“That makes two of us.”
“She says you won’t pick up the phone when she calls.”
“I’m a very busy man,” I say. “Do you know how much time goes into opening a Starbucks franchise? They don’t just pop up overnight. And let’s talk about not picking up the phone. You let the phone ring ten times yourself, so don’t go running around passing judgment on people, all right? Ten rings equals inconsiderate. Terrible customer service. Someone ought to rewrite your company’s handbook, Del. It could be a systemic problem.”
“Please, Jason,” Del says, but I hang up before he can finish his sentence. No one is going to ruin my first day of business. Not Del. Not Joanne. Not Joanne’s mother. Not ten goddamned rings. Nothing.
Zack greets me with a broad smile when I step into the living room. He’s casually wiping off the counter with a damp white towel. “Hey, bud, how you doing today?”
“I’m fine, thanks,” I say.
“Great day out there today, huh?”
“Yes,” I say. “Top five all time.”
Zack chuckles and shakes his head. “Man, I was just saying that. Top. Five. All. Time! Hey, is there something I can get started for you?”
I crane my neck back and stare at the menu affixed to the wall. “I’ll have a, uh, venti double-pump mocha,” I say.
“You want that hot?”
“Always,” I say.
“Always,” Zack says, nodding. “Can I get you a pastry? Maybe one of our new brownies?”
“Crumble coffee cake.”
“You gonna eat that here?”
“Always,” I say.
“Always,” he says. “Cool. Can I get your name, bud?”
“Jason,” I say, and Zack scribbles it on the side of my cup.
“All right, that’s $5.01, Jason.”
I hand him six dollars and tell him to keep the change. “Always,” I say.
“Let me get that order right up for you, bud,” Zack says, and then he fires off one of his smiles again, and I think that he looks familiar to me. Like Joanne’s son. Or maybe her daughter. The one I liked, anyway. It doesn’t matter, I suppose, because Zack is happening now.
After two weeks, Zack and I begin to understand each other’s rhythms. I’m not a morning person, so Zack figures out that he doesn’t have to be at work at 6:00 AM. He can sit in the casita I had built for him and do whatever it is he does until ten, at least, but he’s usually up and doing side-work by nine. I allow him to close at 8:00 PM as caffeine after 8:00 PM usually gives me insomnia, and insomnia is not a condition I especially need right now. If friends are coming over, not that they have, or if I think I’d like a fruit and cheese plate or an apple caramel bar after hours, he’ll leave the pastry fridge unlocked. It is my house, but I like Zack to feel like he has his own workspace. I know how important being your own boss is,
and I wouldn’t want to make Zack feel like he’s being watched in his own office—even if I were watching him, which I am. Today, however, has been rather trying. The guard at the front gate keeps calling to inform me I have guests who want to come in, despite the fact that I’ve told him I’m not expecting guests. He tells me that these aren’t invited guests, that they are men in uniforms, and that they’re fairly adamant in their desire to see me. I tell the security guard that unless they have a warrant or a battering ram, I’m not interested in entertaining this afternoon.
I decide to go out for a cup of coffee, see if I can’t sort through this issue.
“Hey, bud,” Zack says when he sees me in the doorway. “How’s it going today?”
“Fine,” I say.
“Fine? That’s awesome.”
“Yes,” I say. “Everything is fine. The world is fine. The air is fine. The stars, the fucking moon, the fucking sun, all the pieces of dull cutlery in every dirty kitchen drawer, frozen yogurt, toasted sandwiches, all of it is fine.”
Zack tosses his hair back and gives me a grim nod of the head. “I’ve been there, bud,” he says. “I’m beginning to think that life doesn’t really hold the same meaning for me that it used to. Some days, seriously, I wake up and it’s a wonder I don’t hang myself with dental floss.”
“Would that work?”
“Oh, yeah,” Zack says. “Sure, sure. You have to wind it up some. Really get it into almost like a rope, but that stuff is tough. It’ll slice right through your skin, sever a couple arteries, and then you’re just chum for the flies.”
“That sounds painful,” I say.
“Well,” Zack says, “it sure isn’t the way to enlightenment, but it’ll get you to that next stage eventually. Hey, is there something I can get started for you?”
