“I love you,” the boy said again, half muffled from the side of his face in the pillow.
“We’re finished,” Dio said, taking a sip of his wine.
The boy got dressed and walked to the balcony to embrace the god, but Dio stopped him without turning around. “That’s enough. Tell Dominic I’m finished for the afternoon.”
“…Who’s Dominic?”
“The Titan that guards the staircase.”
The boy stopped himself from asking anything else so he wouldn’t ruin the greatest fifteen minutes of his life, and he left.
After the door shut behind him, Dio poured himself another glass of wine and sat on his throne. He had made Buddy Landry rush to the nearest bookstore and buy him novels about New Orleans and Louisiana. The waddling proprietor had brought back Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, Midnight Bayou by Nora Roberts, and Quiet in the Alley by Clemmons Ruiz, the last of which Dio had started back in the trailer with the beat-up pages covered in multicolored highlights and blue pen brackets and asterisks.
“Are…are these okay for a start?” Buddy Landry had floundered in front of the god as he handed Dio the fresh novels. “I got them right…right there.” He spun in a circle, attempting to orient himself in the direction of Pirate Alley. “At Faulkner House Books, where Faulkner himself once lived and wrote.”
“I do not see any books by a Faulkner,” Dio had responded, holding up the books like a spread hand of cards.
“Oh…I’m…I didn’t think. I’m…I’ll go…”
Dio waved Buddy out of the room; he still hadn’t finished the sentence by the time the door shut behind him.
He plucked Quiet in the Alley from his pile of books (a pile that soon included The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!) and opened the first chapter. But before Dio could settle into the novel, the stomping of rushed footsteps coming up the stairs and Dominic’s baritone yell drew him from the bed.
“Hey! He’s not available now!”
“I have to see him!”
Thud!
A handsome boy crashed into the room and tumbled to the floor.
“I need you,” he said, looking up from the ground, trying to catch his breath. “I’ll do anything.”
Dio regarded the boy as he swirled his wine in the glass, and took a long pull. The small nose hoop looked familiar and his bright blue eyes were pretty, but Dio had been with too many handsome young men by then, and this one was indistinguishable from many of the others.
Dominic, apologizing like a serf to a czar, grabbed the boy by the ankles and dragged him across the floor.
“I came all the way back from Wisconsin to see him! Please!” He latched onto the doorway and pleaded one last time. “Please! I love you,” he said, tears building in his eyes.
Dio gave him a moment, for one final gaze upon his glowing body, looked up to Dominic, and shook his head from side to side.
“No.”
And the door slammed shut.
He read the first few pages of Quiet in the Alley, about a down-on-his-luck French Quarter writer who would have coffee every morning at the same shop just so he could make small talk with a barista he described as “Creole Aphrodite, born from the misty foam of the Mississippi River.”
The god rolled his eyes and dropped the book on his lap. For thousands of years the God of the Vine had heard comparisons drawn between Aphrodite and mortal women—in Sweden, Sudan, Colombia, and Thailand, princesses and celebrities had been described as “an Aphrodite among us,” but never had one lived up to the Goddess of Love’s standard.
Dio had witnessed men wage wars over Aphrodite, take their fleets and leave their wives just to be in her good graces. When she appeared before them, on the rare occasions when she would descend from Olympus in search of mortal pleasure, the men would throw themselves before her the moment she revealed her true identity and renounce their previous love for any other woman—sometimes she walked the streets of Athens or Constantinople just for the attention.
Dio pictured the goddess working in a coffee shop and started to laugh to himself as he imagined spilling the brown stuff all over her cream-white hand in frustration, but stopped laughing when the door swung open once again. He would need to have a word with Dominic, whose senses were either dulled from too many purple specials or from not enough sleep, especially when it was just one skinny boy from the land of Wisconsin. But the god froze, staring into the face of the intruder, and Hermes stared back.
Zibby
Daiquiri Fest Canceled.
Authorities Cite Concerns Over Violence.
Liv shot up from behind a stack of pulp paperbacks when Zibby reread the headline.
