by Annora Green
Once reality set in and her bank account was empty, however, Ari started to stay put for longer stretches of time and took up endless odd jobs to pay for food and gas during her nomadic life. Eventually, she earned enough to put herself through community college. Still, she never lost focus of the fact that she could not rely on anyone except for herself.
¨°¨
Present Day
Just when Ari had nearly forgotten about Sophia Black after not dealing with her for a few weeks, she glanced up one Wednesday morning to see Sophia next in line at the cafe, looking at her anxiously.
“Has my son been by here today? Have you see him?”
“I... um, no,” Ari said, instinctively scanning the patrons in the cafe to confirm he really wasn’t there. “I haven’t seen him at all today. Why? What’s going on?”
“I can’t get a hold of him. His school just called, said he didn’t come in today, which is completely out of character for him. I know he sometimes waits for me here after work, so this was the first place I wanted to check. If he’s not here...” her voice trailed off, looking around the cafe.
“Is he at home?” Ari asked, motioning to Athena to come and help the next customer in line while she spoke with Sophia.
“He must be. I don’t know. This day is the worst -” she said, touching her temple and scrunching up her eyes. “I have a meeting in an hour, I’d cancel it but it’s the buyer for a huge department store, and I’ve been trying to get a meeting with him for months... I can’t miss it. But I also need to know where my son is before I can focus on anything.”
“Percy’s not answering his phone? Texts? Nothing?”
Sophia shook her head.
“No. That’s what’s also strange. I don’t understand what’s going on,” she said, looking down at her phone again.
“You should check at home. Maybe he’s there,” Ari suggested.
Sophia nodded. “I know, he probably just stayed home from school... he must have. I would check, but this meeting, I don’t have enough time to get home and back by then.”
“Can anyone else handle the meeting?”
Sophia shook her head. “No, I have to do it. Definitely.”
“Tell you what. This afternoon’s not that busy for me and Athena’s here to keep an eye on things. You go to your meeting, keep your phone handy, and I’ll go check at your house for him.”
Sophia’s shoulders relaxed slightly at the suggestion.
“Would you really? No... it’s too much to ask.”
“It’s not,” Ari assured her. “It’s no problem at all if you tell me where to go and what to do.”
“I’ll give you my key,” Sophia said, pulling her key pouch out of her pocket and handing it to her. “Just in case there’s no answer, go in to check and make sure he’s not there. If he’s not there... I don’t know what I’ll-”
“I’m sure he’s there. I’ll find him. And actually, I’ve got experience with this sort of thing... tracking people down, that is.” Ari said, trying to reassure her, taking the key.
“Okay. All right,” Sophia said uncertainly, tucking her hair nervously behind her ear. “I’ll have my phone the whole time; if he’s not there, send me a message right away.”
Sophia could barely concentrate on the meeting that afternoon. Luckily, she had meticulously prepared for it in advance. She had impeccable samples on hand to show the buyer, business plans and perfect drawings and every piece of information she could possibly collect that might be required to help him make his decision about buying her products easier. She was ready days ago.
Shortly before the meeting was wrapping up, Sophia quickly glanced down at the screen of her phone and saw that there was a new message from Ari.
Found him on the couch at your house. Sick with the flu, I think.
Relief flooded through Sophia. At least Ari found him, that was all that mattered. After that, she regained enough focus to wrap up the meeting, hopefully without the buyer from the store noticing that she had been a little off kilter.
The minute the meeting ended, she said goodnight to everyone and drove home as quickly as she could.
¨°¨
Earlier that afternoon, Ari calmly drove to Sophia’s house. She drove along shady, suburban roads, winding up a hill.
“Is this it it?” she asked herself out loud, peering out of her windshield when the map app on her phone told her she had arrived.
It was a mansion.
