“Good morning!” a girl behind the counter chirped at him as soon as the bell on the door jangled.
“’Mornin’ Terri,” he said with a smile. The girls in the coffee shop always made him smile. They were always happy, always accommodating and always ready to fulfill his every need, as far as coffee, danish, and doughnuts were concerned.
“You’re up and at it early,” she said. “Are you coming from somewhere, or are you going somewhere?”
“Going,” he said. “I’m going to take my coffee and I'm going to sit outside for a while. Maybe I’m going to eat a doughnut, if you got ‘em ready.”
“The doughnuts are still warm,” she said, pulling two glazed confections from the rack behind the counter. “Just the way you like them. How do you want your coffee?”
“Straight up this mornin’, sweetheart,” he told her. “Lots of sugar.”
“Energy booster breakfast, coming right up,” Terri said as she handed him a tray with the doughnuts and an enormous coffee. “Of course, I won’t be held responsible for the crash that’s gonna come in about three hours after you eat all that.”
“No blame coming,” Jay said, and he stuffed some bills into the tip cup after paying for his fare.
“Thanks, Jay,” Terri called.
The door closed behind him on her laughter, making him smile to himself as he settled at one of the many umbrella shaded tables that were scattered around the courtyard. None of the other shops were opened yet, and there was a hollow sound to the place that was so empty and devoid of humanity at that hour. Jay didn’t mind that. This morning he didn’t even care that he was alone. Sarah was home; still asleep after having gone back to bed once she realized she wasn’t welcomed in the bathroom. He sipped some of the piping hot coffee, scalding the tip of his tongue, and recalled the look in Sarah’s eyes. Dull. Heavy lidded, almost to the point of being slits. Angry.
She hadn’t said anything to him, hadn’t made a single remark, but her entire being, from her cold, slit eyes to the cock of her hip as she stood on the chilly tiled floor of the bathroom had screamed a warning to him that she wouldn’t be putting up with his moods much longer. Jay was of two minds regarding that. On one hand he understood Sarah’s frustration with him perfectly, because he was frustrated with himself, too. He wasn’t particularly happy with the way his moods and emotions were in constant arc, swooping from one extreme to the other on any given day. He took medication for that now, but for whatever reasons the medication didn’t always work, and on certain occasions had actually pushed his mental state to the brink. So he understood how Sarah could be fed up with living with someone who was basically unstable.
On the other hand, he just didn’t care how she felt about it.
Sarah had met him, or rather he had pursued her, when he was deep into using and drinking; when he was firmly within the cycle of using cocaine to stay awake and ‘up’ during the day, then drank and popped all sorts of pills to sleep at night. It wasn’t much of a secret, his drug and alcohol abuse, at least not within the inner circle of his vast battalion of friends and acquaintances. It didn’t take long for Sarah to understand who and what she was dealing with, and she willingly, even with enthusiasm, continued to allow his pursuit. Encouraged it. Became a part of his life in the swift and invasive fashion that a relationship nurtured in the close confines of his work environment on the road allowed for. She was there, she knew what was happening to him, and she stayed with him no matter what. So to see those slit eyes, to feel that aura of disapproval, rankled Jay. His habitual, knee-jerk reaction was to tell her to fuck herself. That reaction was still in full force despite the months of analysis and therapy he’d had. The only difference right now was that he didn’t act on it. At least not right away. While he might be thinking ‘fuck you’, he no longer allowed the words to bubble to his lips. He even managed to hold in some of the physical reactions; the urge to punch an inanimate object, the urge to throw cups and vases and books and whatnot, the urge to kick furniture and walls.
“Robbie? Robbie Simmons?”
A soft female voice drew Jay out of his reverie, and it was only then that he realized that he’d been sitting in his chair with his cup of coffee poised at his lips, staring blankly at nothing. He blinked and turned to ward that voice and saw her; a familiar looking young woman smiling at him. It took several seconds for him to register that she was addressing him, and addressing him under a name that he hadn’t heard in more than a year. His slow working mind made the connection from name to face to name, and his smile was instantaneous.
