pulls out a fat fabric covered photo album and I flip through it while she tells me all about her past and her family. It’s as though her whole life flashes before my eyes and I feel a pain in my chest when I think about how I don’t have this: these cohesive memories that line up in logical order, this stability, these people who last for years and years and don’t go away. I don’t have a photo album, in fact the only photo of myself I have is the one Luke took of me and my guitar. I don’t have the pictures of myself with siblings, lined up in front of the same plastic Christmas tree every year; each time everyone taller and broader, their faces losing their baby fat, other parts filling out, with each passing season. There are photographs of Gladys as a toddler standing by a doorframe that has pencil markings all over it, marking her and her brother’s heights. The same doorframe, different pencil marks, years later. I want a door frame with pencil marks. I want to see mine and Rose’s heights written in, year after year. I want to live in the same house as that door frame and measure my own children’s growth. Futile, self indulgent thoughts, I think, and I snap shut the imaginary photo album in my mind, closing with it daydreams and wishes of things that could never be.
But spray cheese? I can’t wait to tell Prue about it!
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When I leave Gladys’ I don’t feel like going home. I am feeling melancholy enough without hearing Bar’s story. It is selfish but I don’t want to know what he’s been through – I don’t feel as though I can handle it tonight. Although I still want my bath and my portable compact disc player, it’s too early to retire for the night. The evening is still hot from the heat of the day, muggy and humid. It makes the long strands of my hair curl up around my face as I walk. I will go to the coffee shop although I am not on shift tonight. I look longingly at the spot where the Blue Beast is normally parked, but it is gone; Israel must have driven off while I visited Gladys. He is probably angry with me for taking it earlier, but I don’t regret it. The exhilaration I felt while driving was unlike anything else I have felt in recent memory. I love driving, I think. I want to drive and drive and keep on driving, leave this existence far behind, not stop until I reach the spot where the pavement ends, where I can be someone else.
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The coffee shop is quiet and nearly empty of customers when I arrive. Micki works this shift by himself since it’s a slow one and as a result, the dulcet tones of elevator music waft down from the speakers. There are a couple college students with laptops, studying over their mochas, occasionally glancing up at each other and saying something or laughing. There is a frazzled looking young mother in exercise clothes, buying frozen smoothies for her rambunctious brood; probably on their way to the health club down the street. They make their purchases and leave, the children dribbling icy pureed strawberries down the front of their clothes and onto the floor as they walk. I wipe up their sticky trail with a napkin after they leave.
Micki is on the phone and so I help myself to a mug behind the counter and fill it with coffee and hot chocolate milk. As an indulgence to my moodiness, I top it with whipped cream. The guitar in the corner by the tiny stage seems to beckon to me and so I sit my beverage beside me on the floor, and pick up the instrument. My skirt is too short to tuck my legs under me the way I normally do when I play so I simply hook my shoes behind the cross section of the stool and balance the guitar on my lap. I run through the song catalogue in my brain, discarding Johnny Cash and Pat Benetar and Bonnie Raitt and Elvis Presley. I start with Stand By Me and when that is over I keep strumming, changing chords until I somehow segue into Unchained Melody. When I open my eyes Luke is sitting on the corner of the stage.
“You are so depressing,” he deadpans. “How about something upbeat?”