“Trust me, I’m not perfect,” she tells Jules, keeping her voice light, “and my family isn’t, either. I mean, come on . . . you’re sitting there in a pretty summer outfit, and I’m in raggy jeans and covered in dirt.”
“Yeah, you look like you’re modeling for a laundry detergent ad.” When Nora opens her mouth to protest, she adds, “It’s a compliment, okay? Just say thank you.”
She does, and they resume eating, and chatting.
Nora notices that the pineapple sage blooms and foliage in the vase on the counter have perked up since this morning’s stem trim. Too bad she can’t do the same. But she’s weary, and in her head, the monkey is chasing the weasel round and round the mulberry bush.
Jules asks where she’s from, then holds up an index finger. “Wait, I know this! Iowa?”
“No, I—”
“Hang on, my memory isn’t completely shot, no matter what my wife says. Um . . . oh, yeah, it was Kansas, right?”
“That’s my husband.”
“Right! You grew up in Los Angeles, like Heather. Are your parents there? Sisters, brothers . . . ?”
“No siblings, my mom died young, my dad died not long after I graduated from USC, and my stepmom moved away, so . . .” She shrugs. “No family.”
“Is that rough?”
“I’m used to it, and I have the girls and Keith, so . . . it’s all good.” She pushes back her plate, a signal to end the conversation, the meal, the visit. “Thanks so much for bringing lunch. It was delicious.”
“Dessert’s better, I promise. You’re going to love the cookies.”
Oh, the cookies.
“And I’ll take that coffee now, if it’s no trouble. But no wine yet.”
Yet? How long is she planning to stay? Nora rises, thinking of the box in the shed and trying to think of a polite way to get Jules out of here. There isn’t one.
All around the mulberry bush . . .
Her jaw clenches around a smile. “Caf, or decaf?”
Stacey
Stacey takes the subway home alone after school. Piper had stayed in Manhattan to watch soccer practice in some park with a new friend who’d promised to direct her to the right subway line afterward.
The non-rush-hour train isn’t crowded. She manages to get a seat and listens to her favorite playlist all the way back to Brooklyn, eyes fixed on the overhead sign that advises her to say something if she sees something.
The slogan is posted all over the city, making her vaguely uneasy.
“What does it even mean?” Piper had asked Dad the first time they rode the subway.
“You know . . . if you see anything unusual, you tell the conductor.”
“Like what? Everything’s unusual here. How do I know what to tell the conductor? And where’s the conductor? And you told us not to look around or make eye contact with anyone so how are we supposed to see anything, anyway?”
Dad answered her sister’s questions patiently, trying not to scare her, Stacey could tell.
“You have to keep alert to what’s going on around you, but you don’t engage. Just like anywhere else, whenever you’re in public, you just put up your personal space perimeter. You make sure you stay in it and everyone else stays out.”
Here, that perimeter is smaller than Stacey’s accustomed to. With the exception of the wild-eyed mentally ill vagrants and pushy panhandlers, people pretty much ignore each other, even when they’re close enough to touch. Yet this morning, she’d felt uncomfortable on the crowded platform and when they were jammed into the car. Visible, somehow, and particularly vulnerable whenever the lights flickered and went out in the tunnel, no matter how she reassured herself that whoever she’d glimpsed watching the house wasn’t lurking nearby.
If you can’t see anything, you can’t say anything, or do anything. In the dark, you’re helpless.
She’s much more relaxed now, on the return to Brooklyn. Maybe because the First Day jitters are behind her. Or because this trip is faster and smoother. No stalling to wait for congested traffic ahead. The lights stay on. She can see everything. It’s better that way.
At her stop, she emerges onto a sunny sidewalk. It’s warm out, but she wears her vintage black army coat, tattered with a ripped lining. Back home, she’d more or less worn it out of defiance. Here, it makes her feel edgy and urban. Plus, it hides her Catholic school uniform as she walks half a block to the Edgemont Grind, a café she’s visited daily since her arrival in Brooklyn.
Stepping over the threshold, she removes her earbuds and joins the line at the register. The coffee-scented air wafts with classical jazz, quiet conversation, and whirring bean grinders. This place is much smaller than the strip mall coffeehouse next door to the bookstore where she worked back home. The hardwood floors, tin ceilings, and exposed brick walls are vintage, and the stools along the plate glass windows overlook a bustling urban sidewalk instead of a parking lot filled with luxury cars.
When it’s her turn, Stacey orders a double shot soy latte from a handsome barista in a Sikh turban.
“For here or to go?”
“To go.” She’s in no hurry to get home, but all the seats are taken.
“Anything else?”
“No, I’m good.” She looks away from the enormous black and white cookies in the glass case beside the register. Lunch was hours ago. She was hungry immediately afterward, and is famished now. She’s basically been famished for months.
It’s worthwhile, though. She felt more comfortable in her own skin today than she has in school in years. Maybe because everyone has to wear the same frumpy uniform, or because it’s an all-girls school with a diverse student body. Her old school wasn’t entirely populated by the superficial, homogenous crowd, but most days, it seemed that way.
“Double shot soy latte for Stacey!” a barista calls just as a pair of yoga moms vacate a bistro table.
She grabs her coffee and sits, relieved to delay home a bit longer.
It isn’t that her mother asks probing questions. But with her, even an innocuous “How was your day?” bears an undercurrent of concern. It’s like Mom’s anticipating a negative answer and would prefer not to hear it, but if Stacey gives her a positive one, Mom thinks she’s lying.
Glumly sipping her beverage, she wonders why she just can’t win with her mother. On the surface, she knows they have very little in common, but sometimes she thinks their personalities are much more similar than anyone else in the family. Mom can be introspective, too. She likes to lose herself in her garden for hours the way Stacey loses herself in books.
A shadow pierces her personal space perimeter, falling over her table.
“Wow, a Catholic schoolgirl out in the wild. Shouldn’t you be praying in the chapel or something?”
She looks up to see Lennon.