“Awww, what the shit?!” Liv shouted over the books, paying no mind to the trickling stream of customers patronizing the store on Saturday morning. “I always enjoyed Blackout Fest,” she said, referring to the festival by its colloquial name.
“Tulane kids just ruin everything,” Zibby said, ignoring the group of three all sporting the green and white of Tulane University perusing the local fiction.
Zibby scrolled past the bulk of the article, which explained the New Orleans tradition of festivals and the cancelation being yet another form of “cultural sterilization,” and opened up the comments section—Pandora’s box, her guilty pleasure.
GreenWaveDad973: Glad to see that something is FINALLY being done about this!
MzChampagneFan504: This is an AFFRONT to our culture and traditions! We have had Daiq-Fest in St. Roch for FifTEEN Years!
WhoDat09: ^ Don’t you mean the “New Marigny”?
RebelRun88: Gotta make those Yankees happy!
PugLuvver: A culture of getting drunk? Yeah, some tradition! I bet you do LOVE Champagne. @MzChampagneFan504
LSUAlum92: Here comes BIG government. #ThankaDEMONcrat
Zibby rung up a middle-aged customer who did a poor job of trying to conceal that his young adult purchases were for himself. Liv had finished cataloguing the pulp fiction and slumped on top of the counter in melodramatic exhaustion.
“The books. The books. They never stop coming.”
“Hey, if everyone read on a Kindle, you wouldn’t have a store.”
“Oh, don’t tease me like that,” she said, picking up Margaret Atwood and giving her nose a rub. “Coffee?”
“Yes!” Liv turned to Zibby like her query was a marriage proposal. “Oh my god, an iced coffee sounds divine. You know my order. Take some cash from the register.”
The old-timey register zinged open and Zibby plucked out a ten and walked to the corner to grab iced coffees at Rue de la Course.
The block was bustling, and a cellist played in a slice of shade outside of the Live Oak Café. A father held his daughter’s hand as they left Haase’s, a neighborhood shoe store that had been around since the twenties, and two young guys, one in LSU purple and the other in Loyola maroon, popped out of the Family Barbershop—a joint so explicitly Republican that there were more Bushes on the walls than a vintage pornography store—still, a staple of the neighborhood.
When directors, taking advantage of the friendly Louisiana tax incentives, needed a “Main Street, USA” for their films, they used Oak Street. Zibby liked to share with out-of-staters that that famous scene in Xavier Danger, the one where Ricky Toronto beats the piss out of Damien Rogers, was filmed outside of the Maple Leaf Bar, and that Zibby saw Ricky pick up food from the Taceaux Loceaux food truck on the set. None of them even knew the movie was filmed in New Orleans. She took pride in that.
She passed the sidewalk tables and tall windows that offered a view of the coffee shop in the repurposed building with the high ceilings; Ben was on his laptop, headphones in, sitting at a table by himself.
She skipped past the window and opened the door, sneaking a peek at her mentor, who was still staring at his laptop screen, either having not noticed her or not caring that they enjoyed the same coffeehouse.
The line
was filled with its typical assortment of moms in overpriced yoga attire, Tulane students in their matching greens, writers honing their craft in public to prove they exist, and the grunge types not quite grungy enough for Zotz, the alternative coffee shop a block in the other direction. Zibby turned so her back faced Ben and typed The Calvary into Google so she could name a few of the band’s top songs. The screen loaded—the Rue’s Wi-Fi was never the most reliable of connections. The search had produced pictures of Jesus on the cross and links to Jerusalem.
“What the shit?”
She typed The Calvary (band) into the search bar.
Did you mean The Cavalry? Google responded condescendingly.
Zibby always read Google’s suggestions with the superciliousness of a junior philosophy major correcting a sophomore philosophy major’s unforgiveable imbroglio: “Did you mean Kierkegaard?”
She clicked on the Cavalry’s Wikipedia page, skimmed the band’s history, and checked their discography and picked a couple of songs that had done well in the charts in the US and UK; she gave them a listen before it was her turn to order.
