by Lisa Dale
“Jonathan.”
Jonathan had stood to gather his things to leave, and Lori stopped him with a hand on his arm. He smiled at her nervously. He’d never considered himself an especially handsome man: he had a long face and eyes that were a bit too close-set for his liking. But until he’d started seeing Lori every few weeks, he hadn’t much cared about whether he was handsome or not. Now he found himself feeling shy under her bright and direct gaze.
“Please don’t tell me that Irina failed her social studies exam,” he said, half joking. “We’ve been studying so much, I think that girl could probably pass a citizenship test at this point.”
“I haven’t graded it yet.” Lori tipped her head to the side; Jonathan couldn’t have looked away if he’d tried. “Why? Do you need to bring a report back to Thea when you go home tonight?”
“Do I need to … Oh, no. No, we’re not back together,” Jonathan said. “If that’s what you—I mean, if you were thinking we were—”
“Oh.” The color in Lori’s cheeks rose, and she blushed the most lovely shade of strawberry Jonathan had ever seen. “I thought maybe you were back together. Maybe that’s why you haven’t asked me out.”
Jonathan could only stare a moment, tongue-tied. The rest of the book group had wandered out of the library, leaving them alone among the shelves and empty chairs. They stood face-to-face under the high dome, and Jonathan suddenly had the odd feeling that he was standing with her not in a library but in a place as important and quiet as church.
“Or maybe it’s too soon,” Lori said. She picked up her jacket and tugged it on. “You know what? I’m sorry. It’s too soon, isn’t it? Wow, this is embarrassing. Just forget it—”
“Lori.” He touched her, his hand landing directly on her waist instead of her elbow. The electricity was instant, shocking. He saw her eyes go wide. “Hey. It’s not too soon.”
She reached into her purse, opened her calendar—an old, brown leather planner as thick as an encyclopedia—and scribbled something down. “Here.” She handed him the piece of paper. “This is my address and number. Let’s just … I don’t know … grab a cup of coffee this weekend. Something low-key.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I have Irina.”
“All right. Another day then. A weeknight.”
He wanted to say something romantic and intriguing. But all he could come up with was, “Sounds like a plan.”
Later, as he walked to his car, the brown, wet leaves dropping like weights around him, he couldn’t ignore the charge that raced through his blood. He had never asked anyone on a date before. He’d married so young, he simply had never needed to go on a formal date. The idea that he was going on one now felt as exciting as the first time he’d stood in line for a roller coaster at an amusement park. But in some distant and shadowy part of his mind, he thought of Thea. He wondered what she was doing tonight. If she was alone.
The way Garret told the story to Jonathan was this: I made a decision—just like you asked me to. But don’t ask me to be happy about it.
The way Garret told the story to his colleagues was this: No, I wasn’t interested in the HUD project in the past. But you know me—once I lock onto something, I get it. Most of the time. Anyway, I wouldn’t lie to you. I want this assignment. I love D.C.
The way Garret told the story to his mother was this: I have to get away for a while. You know why. I don’t know how long.
The way Garret told the story to himself was this: It’s not running. It’s giving everyone space to breathe. It’s giving me space to breathe. If I go through the motions of getting over her, then it just might happen. It just might …
But somewhere over Virginia, after the captain had turned on the fasten seat belts sign, Garret began to wonder if he was making a mistake. The flight had been a short one; with the flight attendant bringing an endless supply of oaky añejo tequila to his seat in first class, he’d hardly boarded the plane before the captain was telling him it was nearly time to get off. He pulled his seat upright, upended his last shot, and stowed his tray. He tortured himself with his options: I could fly back.
But when the plane touched down and he felt the rumble of the wheels beneath him and the pressure of gravity as they lost speed, he knew that even if he returned directly to Newport, it would not feel like going home.