“Annie?”
“You remembered,” she said, and she moved a few steps closer to him.
“Sure, sure. What are you doing here?” Annie. Her last name was lost in the fuzzy matrix of his memory, but he absolutely remembered her from his thirty days in an Arizona rehabilitation clinic. She had been a quiet girl, at first, but opened up during the course of the program as so many of the rest of them had. Jay got up and opened his arms to her, took her in a hug and kissed her cheek.
“I live around here now,” she told him.
“Here, sit down,” he offered, pulling one of the metal chairs out from around the table for her.
“Thanks.” She sat, arranging her bag and tray on the table.
“Man, it’s been… a long time,” he said, taking her in with focused eyes. She looked the same, with maybe only her hair being a little different, a little longer. It was a pale, ashy blonde that hung straight around her oval face, a compliment to her high cheek bones. There had been a cool iciness to her in Arizona, a Scandinavian frailty, but she looked sun-drenched and healthy now.
“More than a year. You look good,” she said.
“Thanks, you, too, you look great. When did you come out here? I thought you…”
“I lived in Michigan. Got tired of the cold,” she said, her eyes crinkled into a smile. “It wasn’t a good place for me to stay, once I got back, so I moved around a bit. Stayed in New Mexico for a while. Then Arizona again,” she told him with a roll of her eyes and a shrug of her shoulders. “Now here. The anniversary came around at Sierra, and I thought you might show up.”
“Yeah, I got all the paperwork about it, but it was at a bad time for me,” he told her. The paperwork was still sitting on his cluttered desk in the home office he kept. He had looked at it every day before the date for the anniversary week came around, and he’d looked at it every day since, wondering why he hadn’t wanted to go.
“We missed you,” she said, and those pale grey eyes, clear like mirrors, or glass, crinkled at him again as a smile flitted across her lips. “Everybody remembered you; your ears must have been burning.”
There was silence between them then. Jay found himself slightly embarrassed by Annie’s words. He liked to think that people thought about him, and that they thought well of him. The urge to please people to be accepted had been one of the strongest driving forces in his life, and one of the pressures that he intensified his use of drugs and alcohol. He’d been working on that urge to please for many months now, trying to contain it to normal levels, trying not to give away too much of himself just to be liked; something he had always done instinctively, as if it were a survival technique. He had only become consciously aware of his behavior during those four intense weeks of rehabilitation. Since then he’d tried to control it, but he still liked to hear that people he knew, no matter how fleeting that knowledge may be, liked and remembered him in a positive light.
“So, how have you been?”
“Pretty good,” he told her, and took a sip of his coffee. “You?”
“Day at a time,” she said, and she lifted her coffee cup to her lips with another smile. Jay liked her smile. It was shy, but friendly all at the same time. She had really nice teeth, too. White and strong, bright against her lightly tanned skin. “It’s nice around here. Pretty easy to get around, as long as you have a Thomas Guide.”
“Yeah, those are great. When did you move out here?”
“Not long ago. A few months.” She took another sip of her coffee and Jay thought that he saw a little pink steal across her cheeks and across the bridge of her nose. “You spoke about California so much, I decided to check it out,” she said.
“Umm. I guess I did,” he agreed. Yes, he had. He had spoken with enthusiasm about his plans to relocate to Southern California, and of course Sarah, who had been a part of his family week in rehab, had told about her life there, and the life they were planning to share together. There were other people in the group that were from the area, too, men women that he kept in touch with through the usual rounds Alcoholic Anonymous meetings and gatherings. “You know that Todd and Lee and Susan are out here, right?” he asked.
“Umhmm, yes, I know. Sue’s been a lot of help getting me moved out here. We go to meetings together.”
“Oh yeah?” It occurred to him that he had neither seen nor heard from Susan in some time.
“We go to the evening meeting in Santa Monica.”