Sophia must have only been, what, maybe five years at most older than her, and yet her house was large, elegant and sophisticated, located on a picturesque street on the side of a hill just within the border of Palo Rosa. It looked like royalty would live there. As stylish as Sophia was, the place was way out of synch with her image as a single mom, up-and-coming owner of an underwear (okay, sorry,lingerie) line, and part time small town Retail Association President.
Ari felt small as she unlocked the door and stepped into the foyer. In awe, she quietly walked through the pristine rooms and hallways, it crossing her mind that she should have maybe taken off her shoes to walk around on the spotless floor. The wood floors shone, the walls were a creamy white, the kitchen had beautiful marble countertops. She felt slightly like she was in a museum. The place needed a docent. She definitely felt like an intruder, but no alarms were going off (when Sophia had texted her the address, she had told her she turned off the house’s alarm system remotely from an app).
After a second of looking around, she remembered her mission and began checking the rooms for Sophia’s teenage son. Thankfully, that took all of 10 seconds, as she found Percy in plain sight on the couch in his mom’s study, the television playing softly in the background. When she walked into the room lined with bookshelves and a fireplace as its massive focal point, he rolled over on the couch, squinted, and wondered aloud why she was there.
“Your mom sent me to try to find you. She didn’t know where you were when she heard you weren’t in school,” Ari said.
Percy seemed satisfied with that answer, and closed his eyes.
It was clear Percy was under the weather, but with no children of her own - and having been an only child - Ari was slightly at a loss as to what to do for the kid when he was not ordering a donut or hot chocolate in her cafe.
She found Percy a blanket from a small linen closet under the stairs, brought him some water and herbal tea she found in the kitchen, and assured the kid his mom would be home in a while.
He thanked her for the water and tea and fell back to sleep on the couch.
Ari did not want to leave him home alone before Sophia arrived, so to kill time, Ari wandered through the house. She was trying to get a sense of the space, which was at once beautiful and elegant, but also lonely, as the house felt too big for just a single mother and her son.
The rooms, with their traditional, light and neutral colored decor had made quite a first impression when she first walked in, but the more time that passed, the more the house started to feel cold. Why did Sophia and Percy really need all that space, anyways?
Ari tentatively brushed her hand along the polished countertops, the velvet and leather furniture, the endless books in the cabinets. She inspected the two coffee machines, one an instant espresso maker imported from Europe, another, a complicated, more traditional style manual coffee machine. She was not daft enough to go upstairs, but she did shamelessly sneak a peek in the medicine cabinet in the downstairs powder room, where she discovered a small bottle of perfume. She gave it a light spritz and the air instantly smelled exactly of Sophia. Ari closed her eyes and sighed for a moment.
The woman was a real piece of work sometimes, but damn, she smelled good.
After that, Ari got bored of snooping and went back into the study and thumbed through a few coffee table books: one on horses, the other on a history of French fashion design.
About an hour later, a very concerned Sophia came home, heading straight over to the boy sprawled out on the sofa.
“What hap
pened, Percy?” she asked, kneeling in front of him, feeling his forehead, talking to him softly as he stirred awake.
“My... ear...” he said.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
The kid nodded.
“Let’s get you to the doctor. Can you stand?”
Percy eased himself up, and Ari quietly followed them out the door, taking it as her cue that her help was no longer needed.
¨°¨
Ari returned to The Little Cafe, and to a quiet evening. The weather was unusually cold, and rainy, and no one in Palo Rosa seemed to be interested in heading out for a cup of coffee that night. Even her music booking for the evening had cancelled.
“Athena, go ahead and close up in a few. I’m just going to make something in the kitchen before I go,” Ari said.
Athena nodded.
“Sure thing,” she said as she started to close out the cash register and do a final pass at wiping off all the tables and the bar and counter space.
