to the present and also to make me feel better, I tweak my father’s nose a bit harder than necessary in what is disguised as a gesture of affection but is really a painful twist that makes him yelp. I do feel better though. Much.
“Just leave him,” I tell Luke and head for the door. He really has no choice but to follow me. “He’ll be fine.” He always is, is the part I don’t say but I might as well since we both hear it anyway.
“Thank you for the art show, it was lovely,” I smile, or attempt to. It feels wooden and stiff. “And thank you for trying to find Rose. And for,” I gesture toward the couch, which is emitting a peaceful snoring sound. “That.”
“It was most interesting,” Luke chuckles. “Maybe we can do it all again sometime.”
I don’t take him seriously and to show I don’t, I push him lightly out the door and say goodnight. What genius would want to do this all again sometime? He is either terribly masochistic, ridiculously lonely, or a glutton for punishment. I simply cannot come up with a fourth alternative for wanting to be near me.
When Luke is gone and Dad is tucked in – with not a lot of gentleness on my part – Prue presses a mug of hot chocolate in my hands, as though I am nine years old and it will cure all that ails me, and sends me off to bed.
I dream.
I am eight years old and sitting beneath a stone wall. There is a dog baying somewhere nearby and the whole world seems flat and gray through my blue eyes. I am lonely. The children here don’t like me. I am slow to learn their language and I seem odd to them; I don’t find the same things amusing and I laugh in all the wrong places at the wrong times. I still look for my little sister everywhere we go because I still remember her.
I wake up with a start. I did remember her at that age; my own memories, not the stories repeated that make me wonder if I remember, but actual solid images. The frustrating thing now is the more time goes by, the less clear those images are until, like a dream, the edges blur and become fuzzy, like a cloud that drifts across your view. In my mind I attempt to stare and concentrate and make it come into focus but the clouds come faster and faster, blurring my vision and taking with it, any clarity that once was there. I want to fall asleep again and dream some more, remember some more, but it’s useless. I lie in bed, tired but awake until the break of dawn.
********************
In the morning at work, I feel that restlessness that comes with having been too long in one place, and I find myself giving Micki notice again. He ignores me as usual and asks me to re-do the entire chalkboard menu behind the counter. He likes it when I redesign it because my handwriting is pretty. His would be too if he learned to write in a monastery with monks who wrote bibles by hand and spent days on just one letter. My hands cramp in memory.
I am balanced precariously on our tallest bar stool when Emme stops by for her favorite beverage: scalding hot tea in a double cup.
“You look like hell, luv,” she greets me, cheerily.
“I’ve been having trouble sleeping,” I grumble, erasing my C in the word cinnamon and starting over. I had gotten too ornate with it and it looked like Ginnamon. “And you’re awfully perky for the morning.”
“It’s Joe’s birthday,” Emme replies, blowing on the cup of tea that Micki hands her. “I’m going shopping for a gift. Want to come?”
“I’m working.”
“Take her,” Micki sticks his nose in the conversation. “She keeps glaring at the customers anyway.”
“I am not!” I protest. “I’m concentrating, not glaring!”
Micki and Emme exchange glances that seem to commiserate with each other and completely irritate me.
“Really, I can handle it. Go, have fun,” Micki pushes. “I’ll even finish the menu.”
“You write like a four year old,” I argue.
“I’m the four year old who signs your paycheck, so get lost.”
Get lost. Just another modern expression that always confuses me into silence. I suppose that in order to convince everyone that I am not glaring and grumpy, now would not be the time to complain about how much I despise shopping.