Blue Jeans and Coffee Beans (25 page)

“Neil and I did the same thing when we were kids.”

“I remember being able to
feel
it first,” Maris says.

Jason nods as though he knows exactly what she means. His hand skirts along the low windowsill now. “You can come in here and just sit and lose a whole decade, easy.”

A decade ago, his brother was alive. He is seeing the restaurant through those eyes, Maris knows, dealing with triggers and memory and longing. She sips her soda and gazes out the window. Her eyes search Long Island Sound at the horizon. Jason is lifting a piece of pizza onto his dish when she feels it. Before she can even speak, she points to the window first, because, heck, winning means everything at Ronni’s. “Train!”

It is a subtle change in the air, a hum from deep below. Looking at Jason, she can feel, at their table, the immense, palpable speed and power of the approaching train before it even comes into view. It is like the calm before a storm, you feel it and brace for something else. A few seconds later, the Amtrak blows by the front window on its way to Boston and everyone in the restaurant stops eating, stops talking, for only moments, until its whistle carries back to them after the train passes out of sight.

Kyle should be here by now. Lauren looks out the window, checking the street for his pickup before reaching for her comb. When she’s nearly done French braiding her hair, he pulls in the driveway. She glances out in time to see him reaching across the front seat for a large shopping bag.

“Hey you,” he says when he walks into the living room. He touches the side of her face. “Where are the kids?”

“They’re at Alison’s. She and Taylor are taking them to the movie on the beach later.”

“Good.” He studies her, touching her hair. “What do you want for dinner?”

“Want to go out? Maybe for fish and chips?”

Kyle heads into the kitchen. “Sounds good. I’m starved.”

Lauren follows him and leans against the kitchen counter, watching him grab a peach from the bowl on the table. The bruise on his arm has nearly faded away. When she reaches out to touch it, Kyle turns and pulls out a chair for her.

“Sit. I want to ask you something.” He bites into the peach. “What do you think if I take some business management courses? Just a night class or two.”

“Business?”

“To help me set up the books on a new computer system. I read that there’s some new software to keep the latest business tax records in order.”

“Tax records? What are you talking about?” When Kyle slides Jerry’s offer to her, she scans it quickly. “He’s selling you the diner? Is this for real?”

“Yes it is,” he says around a mouthful of peach.

“Really?” She looks up at Kyle’s face. Maybe part of life, the good in it, comes from how you look at stuff. Stuff like ten years of sweating out part-time, temporary work behind a hot stove in a diner. Ten long years grow into this.

“It’s ours, Ell.”

“This can’t be true.” She rereads the contract, slower this time. “But there’s a lot of cash involved. How can we ever manage to buy it?”

“We never touched that severance money from my layoff, and hell, I’ll beg, borrow and steal the rest. I just really have to come up with the down payment.” He finishes the peach while pointing out different figures on the contract. “Jerry’s holding the mortgage, kind of like a retirement plan for himself, and he’s giving us a low interest rate. And he’ll stay on for a few months till I get the hang of things.”

“No way. What if he changes his mind?”

Kyle points out Jerry’s signature. “Don’t worry. And I was thinking, maybe I could give it more of a bistro feel. You know, keep the boat theme, but update it. Make it kind of a café type of place. The Coffee Pier, The Driftwood Café, something like that.”

Lauren sits back in her chair, motionless. “I can’t believe this.”

“Wait, there’s more. Wait right there.” He pushes back his chair, tosses the peach pit in the trash and rushes through the cottage. “And close your eyes!” he calls out from the porch.

Lauren squeezes her eyes tight and sits on her hands to keep them off the contract. Not seeing brings the evening birdsong to her: a lone robin settling down, a distant blue jay. She knows this is good, that days like this come few and far between. Something tells her, in her heart, to remember every moment, every touch, every word. This gets you through the rest.

Kyle checks that her eyes are closed, sits and sets the bag down behind him. He scrapes his chair over beside hers, takes her hands in his and holds them to his lips for a long moment. “You’ll be really busy with the kids getting back to school in a few weeks, and the business will be crazy at first. But not forever.”

Lauren opens her eyes and watches him closely.

Kyle catches her tear with his thumb. “Things will quiet down. They always do. And then, well I think you’ll be needing this.” He reaches behind his chair and sets the shopping bag on the table. Driftwood swells from the bag in every weathered shade of gray and brown that he could find along the beach. They came from the seaweed line, from along the rocks, and from Little Beach, past the patch of woods, where her love of painting began. He stuffed in as many pieces as he could, all sizes and shapes, in every which way. In a smaller bag he packed her paints from the back shelf in her closet at home.

“Woo-hoo,” Lauren laughs. “Yes!” She stands and shifts around the driftwood, pulling out random pieces like they are precious jewels. “Now I get it. The Driftwood Café?”