I give him my order and for a while I just watch him work the espresso machine. He’s a fine boy, really, lots of energy and panache. At night he often leaves the house and meets a friend named Skylar for a drink. She’s a pretty girl, nice teeth, a tattoo on the small of her back, also of a sunburst, oddly. Zack has had her over for dinner a few times. They’ll barbeque steaks on the small grill he has on his patio, and then they’ll sit outside talking or laughing or not speaking at all. She spent the night yesterday, and when I woke up in the morning I saw her out in my garden, stooping to smell the roses Joanne planted last season, only now fully in bloom. I wonder if Zack would like me to hire her for the second shift. I wonder if she has another friend, perhaps a girl slightly older, someone without any tattoos, who might be interested in working on the weekends. It would require more casitas. Or not.
“Here you go,” Zack says, handing me my venti double-pump mocha and a piece of crumble coffee cake in the center of a white plate. “You have a great day, Jason.”
“Tell me something,” I say. “Do you have a family?”
“Everyone has a family,” Zack says. “Am I right, or am I right?” He turns his back to me and begins wiping off the counter around the espresso machine with a damp white towel. “You have a good one, now, okay?”
“Sklyar seems nice,” I say.
Zack stops cleaning the counter and slowly turns to face me. “Excuse me?”
“Sklyar,” I say. “The woman with the tattoo on her back. The woman who spent the night last night. The woman who was outside this morning smelling my roses. Skylar.”
If I met Joanne today, I imagine she might look a bit like this Skylar. Though I suppose women have always looked the same, it’s the clothes and the body ink and the scars that change them. That and children. You keep another human inside you for nine months, and I think it’s fair to assume you might leave the experience slightly different. It’s such an alien thing: a beast that grows inside you until it crawls out bloody and screaming. If sperm came out of men like angry rainbow trout hooked through the lip, I believe we’d be less cavalier about the whole subject matter. I imagine Skylar might be the kind of woman who wouldn’t want to be invaded in such a way. Zack is lucky to have her.
“I need to go on my lunch,” Zack says abruptly. “Is that all right?”
“I’ve offended you,” I say. “I didn’t mean to.”
“No, no, you haven’t offended me,” Zack says, but I can tell he’s lying. You don’t practice medicine—or at least pretend to practice medicine—without being able to spot obvious self-delusion. “No worries at all, bud.”
“I’d like to make you permanent,” I say. “I’d like to wave the next two weeks of probation. I’d like to give you a raise and begin paying for your medical insurance. I’d like to do that now.”
“Sure,” Zack says. He undoes his apron and sets it on the counter, locks the register, and turns off the light inside the pastry display. I grab a copy of the
New York Times
and sit down in one of the overstuffed chairs and pretend to drink my
coffee while Zack turns off the machines. “Do you want me to keep the interior lights on?” he asks. I look up but don’t see him, so he must be in the back.
“Please,” I say.
“What about the CD?”
“Yes, please. I’d be happy to hear the Rolling Stones rarities,” I say. “Or Lucinda Williams. Either one would be fine.”
Zack doesn’t reply, but a few moments later I hear the opening strains of Lucinda Williams singing about changing the locks on her front door. I try to get invested in a front page story about the president ordering the torture of some prisoners, but it’s impossible. I know that I’ve offended Zack, and it makes me heartsick in a way I haven’t felt since . . . well . . . since the last time I felt heartsick. Almost two months now.
“All right,” Zack says. He’s standing by the front door dressed in his non-work clothes: jeans, a T-shirt fashioned with an iron-on of Clifford the Big Red Dog, an LA Dodgers baseball cap. “Good-bye.”
“You have a great day,” I say, and just when I’m about to add his name to the salutation, it completely escapes my memory. So instead I say, “bud.”
When Zack doesn’t show back up after seven hours, I decide to slip into his casita to see if he’s sick or if he’s fallen in the shower or if he’s hanging by a noose made of dental floss. But all I find is his tightly made bed. He didn’t even bother to leave a note with a forwarding address. Just like that, he is gone forever.