Ari wandered into the kitchen and started to prepare a little more food than she normally made for herself for dinner. She took a plastic container and threw together a salad: they usually had a gourmet salad every day around lunch time on the limited lunch menu, and today’s had been cranberry-pecan spring greens with a vinaigrette, so she used the leftovers from that. She then found a few thick slices of bread, some thin slices of cheese, and dug out a wedge of butter from the back of the fridge, and put together some grilled cheeses. At the last minute, she added thin slices of pear and dijon mustard to the sandwiches, just to give them a bit more of a sophisticated flair. She wrapped them in foil wrap, and, on her way out, grabbed a few glass bottles of cold-pressed organic juices. And then, as an afterthought, two date-filled pinwheel cookies.
Without over-analyzing what she was doing (What was she doing? This woman had tried to make her first few critical weeks in business miserable...)
It was not at all rational, but Ari drove all the way back to Sophia’s. When she arrived at the dark house, she took the food from her passenger seat, which she had packed in a canvas shopping bag, and walked it up to the front porch.
Just then, she noticed headlights behind her.
She cringed. She had thought she would be out of there before Sophia and Percy got back from the doctor.
She turned around, smiled, and waited awkwardly as Sophia parked and got out of the car.
She silently cursed herself for doing this. Would Sophia think it was weird?
Percy followed, dragging himself out of the passenger seat, and Sophia put her arm around his shoulder, guiding him up the front step.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean for you to see me again. I wanted to drop off some food on my way home - figured it’d been a long day,” Ari said shyly, holding up the canvas bag of goodies.
“Come in,” Sophia said, her voice tired and eyes a little unfocused, unlocking the door and helping Percy inside. He headed straight to the study to lay down on the couch, and Sophia motioned Ari to follow her toward the kitchen.
“What ended up being wrong with Percy?”
“Ear infection, apparently. He’ll be fine. It gave him a high fever and made him a little disoriented today, which is why he didn’t call me at first, and then his phone died and he fell asleep before it had charged. Anyways, we got his antibiotics... he’ll be fine,” she said, slumping over the counter, her energy clearly drained.
“I’m glad he’s gonna be okay,” Ari said.
“Parenting is...hard,” Sophia said quietly, running her right hand through her silky, inky brown hair, the light reflecting off of a few slightly reddish highlights.
Ari shifted, not sure what to say. She was not a parent. She could not really commiserate.
Sophia blinked a few times, as though it had just sunk in that Ari was there.
“Thank you. For... everything today. I don’t really...” she hesitated, as if trying to find the right words. “I just don’t have anyone I can call for help with this sort of thing.”
Ari shrugged. “Really no big deal. Glad to help out, you know. He’s a good kid.”
Sophia smiled, her shoulders relaxing. “He really is.”
“Oh, and, I brought this,” Ari said, remembering the bag she was carrying.
She unloaded the sandwiches, salads, cookies and juice, spreading the items out on the kitchen island.
“I’m starving. You have no idea how welcome this is,” Sophia said, taking a plate out of a cabinet and surrendering herself to the spread of food.
“What about Percy? Is he hungry?” Ari asked.
“He’ll be okay. I think he wanted sleep more than anything. If he wakes up, I have some soup in the freezer that I could heat up for him.”
Ari nodded. “Well, I guess I’ll be out of your way, then.”
Sophia looked at her, blinked, her eyelashes fluttering.
“No, stay. Please, Ms. Little.”
“Ari.”
“Ari. Eat some of this...” she motioned vaguely at the pile of food. “I can’t get through it all on my own, and Percy’s appetite seems to be gone.”
Ari started to refuse again, but Sophia was already pushing a plate toward her, and so she gave in and sat down on a barstool at the kitchen island.
They ate in silence for a few moments.
“Any word on who broke your window?” Ari asked, trying to think of small talk.
Sophia shook her head. “No idea. Seems to be a lost cause.”
“One of the guys I hire for odd jobs around the cafe, Leonard, might be able to help you with the repairs,” Ari offered.
“That’s appreciated, but I have someone. Besides, Leonard...is it?” Sophia cleared her throat. “I assume he’s not my biggest fan because of the whole...well, being against festive holiday decorations thing?”