Iced coffees in hand, Zibby hurried to the station of sugars and milks at the back of the shop, completely ignoring the station set up by the door for people taking their drinks to go. When she was only a few feet from his table, close enough that any normal person would have the decency to at least look up and nod at someone he had had a conversation and shared witty email exchanges with, Ben still hadn’t peeled his eyes from the screen, so Zibby gave his workspace a nudge with her hip.
He jumped with genuine surprise and she played it off like an accident.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Oh, heyyyyy.” She held it longer than she would’ve liked to admit.
“Oh, hey Zibby! What’s goin’ on?”
“Ya know, just pickin’ somethin’ up to get me through the day.” She held the coffees up to her ears.
“Looks like you’re having a long day.”
Zibby pursed her lips, floundering between whether she should be insulted or if she had forgotten to put on makeup this morning.
“Because of the coffees,” he clarified.
“Oh…Oh! ha! No, no, these aren’t both for me. One’s for my boss. I work down the street and pop in here often,” she said, laying the foundation for another possible accidental run-in.
“Oh yeah? Where? At the Advocacy Center?” he said, referring to the legal aid clinic located a few blocks down Oak Street.
“Huh? Oh, no. That would make sense. Law school, right? No, I work at the bookstore.”
His eyes grew cartoonishly large, as if he were having an epiphany.
“Ya know, Oak Street…”
“You’re the girl from the bookstore!” He cleared his throat and composed himself. “That’s where I recognized you from.”
“So you know it?”
“Yeah, of course. I love that place. I’ve talked with the manager before. Liv, right?”
“That’s who this is for.” She held up one of the coffees by the rim.
“Very cool. So, how’s my book doing?”
Zibby gave one of those courtesy laughs you give when you realize that someone was trying to be funny, but you didn’t understand the joke. When he didn’t say anything, and waited for an actual response, Zibby had to prove her ignorance. “I’m sorry, what do you mean?”
“Well, that’s not a good sign.” He laughed. “I dropped a few copies of my book off last month.”
“You…you have a book?”
“Yeah, a novel.”
“What’s it called?”
“Come July.” “What’s it about?”
“Oh, you know, the same thing everyone’s first novel is about—everything.”
“I see.” Zibby scanned the 3L one last time to check if he was just messing with her.
“You don’t believe me? It’s in your store! That’d be a weird thing to fabricate.”
“Yeah, it would be. Well, I gotta get back to the store. I’ll talk your book up to unsuspecting customers.”
“I’d really appreciate that, thanks. See ya later.”
Zibby took a few steps toward the door before turning back around. “By the way, LaSalle still sucks.”
“Just trust me, she gets better.”
“Y’all close or somethin’?”
“What? No, no not like…She’s just one of my references.”
“All right. I’ll believe it when I see it.” And she left the coffeehouse.
Somehow Oak Street had become ten degrees hotter in the time she spent in Rue and Zibby’s Defend New Orleans t-shirt stuck to her lower back. “Shit, shit, shit,” she said when she realized she had forgotten the sugar for the drinks, but she was already at the shop’s storefront, and already running late because of the unexpected run-in with Ben.
The little bookshop was swelling with so many people that it seemed as if a French Quarter tour had taken a wrong turn and made a pit stop at the literary establishment. Liv, red and frazzled, called to Zibby as the bell over the door rang.
“What’s going on? Did a new Harry Potter book come out or somethin’?”
“I have no idea,” Liv said, taking a healthy sip from the straw as she stacked the entire series of A Song of Ice and Fire for a sweaty customer. “What took so long? Did you brew the beans yaself?”
“You know how the line gets over there. Every mom this side of South Carrollton is getting their iced coffee before they pick up their shitty kids from school.”
“You’re gonna make a great mother. Wait, is there sugar in this?”
“Oh, don’t even start. Last week you said your daughter was the reincarnation of Pol Pot.”