You never get used to people disappearing. It’s not the lack of closure precisely, but the sense that perhaps you’ve played a role you weren’t aware of initially. With Joanne and
the kids, the signs were there: the packing; the airline tickets to Hawaii, Australia, and Burma purchased on my credit card; the strange way Joanne kept telling me to stay the fuck away from her or she’d call the police; the way she called the police; the way she and her three kids (I’m almost certain there were three of them now—I’ve counted the bedrooms and it makes sense) were here one night and then that next morning they weren’t. I remember waking up and feeling like the house was listing to one side and that the living room was about to crack in half. Something had to be done, obviously.
I spread out on Zack’s bed and close my eyes. I imagine I am Zack. I imagine that woman I saw in my garden this morning, the woman with the sunburst on her back, is above me and that she is leaning down and whispering into my ear. I want to imagine she is Joanne, but I can’t conjure her face, can’t smell her skin, can’t quite tell myself what it is I’m doing at all, if any of this is happening. Because if you think about it, it’s all a little preposterous that I’ve turned my house into a Starbucks, but the facts of life are that we only get to live for a small amount of time—I mean really
live
, not that diaper period on both ends of the spectrum, or the acne era, or any time when life gets broken up by making photocopies, or sitting in meetings, or listening to music in elevators, or shopping for groceries, or waiting for that certain someone special. How much real time is that? Maybe 1,095 days. Maybe. And anyway, this living I’m doing inside the house now feels moored and solid.
Tomorrow, I decide, I will put an ad in the paper for a new employee. Or wife.
Part of being a good boss, I’ve learned reading the Starbucks franchise handbook, is an ability to perform all of the remedial tasks you expect of your underlings. Corporately it’s referred to as the reverse plane-crash theory. I prefer to think that it’s simple survival instinct, though I suspect I’d have a difficult time killing a wild boar or skinning a cougar if it came down to it. Working for Carolyn, I learned a great deal about medicine, or at least which drugs people really wanted, which ones made people happy, which ones made people angry, which ones made people irrational and suspicious of the black helicopters. So that when a patient would call and Carolyn was busy, I’d occasionally dispense my own diagnoses and even call in prescriptions, though the majority of my business was handled outside of the office, certainly. I would have been an excellent doctor, and I am sure many people believed I was one.
Del, of course, always knew the truth. He always knows. So when he shows up at my front door the day after my full page want ad runs in the
Los Angeles Times
,
Chicago Tribune
, and
USA Today
, I fire up the espresso machine to show him how much
I
know.
“What can I get for you?” I ask.
“I’m not here for coffee, Jason,” he says.
“No charge,” I say.
“Fine,” Del says. He looks up at the menu, and I can tell he is impressed. Unlike most Starbucks, I have all the seasonal drinks available year-round. “Just give me a latte.”
“Nonfat? Whole milk? Soy? Eggnog?”
“Jason, look, it doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me,” I say.
“Fine. Nonfat.”
“Great,” I say. “Can I get you a pastry or something? I even have the classic coffee cake. No one has that. I challenge you to find it anywhere else.”
“Yes, fine, that would be fine.”
“Great,” I say. “Why don’t you have a seat, and I’ll call your name when your drink is ready.”
“Jason,” Del says, “have you heard from your wife?”
“Take a seat,
sir
,” I say, “and I will call you when your drink is ready. Please, help yourself to a
New York Times
. They are complimentary.”
Del ignores the newspaper but takes a seat on the blue crushed velvet sofa and stares out the window to the street. From the way the shadows bounce on the walls I can tell that there is some activity outside, but since it is just after 1:00 PM, it may well be that man and his enormous poodle. Or maybe that woman with the sunburst has come over to have a cup of coffee. Maybe Joanne and the kids have returned. I would welcome that, truly, because the house has started to sag at the corners again. The casita in the back is nearly gone entirely.
“Venti latte on the bar for Del!” I call out. Del stands up carefully, and I note that the tilting of the house is really becoming pronounced. I’m amazed Del can actually walk without pitching downhill toward me, but he makes it to the counter without any problem.
“I want you to listen to me,” Del says.
“You have a great day,” I respond, sliding Del his cup.
“Joanne’s mother has gone to the police. They want to come in and take a look around. No one is saying you’ve done anything, Jason, okay? They just want to look around. Will you let them do that?”