by a phone were absent, there was only the weight of her own grief and hope and no tangible thing to make into the altar of all that emptiness inside.
“What happened?” her friends asked. And she could only give them the vaguest of answers. The possibilities were staggering and dangerous, layering up like snow on ice on snow. She thought of Jonathan’s warning: Garret had only wanted her for one thing. Garret was a sportsman—she’d known going into it that he measured his life in goals and girlfriends. She’d become one more, and it was nothing less than she’d expected.
But there had been an additional element, one that she hadn’t seen coming, and that had been her utter failure on the concrete floor of the barn. She’d done something wrong—something mortifyingly wrong. She’d expected the pain, but not the way Garret had been so careless of it, almost as if he’d meant to use it against her—or to use her in spite of it. How he could be so cruel, so purposely ungentle, she couldn’t understand. And then, as if her humiliation hadn’t been complete enough, he’d left her there, alone, so that she could hear the scrapes and squeaks of birds that were nesting in the rafters, and she pulled her clothes on, mindless of blood, and made her way out into the early dusk.
She’d tried to talk to him the morning of their graduation—to play it normal. But he was cold and disinterested, so that when she said, “I guess we’re finally free, huh?” his reply barely sounded like words at all.
And she tried again later, after anger had swelled up and replaced all her sadness. She’d cornered him outside the locker room, hating herself for her own neediness, and told him, flat out: “You hurt me.”
If he knew what she was talking about, he didn’t let it show. “It’s supposed to hurt,” he said.
“Not like this,” she’d replied.
Garret had known his mother was up to no good when she’d invited him over to her house on a Friday evening in late September. She greeted him in the marble foyer wearing a pink track suit and diamond earrings. She placed a small kiss on his cheek then led him into the living room, where Tara—the girl who helped Sue with housework—was arranging biscotti on a small silver tray. Beyond the gauzy curtains, the trees were bright red and gold against the blue slate of the ocean.
“Have a seat,” Sue said.
“Why do I have the feeling I’m in trouble?”
“Because you are in trouble,” Sue said. She poured herself a cup of tea, and the smell of lemon and chamomile pervaded the room. “What did you think of Kate?”
“So that’s what this is about? You’re mad because I didn’t get down on one knee and propose in the middle of the piazza?”
“That’s textbook rhetoric, dear,” she said calmly. “Exaggeration. What I expected was for you to have a conversation with her. What I didn’t expect was to see you dancing with Thea the next time I turned around.”
Garret rolled his eyes and bit off the end of a biscotto. “You told me to make nice with her.”
“Make nice,” she said. “You looked like you wanted to make something with her, but it wasn’t nice.”
His biscotto turned to dust in his mouth, and his face grew warm.
“You don’t have to say anything,” she said. “And I won’t bring this up again. But Garret—for once in your life—listen to what I’m telling you. Thea’s always made you go a little crazy.”
“That’s not tru—”
“Hear me out. You get reckless around her. Careless. You and your brother are finally settling into friendship. Don’t ruin it. Not now.”
Garret shook his head, looked down at his lap. His task was clear before him: he needed to convince his mother that she was worrying for nothing. But the truth was that Thea had been on his mind 24/7 since the moment she’d left him standing on the lawn at the Breakers. Thoughts of her—memories—popped back into his mind at the most uncomfortable moments. And even when he wasn’t thinking a specific thing about her, he felt as if she vaguely permeated every moment of his days and nights, much like the smell of lemon tea that now filled the room.
He had to make it stop—the torture of how much he thought of her in her absence. There had to be a logical way to make the longing end. But in the meantime, he had to convince Sue that she was overreacting.
“You do realize that was the first Gilded Age Society Ball she went to without Jonathan,” he said.
“Of course.”
“I wanted her to feel comfortable. Especially with me.”
“Well, that’s very admirable of you, but—”
“And did you or did you not see me talking with Kate later in the evening?”