“Oh. I go during the day.”
“I know, Sue told me,” Annie said, and that pink stole across her face once more, making her light tan glow. “We thought that maybe you’d like to come to one of the evening meetings some time. Sue said you knew the place.”
“Yeah, I know it.” He did. He went to the evening meetings for a while, right after his last tour ended with a whimper instead of a bang. It kept him on that schedule of late days and night, and sleeping through the mornings. Sarah had broken him of that habit, though, complaining that the eight or nine o’clock in the evening meetings interfered with their lives. He supposed they did, he never really thought about it too much at the time and weaned himself from the later nights, and later mornings. For a time. It seemed as if he was slipping into that more familiar groove again, though, and he wouldn’t mind seeing some old, friendly faces again; in fact he began to look forward to the prospect.
“Maybe we’ll see you there, then.”
“I think so,” he said, and he smiled at her. That silence fell again, but it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence at all. It was the silence of adjustment, when two people are finding their rhythm together. Jay was familiar with it, because it was a silence he had always tried to fill up with senseless chatter. Silence had been the enemy for many years in his life. Then it became an indicator of deep, deep depression; the aural manifestation of his inner loneliness. A compliment to the blackened windows of his bedroom. Silence meant peace now. Peace and that serenity he sought which was often a slippery thing, eluding his pursuit.
“I need to get to work,” she said, consulting her wristwatch. “It’s good to see you.”
“Oh, man, do you need to?” he asked, and was surprised at the plaintive sound of his voice.
“Umhmm, yeah, they don’t like it when I don’t show up,” she said. “At least it’s not too far.” She turned her small head so she was looking over her shoulder, and she made a delicate motion with her sharp little chin toward a shop.
“You work there?” Jay said, his voice rising in surprise. “The Rising Phoenix”. He was familiar with it, even though he’d never been inside. Sarah was there, often. It was where she bought all those books on spirituality. All those books he couldn’t understand. A place he didn’t even want to go into.
“Umhmm,” she said. She fished a key out of her purse, a key attached to an elaborate bit of jeweled macramé. “I suppose I could sit here for another minute, though. It’s my shop.”
“That’s great!” He was surprised. He was down for coffee so often he didn’t know how he could have missed Annie, but then again, she was pale, almost wraithlike, and not the type of woman who typically caught his eye in passing. In rehab it was easy to appreciate Annie’s charms in close quarters. Out in the open, though, and she was definitely someone who would slip by him. Not now, though. Not now that he knew she was here.
“Thanks. I haven’t been opened too long, I mean, the shop’s been here, but I only just took over. I think it’ll do well; it’s doing all right so far.”
“I think it’s a pretty popular place,” Jay agreed.
“Umhmm… well, come on in, then. I’ve got an in with the owner; I’ll get you a complimentary birth chart made up. Or a crystal, if you prefer,” she said. Her hand reached out and touched the back of his as it rested on the table.
Jay shivered, but he unconsciously turned his hand and took her slender fingers in his.
“Sure,” he told her. “I’d like that.”
“I have to open up now…”
“Yeah. I gotta go, too,” he said.
“So, drop by. Or maybe I’ll see you at a meeting,” she said, and she gathered her breakfast up. Jay stood up, too, feeling a little awkward until Annie kissed his cheek. “Good to see you again, Robbie.”
“You, too, oh, hey, you can call me Jay,” he told her.
“Umhmm. Okay, Jay. See you soon.”
Jay stood and watched Annie as she walked away, even stayed standing as she opened the door to her shop and went inside. He picked up his doughnuts in their waxed paper wrappers and his cup of coffee and walked back to his car, noticing that the seats were starting to warm up now that the sun was coming up and over the hills.
Annie at “The Rising Phoenix”.
Annie from rehab. He would have to call her.
Jay didn’t realize that he never got her number until he was pulling his car into the driveway at home.
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© 2004 Chandrah, Inc.
© 2004 (*> Baby Bird Productions, Inc.