Thea sat in the car, waiting in a line of traffic to pick her daughter up from school on Friday afternoon in late October. All along Van Zandt Avenue, children with bright-colored backpacks were searching out their parents’ cars and running energetically toward them. Thea sat listening to the news on the radio, keeping her eyes peeled for Irina. When she noticed her daughter, talking to a group of laughing girls near the stairs, she thought about beeping the horn. But Irina wasn’t looking around for her ride; she was hanging out. Taking her time.
Thea opened the car door and stood. She called Irina’s name and waved. Normally, she might have been more patient, but she needed to get to the shop to train a new hire. Irina glanced over and saw her mother. She turned to her friends, said something that made them laugh, then walked—in no hurry—to meet Thea. She slid her backpack on the passenger-side floor as she climbed into the car.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s okay.” Thea checked the traffic and pulled out slowly onto the street. “How was your day?”
They went through the usual conversation—Thea prying details and answers out of Irina about her homework, her tests, her lessons for the day. The thought of Irina’s stash under her bed still bothered her, and because she didn’t want to hold off until Irina got into serious trouble (was she bringing the knife to school?), she’d decided that she could no longer wait to speak with Jonathan. Apparently, he’d felt that an e-mail was all that the situation called for. She would tackle this problem on her own.
“Irina,” she said sternly. “I found the box under your bed.”
Irina’s eyes grew big—over-the-top innocence. “What box?”
“If you lie, you’ll make this a hundred times worse.”
She changed gears fast. “So what? Who cares?”
“Where did you get the knife?” Thea asked.
Irina looked out the window. “Are you going to take it away from me?”
“I don’t know. Where did you get it?”
She slumped down in her seat. “I traded with a kid at school for it.”
“What did you trade him?”
“Espresso beans.”
“What did he want with them?” Thea asked.
“Energy,” Irina said. “They make you run fast.”
Thea shook her head. “It’s dangerous to give children caffeine like that. How many did you give him?”
“I don’t know,” she said, annoyed. “A handful?”
Thea stopped at a red light. “Don’t do that again. Understand? If I catch you giving espresso to kids, you’re grounded.”
“You’re probably going to ground me anyway.”
Thea drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “What about the cigarettes and matches?”
“I don’t have any cigarettes.”
“You have an empty pack.”
Irina turned to her mother, her bottom lip protruding in a frown. “I don’t smoke, Mom. I just like the way the box smells. Like apples. Smoking is gross. It’s tar.”
Thea breathed a sigh of relief.
“And anyway I tried smoking once.”
Thea stopped drumming. Her heart may have stopped as well. “And?”
“It tasted disgusting. Like … like ash!”
Thea held back a smile, pleased that if there was one thing that would keep her daughter from smoking, it was smoking itself. The light turned green, and she pressed the gas. “All right, here’s the deal,” she said. “You agree to these terms, or I really do ground you. Ready?”
Irina nodded.
“First, no more giving espresso beans out. They don’t make you run faster. But they can make your heart race if
you don’t know how you’ll react to them, and that could be very dangerous. Especially for kids. Okay?”
“Yes.”
“Two, when we get home, we’re throwing away the matches. They’re dangerous, Irina. Not for playing with. Understand?”
“Fine.”
“Last, I keep the knife until you’re old enough to have it back.”
“When’s that?”
“I don’t know exactly. We’ll have to see how well you behave. If you’re mature enough to have it.”
“Really?”
Thea nodded.
“Fine. As long as you won’t ground me,” she said.
They rode in silence, heading south toward the Dancing Goat, and Thea thought to herself that there was something almost too easy about the conversation. Irina, who so often dug her heels in, had agreed to Thea’s terms without any terms of her own. Thea would have to keep an eye on her daughter for a while, just to make sure she wasn’t getting into any trouble. She hoped Irina’s rebellion phase didn’t last too long. There was only so much Thea could take.