Ari laughed, despite herself. “Yeah, something like that.”
Even Sophia cracked a smile, shaking her head. “Well then, I think I’ll just go with the person I have in mind.”
Ari shrugged. “No problem. But if you need anything else, or if your person falls through, let me know. Us small business owners have got to stick together. Pool our resources. This kind of window smashing thing could’ve happened to me. It might’ve just been random, them choosing your window.”
“Perhaps,” Sophia said.
Ari studied her for a moment. She was unwrapping the grilled cheese from some foil.
“This is really good,” Sophia said, staring down at her sandwich after she took a bite. “What do you call it?”
“Grilled cheese with pear and mustard,” Ari shrugged.
“Nice combination. I wouldn’t have thought of it.”
“Well, I was just going to make a regular grilled cheese, but figured I’d fancy it up a bit. You don’t really seem like the... you know, grilled cheese type.”
“I suppose you’re right. It’s not something I’d typically gravitate toward. But I do appreciate this one. It has complex flavors.”
“Usually I’m not that into complex things,” Ari said. “The simpler, the better.”
“Is that so?” Sophia said, raising her eyebrows.
Ari nodded.
“Well, I like complex things,” said Sophia, munching thoughtfully.
After she finished her sandwich and salad, Ari offered her the cookies. Sophia seemed to be debating a moment, then took one.
“This is good, too. You’re talented, you know. The food is good, the coffee is good.”
Ari smiled. “I didn’t make the cookies, Rachel did. But yeah, I love food. It’s why I always wanted to open a cafe. I’m not a chef, I don’t even really know how to bake or cook - that’s why I hire people like Rachel to do the complicated stuff like pastries and donuts - but I guess I know good food when I see it. My parents were always out, busy, working when I was a kid, ‘cause they had me so young. So I learned at a young age about how to, you know, put a grilled cheese together, or make something simple like tomato soup.”
<
br /> “Comfort food,” Sophia commented, finishing the last of her cookie.
“Exactly,” Ari said.
Sophia set her napkin next to her plate. “How much do I owe you for this?” She asked, taking Ari’s plate and moving towards the sink.
Ari stood up.
“What? No, nothing. My treat.”
“Nonsense. First I kept you from work by sending you here earlier to check on Percy, then you brought me all this food-”
“It was nothing. It’s on me.”
“Well, I must owe you something. Do you want to be able to put another table out in front of your cafe? Because I can turn a blind eye to it, if you do, and I’m sure...”
“Sophia,” Ari said, lightly touching her shoulder.
Sophia looked down at her hand, clearly surprised, and Ari instantly withdrew it.
Ari cringed internally. Why had she touched her?
Ari tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear and continued. “The food’s on me. Just helping out someone who needed it today. That’s what neighbors are for, right?”
“I can’t tell you the last time someone brought me dinner,” Sophia sighed.
“It’s late. I should go,” Ari said, edging towards the entrance.
“Right,” Sophia said, walking her out.
Ari noted how their footsteps echoed in the house as they walked.
“Goodnight. And thank you, again,” Sophia said, walking with her out to the porch.
Ari smiled. “Any time. Seriously. And tell Percy I hope he feels better soon.”
Sophia nodded, crossing her arms against the night chill. “I will.”
As Ari drove home and kept replaying the events of the day over and over in her mind - wondering if she had said or done the right things, wondering why she was even helping out her impossible and irritating neighbor to begin with - she also tried to make some sense of the woman, who seemed so unusually docile and tired tonight.
At least it seemed as though they were finally on better footing. Maybe they could, at a minimum, at last get along as neighbors.
As she drove, Ari was also relieved to know that she was returning home to her own tiny third-floor studio apartment situated above a little hardware store. Sophia’s house was beautiful, but ridiculously big and empty. Ari liked things to be a little bit cozier. Her old, worn couch, warm wool rug and bed with the quilt on it that her mom had made sounded pretty good right now.