Kyle moves behind her and when his arms wrap around her waist, pulling her close, she leans back easy against him. He bends down, brushing his face against her hair. “I did good, didn’t I?”

She whispers something that he misses, and so he turns her around. “What did you say?” he asks.

She leans back against the refrigerator and his arms hold her there, the refrigerator behind her as he leans close, stroking her hair, touching her ear, watching her, waiting to hear the words.

And when she starts to talk, to say the words he’d missed, he stops her, slips his arm under her legs and scoops her up. “Wait, Ell. You can tell me upstairs.”

.

Chapter Twenty-Three

M
aris spreads her sketches on the dining room table as the coffee brews Sunday morning. Up with the sun, the day awaits fresh and open to possibilities, inspiring her to pick up her graphite pencils, to play with light and shadow, to add texture to her designs. While the rest of the world still sleeps beneath cool, cotton sheets, or tangled in summer night-shirts, she intends to immerse herself in the fall denim line taking shape in her cottage. A constellation continues to connect the pieces, the stars travelling from one style to another, from cuffed jeans to a cropped blazer to a pair of slim denim gloves.

She walks first to the front porch doorway, sipping her coffee. Except for an early jogger passing by, the street outside looks still, yet liquid somehow, like a watercolor painting. Shadows and light softly blend in the greens of the maple trees, the blues of the sky. Summer quiet follows behind the jogger’s footsteps, touching upon the porch and its comfortable old white wicker furniture. Above the windows, a high shelf holding brass hurricane lanterns and starfish and pale pink conch shells reaches around the room. Spiky cattails rise from the large clay floor vase in the corner, standing against the crisp white paneling. Outside, scarlet red geraniums and pretty petunias spill from the flower boxes Maris filled weeks ago.

But seashells and white wicker and summer flowers can’t keep complications away. She sits in a chair on the porch, cupping her coffee. This complication is a new one. No man has ever kept her from her work before. Her career had become a shell, curving around her like the intricate whorls of the conch, shielding her, until now.

Until Jason Barlow suggested they hang on the beach when he drove her home last night.
Summer will be over before you know it,
he said. And so they took a lazy walk on the sandy boardwalk, talking easily as twilight closed in.

Until he took hold of her hand, steering her off the boardwalk toward the water’s edge. They walked slowly, and she noticed he kept to the firm, packed sand as they followed the high tide line before them.

“Sometimes,” Maris said when they stopped at the end of the beach, “it feels like I left behind a shadow of myself here a long time ago. And on nights like this, maybe I came back to connect with it.” They were standing near the rocky outcropping, watching the waves break on the ledge. Jason didn’t answer. Instead he took her hand again and they walked back down the beach.

All Maris knows about his shadow comes from what Eva told her earlier in the summer. Seven years ago, Neil and Jason rode together on Neil’s motorcycle, a Harley Davidson he’d bought. They’d been involved in some horrific crash that ended up taking Neil’s life. She pictures the two of them, Neil driving, Jason hitched behind him on a hot summer day, two brothers about to meet their fate.

“Good God,” Maris says to herself on the porch, imagining what might have followed. It isn’t the beautiful day or family distractions that keep her from working this morning, from focusing on design. From adding diagonal texture with a white pencil, before drawing the gold stitching with a gel pen. Illustrations give the illusion of reality, but some realities are too authentic to ignore.

Saint Bernard’s cedar shingles are weathered driftwood gray by Long Island Sound’s damp and salty air. The bottom third of the stained glass windows tilt open so that the sea breeze might visit upon the warm Sunday masses. Maris arrives as the entrance hymn begins, choosing an empty seat in the center aisle, several rows down. Holding the opened missal, she scans the church for Jason and Paige. The pews are full, and Matt, Eva and Taylor stand near the front. A light tap on her arm startles her and she turns to see Paige slipping in beside her.

“Where’s your brother?” Maris whispers.

“I thought he’d be with you.”

“With me?” Maris looks from Paige to the altar. They bless themselves as an elderly priest leads the parish. His deep old voice moves slowly.

“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

“Amen.”

“He never showed up at the house,” Paige says quietly. “It’s a good thing I had my old set of house keys. Vinny and the kids are there now.”

“May the peace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, be with you all.”

Maris turns back toward the altar. Rays of morning sunlight shine through a stained glass window above it. A bank of flickering candles glimmers to the right. Ceiling fans paddle the warm air and the simple wooden pews feel cool to the touch. The scent of the sea comes through the opened windows.

“Jason does this sometimes.”

Maris tips her head closer to Paige to hear her hushed words as they sit for the Readings. “Does what?”

“Disappears. Most years he shows up, but others he vanishes. He must be having a hard time this year.” Paige glances at her, then scans the church before shrugging and turning to face the front.