“Well, you—”
“Did you or did you not?”
Sue sighed. “Yes, counselor. I did.”
“No further questions,” he said.
“I’m trying to look out for everyone’s best interests here.” She got up from her armchair to sit with him on the couch. Her eyes were soft, pleading, and she put a hand on his arm. “Just promise me you won’t go off the deep end with Thea again. Promise that you’ll do whatever you need to keep both feet on the ground.”
He held his breath a moment, then let it go. His mother had seen through him—she always saw through him. He could fool senators and judges, but not his mom. Some part of him almost felt relieved that she knew the truth, even if he felt compelled to deny it. Her reaction made one thing clear enough: Thea did get under his skin, more than any woman he’d ever met. He couldn’t think straight when it came to her. Sue was right—he needed to stay grounded going forward.
“You’re overreacting,” he said. He put his hand over his heart. “But if it makes you feel better, I’ll swear. I won’t do anything crazy.”
“I think we have to discuss the meaning of ‘crazy’ in this context.”
He kissed her cheek. “And you wonder where I get it from.”
Thea knew she had a serious problem—Claudine had pointed out that she’d mistakenly made a decaf espresso instead of a regular, Jules had mentioned that she was wearing her shirt inside out, and even Tenke had pulled her aside to ask if she realized that she’d replaced the stack of coffee filters with a pile of napkins.
She’d laughed and made jokes about going senile—which Lettie told her she knew nothing about—and she tried to stay on track. But the fact was, she was uncontrollably distracted. The memory of just three simple words that Garret had spoken—I want you—raced through her blood and made her feverish as a virus. Her body went hot and cold, heat spreading through her at the most innocent moments. Her head swam and her imagination took her rational brain hostage, replacing reality with fantasies of seeing him again—at the shop, at the beach, in her bed.
One evening while Thea was closing up alone, Dani wandered in wearing her blue uniform, her face set in determination. Dani locked the door of the café, swept under all the chairs, and when Thea started to say “Thanks so much for your help,” Dani told her to sit down.
“Spill,” she said. “What’s going on?”
Thea rolled her head to one side, fighting the muscles that had been tightening bit by bit over the last few days. “You’re not going to like it,” she warned.
“I might not like what you have to say, but I’m willing to hear it.”
Thea nodded. “Something happened with me and, okay, with Garret.”
“You slept with him?”
“God no,” she said. “Something trickier than that.”
“Go on …”
“He was flirting with me. Hard-core flirting. Like, I want to take you home and have my way with you flirting.”
Dani laughed. “And that surprises you? Thea—he talks to every woman like that. It’s just how he is.”
“I don’t think it’s the same.”
Dani sat back in her seat. “So what are you telling me here? That you want him too?”
“Well—”
“Because that absolutely can’t happen.” She smacked her hand on the table. “If you want a rebound lay, you’re going to have to pick someone else. I know I’ve been encouraging you to try new things, but I don’t think anyone was talking about your ex’s brother.”
Thea got up, not because she needed to stand, but because she felt too close to the conversation. Dani always had a way of cutting right to the bottom line when she had a problem to solve—and whether she hit the bull’s-eye or not, she stood by her convictions.
Thea paced, caught in the sting of pent-up frustration. Dani was right to suspect what Thea hadn’t allowed herself to suspect—that she was looking for a rebound, that it was only natural. After years of a lackluster love life, she was overdue for some toe-curling, sheet-twisting sex. But even before Garret had told her he wanted her, she’d been feeling uneasy—leading her to suspect that her sex life was part of the problem, but not all.
“It’s not entirely about that,” Thea said. “It feels like something else.”
“Like you need closure.”
She nodded.
Dani leaned an elbow on the table. “Oh I see. It makes sense. You’ve got closure from Jonathan. It’s probably in a drawer in your filing cabinet with the Rhode Island notary seal on it. But with Garret, things are still a little open-ended. You’ve got to find a way to close things off.”