The week dragged into the weekend, and Thea knew Garret had left—she felt his absence like a thinning of the air or the change in temperature that happens when the sun dips behind a cloud. She forced herself to know it, to reconcile with it, to embrace his disappearance. He hadn’t told her he was leaving Newport, and yet somehow she knew the moment he was gone.
The baristas at the coffee shop did their best to cheer her up, and she did her best to let them. Only Dani and Lettie seemed to have guessed what was wrong, but neither of them spoke about it. They asked Thea if she was eating and insisted on going out to lunch. They offered to watch Irina if Thea needed a break, and when business was slow and Thea lingered longer than necessary, Lettie put her foot down and sent her home.
On Saturday evening, Thea had flipped the sign on the door from Open to Closed, and the baristas put on eighties music and danced as they cleaned up, Claudine making advances on a broom and Jules twirling à la Ginger Rogers as he mopped. Apparently someone had told Dani there was a party, because she’d brought her civilian clothes to change into in the bathroom after her shift. Lettie showed up with her knitting bag full of all the fixings for mojitos.
Sure, Thea thought. Why the hell not?
They closed the shades and dimmed the lights and tucked in for a long evening. And, sometime around one a.m., Thea realized she was drunk.
Jules refilled her glass, and she shook her head and pushed it away. “Oh come on,” he said. “Lettie’s opening in the morning. You don’t have to be up.”
“No.” She stood on wobbly legs and went behind the counter for a glass of water. It tasted fantastic—crisp and clear going down. When it was gone, she poured another. Jules turned around in his seat to look at her as she rejoined them.
“Why don’t we get out of here?” he asked. “There’s this little bar I know about around the corner; it’s so adorable. The kitchen is open all night, and they make the best lobster rolls this side of the Penobscot Bay.”
“Lobster rolls?” Thea said. “I haven’t had one in twenty years.”
“Then maybe it’s time to try again!”
“No. No lobster rolls.” Thea put down her water, suddenly feeling an intense need to explain. To make him—all of them—understand. “Look. I don’t like them. And that’s all there is to it. It doesn’t matter why I don’t like them, I just don’t.”
“Okay, okay!” Jules said, sitting back in his chair and laughing. “No lobster rolls!”
But Thea wasn’t done. “Do you know why Irina likes soccer?”
Claudine grinned. “Because it’s the real football?”
Thea rolled her eyes.
“Because she’s a show-off,” Dani said. “And I think she gets a kick out of outplaying the boys.”
“It’s because it suits her,” Lettie said. “That’s all.”
“Right.” Thea jabbed her pointer finger in the air. “Soccer suits her. I never taught her to like it. I figured I would have been carting her to and from ballet or piano lessons by now. But nope—she likes soccer. And I have no idea why.”
“Where are you going with this?” Claudine asked.
“I have no idea,” Thea said. “I guess … I guess the point is that—okay—I did what you guys asked.” She looked around at her friends, Claudine with her purple fedora, Lettie with her necklace of pearls, Dani with her boy-cut hair, and Jules with all the best intentions in the world. “I tried to reinvent myself—you know, the whole new post-divorce me. But as it turns out, I like the coffee shop. I like being a mom, even though I had Irina young. And I like my house, even though I inherited it from my parents.”
She noticed that her friends had grown quiet, listening.
“I mean, maybe I could learn to like Indian food. Or lobster rolls. Or kissing strangers at two a.m.—”
“Whoa, I need to hear this story,” Jules said.
“But,” Thea continued, “my life, the life I’ve been living so far, suits me for the most part. I don’t want to talk myself into being a person that I’m not. I like what I like. And I love who I love. And it doesn’t matter why I love. I just do. And that’s all there is.”
Lettie stood up and walked around the table to Thea. “Come on, darling.” Thea glanced up at her. “Come on and let Lettie take you home.”
Thea looked up, confused. The look on Lettie’s face was filled with gentle concern, and it wasn’t until that moment that Thea realized she’d been crying. When she touched her cheeks, they were wet. “Lettie …” She started to say she was sorry, but the words wouldn’t come out.