Maris thinks that at this sad mass, on this sad day, Paige looks accepting. The loss of Neil has become a part of their family. Her hair is brushed back and she wears a blue sundress. She sits straight, her hands folded in her lap, and her face wears the calm, knowing expression that comes only with motherhood. Her children aren’t with her, though. She came here strictly for her two brothers, dead and alive.

“Coffee later?” Maris asks, leaning close. When Paige nods yes, Maris gives herself over to the mass, to its words and music, to the Gospel and the prayers, to the reality of why she is here.

“For all of our departed brothers and sisters who have gone to their rest in the hope of rising again, especially today for Neil Barlow, for whom this mass is offered, we pray to the Lord.”

Neil Barlow. Two words that make the death real. Hearing them spoken by a priest at the altar, she understands how the reality of that very sound might keep Jason away.

On the August day of Matt and Eva’s wedding, Maris hugged Eva for a long moment before she and Matt left for their Cape Cod honeymoon, and before their car pulled away, Matt had to hit the brakes. Maris trotted along close beside the car, and when Eva rolled down the window, she leaned inside and hugged her again, holding Eva’s hand in hers and saying how much she would miss her. No one ever left her again without a goodbye after her mother died.

Late August endured its own partings. Its autumn-tinged air bid farewell to the tired summer cottages closing up for the season; reluctant families retreated to their work-a-day lives; summer itself relaxed its hold. That year, late August became the roll of credits at the end of a long, wonderful movie about two friends coming-of-age. Even Maris would stay only for the weekend before leaving for campus Sunday night.

That evening after the wedding, the tide was low and she walked alone, barefoot in cuffed jeans, along the cool, packed sand just below the ragged line of seaweed at the water’s edge. Neil apparently had the same pensive idea.

“Walking the driftline?” he asked as they crossed paths.

“The what?” The word sounded dangerous, like she walked a fine line drifting between danger and safety.

“The driftline.”

Maris looked at Neil, thinking he would never leave Stony Point. He seemed so beach bum. His hair was wavy in the late day sea dampness and he still wore the formal, now wrinkled, wedding shirt from earlier in the day, over a pair of jeans. He stopped and pointed down the beach toward the rock jetty. “See it?”

The low setting sun had swirled a soft pink light on the expanse of sand before her. What Maris saw was the dark, tangled line of seaweed meandering the length of the beach.

“The seaweed?”

“That’s the driftline. Kyle told me he read it in a book on beach life.” They walked alongside the seaweed then, weaving right along with it. “But it’s not only seaweed,” he said. “It’s all the other stuff the tide brings in with it, too.”

He stopped and crouched down. With a stick of driftwood, Neil lifted the damp seaweed, exposing pieces of pastel sea glass and one perfect, white clamshell. A hermit crab in a periwinkle snail shell scurried for cover.

“See?” Neil asked. He looked up at her. “Everything’s connected.”

Maybe it took this long to see it. Maybe she really didn’t get it back then. Because aren’t they all connected here, in some sort of driftline of their own? When she thinks of Eva and Matt and Jason and Lauren and Kyle and Paige and Vinny, and Neil, always Neil too, isn’t it the same?

The feeling has her glance around the church and when she looks over her shoulder, she spots Jason in the far back corner. While others sit, he kneels, his elbows on the pew in front of him, his head bent low. He wears a navy suit, perfectly tailored, with a pale yellow shirt and silk tie knotted just so. Only the very best, Maris sees, for his brother.

Maris turns back and starts to stand. “Jason’s here,” she whispers to Paige, carefully passing in front of her and walking up the aisle to the back of the church. Jason still kneels as she hurries behind the rear pews and walks down the side aisle, then quietly kneels beside him.

Jason looks up at her. His face is clear, there are no tears. But you can see when someone is straining to hear; she’s done it herself, listening, listening in the wind, at the water’s edge, in a song, to hear her mother’s voice. He’d been talking, in thought, to Neil.

“Pray brethren, that our sacrifice may be acceptable to God, the Almighty Father.”

When they stand in response, Maris takes his hand. Comfort sometimes comes from the slightest gesture. He stands so very still beside her, she notices the calm, the steadiness of his stance, the slow rhythm of his breathing. When it’s time to offer peace to one another, she takes his shoulders in an embrace, pulling close. “Are you okay?”

She feels his hand rise to her head as he bends low near her ear. “I’m all right, sweetheart,” he assures her, then backs up a step as his hand briefly touches her face.

And that is the last she hears from him. Returning from the communion procession, when Maris steps backs into her pew it takes several moments to realize that he hasn’t followed behind her. At first she thinks that maybe other parishioners moved in front of him until she finally realizes he has left, has received communion and walked right out of the church without saying a word.