“Have you seen what she does to her stuffed animals? There was so much cotton stuffing lying around her room it looked like Christmas decorations at a department store.”
Zibby laughed and pictured Liv walking into the room with six-year-old Portia holding a teddy bear head out in front of her like a jihadist.
Liv took a customer to the Children’s section to help her find the book of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and asked Zibby to take over the register.
Eventually, the afternoon crowd died down and Zibby called to Liv, who appeared from the back room cradling Margaret Atwood and running her fingers through the cat’s belly hair. “Hey, do we have a book by Ben D’Alessio?”
“Who?”
“He’s this guy who goes to my school. Actually, he’s my 3L mentor. He said he dropped off a few copies here recently.”
“Check the Self-Published section,” she said, pointing to the neglected corner by the front window.
Zibby scanned the bookcase and ran her finger over the spine of Come July, a novel. She plucked one of the three copies from the shelf and regarded the baby-blue cover.
“Oh, yeah. I remember him,” said Liv, dropping Margaret Atwood on her pillow. “Nice guy. Comes in here once in a while and buys like ten books at a time. Surprised you didn’t recognize him.”
“Have we sold any yet?”
“Psh, no one buys self-published books,” she said as she headed out to pick up their pho from the spot on the corner across from the coffeehouse.
Zibby read the back-cover blurb and author bio to herself. “It sounds interesting enough,” she said, turning to an uninterested Margaret Atwood. “Ha! ‘He lives in New Orleans with a very mischievous cat named Kennedy,’” she read. “You hear that? We might find you a new friend.”
When Liv returned, they ate together in the back office. Zibby would pop out of the back when the bell above the door rang. But at seven on a Saturday night, most entrants were merely killing time as they waited for a dinner reservation at an Oak Street restaurant or for their friends to show up at Pints, the pretentious bar next door.
“You really”—she paused to slurp down the rice noodles—“don’t like that place, huh?”
“One of the bartenders scoffed at me once when my dad and I ordered Dixie.”
“Oh man. I
know how your father loves his Dixie.”
“You should’ve seen him. He was like, ‘This is why I only drink at Carrollton Station!’”
“Those beer snobs are the worst. I’ve seen them in there with a pen and pad taking notes. Just drink the thing! I’ll tell ya, the bigger the beard and the more tattoos they have, the more of a beer authority they become.”
“I know, right? Like, it’s the city’s beer. It was as if we offended his craft mecca by ordering something owned by Tom Benson.” Zibby slurped down the rest of her soup and wiped her mouth with a napkin. “Can you believe they canceled Daiquiri Fest?”
“Yup. The times they are a changin’,” Liv said before she lowered a glistening piece of flank steak into her mouth.
After their whole discussion about Pints’ pretentiousness, Zibby and Liv were in the mood for a drink and stopped in for a beer.
“Hey, hey,” Liv started. “Should I order a Coors Light and see if the bartender has a conniption?”
“Yeah, and I’ll order a Schlitz just to deliver the coup de grâce.”
The bar didn’t carry either beer, and the bartender folded his arms as the girls shared a laugh and scanned the tap handles. They settled on Louisiana’s own Abita Amber—not adventurous, but acceptable.
Liv went to the restroom halfway through their beers, which gave Zibby a chance to open up Kindling and get swiping.
“I am man,” said Zibby with a baritone bravado while she looked at her phone. “I shall provide for you with this fish I caught. Next. Peew. Peew. Peew… Ehh, peew.”
Zibby sent more potential matches to the executioner than the Queen of Hearts. But in her mechanical, left-swiping fury, she accidentally passed over her mentor and had to clandestinely shake the phone underneath the bar to receive her mulligan.
She scanned through the photos and was happy to see that none had him holding a fish. I like girls who read, drink wine, and use the Oxford comma. (See what I did there?) was the totality of his bio. Zibby swiped right.
It’s a match! the app shouted as digital confetti fell from the top of the screen.
Per Kindling rules, Zibby was obligated to message Ben first, which she did before Liv sat back down at the bar.
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