“Shhh.” Lettie took her hand and helped her out of her chair. “Come on, love. You’ve had a long week. A very long week.”
The room spun. Time had slipped at some point, and apparently Jules had gone for her things. He helped her into her coat and handed Dani her bag.
“I’m sorry, guys,” she said. She took a deep breath and pulled herself together. “Thank you for this. For the party. And the therapy.”
“I’ll expect an extra eighty-five bucks in my paycheck this week,” Jules said. Claudine smacked him on the back of the head.
In the doorway, Dani hugged her and said good night while the others began to clean up. “Call me if you need anything.”
Thea nodded. “I can’t help what I like,” she said. “I’m not a bad person.”
“You’re the best person I know,” Dani said.
Lettie put her arm around her. “Time to get you home.”
From “The Coffee Diaries” by Thea Celik
The Newport Examiner
After you’ve made your morning pot of coffee, what do you do with your coffee grounds? Toss them in the trash?
Americans drink millions of cups of coffee every day—and that’s a lot of coffee grounds. We can all make more conscious, responsible choices by drinking organic fair trade coffee and by being aware of the waste that is so often invisible when we grab a cup of joe from our favorite vendor. Even when you take that last sip of coffee from your mug, the journey of the beans has not necessarily reached its end.
You can use your coffee grounds to fertilize your garden. You can flush some down the sink with boiling water to scrape the pipes clean. You can dry them out and use them as a deodorizer—the same way you put baking soda in the fridge.
Whatever you do, the important thing is to pay attention, to not take the earth’s resources for granted, and to make the most of everything you have.
NINETEEN
Weeks passed. Irina had dressed up as Hulk Hogan for Halloween, with cotton-stuffed muscles, a bandanna, and a blond wig. She’d won a best costume award in the town parade. The leaves dropped from the branches until there were no more to fall, and the street sweepers roared down the streets and brushed the stragglers away. The grocery stores began advertising free turkeys, the food pantries took out ads in the paper calling for donations, and in some stores, the first Christmas decorati
ons were popping up among lawn rakes and fertilizer like vanguards hinting at the winter freeze. The first snow flurry of the year came while Thea was taking Irina to school one morning, flakes sweeping up and over the hood of the car. She nearly had to squint to see them, and yet they foretold so much.
At some point, Thea had made the decision to stop wishing for what wasn’t: for Jonathan to help make important decisions about her child, for Sue and Ken, for Garret. She felt the loss of them at odd moments—she missed Sue when Irina was hawking cheap chocolate for a school fund-raiser, and her grandmother always bought so much and with such joy. She missed Ken when it was time to clean out the gutters of her house, since he’d always insisted on giving her a hand and she always insisted on making a pie for him afterward. She missed Jonathan when she came home at night, because she’d spent so much of her life exchanging stories with him, and she liked his easy companionship. And she missed Garret—so much—all the time; her longing was a low hum that followed her everywhere, a sound that she could get used to and live with and maybe even one day learn to ignore, but she would never stop hearing it completely.
She studied with Irina to help keep her focused and on track. She kept the house clean, and she tried to settle into a new kind of rhythm. She wasn’t alone—she had friends—but aside from her daughter, she no longer was close with any of her family. Still, she knew she was strong—that she could stand it. Maybe, she thought, she would even come to like her new life—maybe being alone, too, could become an acquired taste.
Jonathan loved to watch Lori Caisse eat—the way she gave such perfect attention to her food, cutting meat and vegetables into neat little bites, and chewing each with a thoughtful, pleased expression on her face. At the Greek restaurant where he’d taken her for their second date, his own food sat nearly untouched on his plate. It was delicious enough—a rich moussaka of eggplant, meat, tomato, and Parmesan—but part of the reason he couldn’t bring himself to enjoy it was because of how much he wanted to.