June 2011

Queen City, VT

Ari would have liked to go on believing he wasn't some kind of creep, but he'd been following her for around ten minutes by the time it even occurred to him that this was troubling behavior. It had felt so natural to do, was the thing. She was familiar to him.

He'd first noticed her as he rounded the corner onto Church Street at the end of his long walk up the hill from the hostel. It was just starting to rain and she caught his attention by stepping out from the scrum of other shoppers to spring open her umbrella. It was crystal clear with a bright red rim. She turned to proceed deeper into the marketplace.

It had felt intentional, inviting. He'd just let his body accept the invitation, operating at the same level as a hand swatting at the tickling of an unseen burdock seed that cries to the brain, 'Spider! Spider!'

He recognized her. He recognized her, and she was dead. Holding those two thoughts in the same head was what had him following her.

Whether it was better or worse that he followed her at a distance, he couldn't decide. Even if it would have been absolutely unacceptable to walk up and introduce himself, keeping ten feet back with his eyes pinned to the nape of her neck wasn't a lot better. 

She would continually pause at the canopies along the street to make muttered small talk with the clerks huddled in their little three-table fortresses of potted succulents or candles or any of a half dozen other categories of standard issue doodad available for tourists to buy. These pauses strained the illusion and the strain made his memory feel smeary and waterlogged. 

Had Maya had a fuller face than this one?

But it had been a couple years, hadn't it? He couldn't expect everything to match old photos.

She wore her hair like Maya did in her high school graduation photos, cut short and shaggy and bleached from black to a brassy, uneven brown. She’d called it her rockstar hair. Her mother had been so angry that some of that anger had splashed off and onto Ari for 'allowing' her to do it.

But she'd taken the photos anyway. She'd even given Ari some. They were somewhere.

Of course she’d given him photos. They were best friends.

They’d been best friends.

At one point he lingered on this and other minute mismatches of memory so long that the moment itself started to lose its edges. He was grateful for the umbrella and the way it drew a circle around her head for his eyes to track as she moved through the crowds.

Eventually, though, she dipped down a staircase off the sidewalk and into a place called Flying Circus Books and triggered a rule Ari hadn't realized he'd set for himself: No following her into any buildings. Her absence left him standing in a state of chilly clarity, soaked through to his underwear by summer-warm rain.

He forced one anxiety to distract him from another and looked down at his watch: Three minutes to six, and he'd passed his gig a full block back. It occurred to him that he'd been following her with his backpack and his guitar case strapped to his back the whole time. Not very inconspicuous. 

His canvas sneakers made choked squashing sound as he kicked off back down the street, headed for the Starsong Cafe. The threat of losing his one true regular gig motivated him to forget everything else until he reached the shop's starry stained glass door.

He practically fell through the door, skidding in the muddy slurry of a couple hundred passing feet, the bulk of his backpack and guitar case sweeping abandoned umbrellas over. He was stooping to pick some of them up when something body-warm slapped itself to the side of his head. He clapped both hands to his face instinctively and, once his hands told him what it was, straightened up and started to scrub the threadbare kitchen towel around his head in what he hoped was evident appreciation.

Blake had been waiting for him, which was nice in a way. Normally Blake reserved his limited stores of patience for people who could offer something in return - girlfriends, bosses, scatterbrain professors - and as Blake’s deadbeat baby brother Ari knew he did not qualify.

"Some of us plan our entire days on the assumption that other people will show up on time, you know." Blake was within brother-swatting distance all of a sudden, leaning on the reclaimed wood frame of the little foyer that separated the main cafe from Vermont's snow and salt and mud-assaulted streets.

Or, on that day, rain-assaulted. The old folks who came to Vermont as back-to-the-land Hippies decades before kept telling him that was more the rule than the exception as time had worn on, and that the brutal hurricane the year before had been all the proof. But that had been before Ari’s time.

Ari peeked out from behind the towel - there wasn't much to it, so this was easy - and tried to gauge whether his brother was in a playful mood. "Working in a place like this, that's got to be a really frustrating way to live."

Blake's face moved like it was trying to condense itself into a single, knotted point in the center of his skull. Play was not officially on the table. "At least I work!"

"I work." Ari tossed the towel back to Blake, who gave it a disdainful look before tucking it into the string of his apron. "Where's Zoe?"

"You'd better have a change of clothes in that bindle of yours," Blake said. "Anyways, she's on her way."

Blake's boss was allowed to be habitually late. To Blake, if you owned a place, you were never late. Always 'on your way.' Ari rolled his eyes and made his way through the interior door and around the corner to the 'family' bathroom. He shrugged his guitar case off and set it aside, on the wicker changing table Zoe had set up in the larger of the cafe's two single occupancy bathrooms. The 'gasket' he'd made for the lid crinkled. It was mostly packing tape he'd affixed to the edges of the case's two halves with even more packing tape, but it kept the inside dry enough. His backpack he slung into the sink so he could rummage through it without getting the floor any wetter. 

He stripped down with his back pressed to the door, which hadn't reliably locked at any point that Ari could remember. Once he'd changed and quarantined his soaked clothes in the most watertight part of his bag, he joined Blake at the corner booth where he was already digging into his meal of two apple and cheddar turnovers and a double-stacked espresso lightened to soft beige by enough half and half to create some facsimile of an iced latte. The sight alone made Ari's stomach cramp. Blake was insulated by not having received a double dose of milk-averse genetics. Sometimes he would tell Ari it was his consolation prize as a child of divorce.

"See?" Ari slid into the booth and let his guitar case lean on the wall with his backpack as a chock. "It's not like me not being early made you miss your break."

Blake scratched some flaky, cheesy crumbs out of the dense black beard he'd started cultivating over the winter - another genetic boon from their mother's first husband. "Only because nothing else went wrong. Did you eat before you left?"

"I eat, I work, it's fine," Ari said. "I'm eating dinner after my hour is up anyway."

"You give any thought to my offer?"

Ari sunk a little deeper in the squeaky booth Zoe had proudly reclaimed from a shuttering bar. He'd told Blake that he would 'think about,' the offer of a spot on Blake’s lease. "Yeah, and I just don't think it's something that would work out in the long term."

"Well!" Blake put his hands up in an 'I can't believe you right now, wasting my kindness,' maneuver he had learned, not inherited, from the man they both called Dad. "What exactly is it about living in a hiker's hostel that's better for your long term plan?"

"I don't pay for housing or anything I absolutely need, so I can put almost everything I make into my savings." It was a rehearsed answer. Saying it still made Ari sit up straighter in his seat.

"What's a guy like you saving up for?"

"A down payment on a house to raise my family in one day," Ari said. This was not rehearsed. This was little brother pettiness. It was also a lie. “Hey, aren't you only down half the occupancy of your apartment because Sadie moved out?"

Blake lowered his heavy caterpillar eyebrows, the corners of his mouth and, Ari could sense, his standards for what would constitute a polite response to that.

"I already have almost nine thousand dollars saved up." Ari rested his head in his heads and put on his best little stinker face.

"Horse piss!"

"Fighting again, boys?" Zoe had appeared, the wind chime tune of her bangled wrists and ankles missed until the last possible moment. She plopped her giant slouchy shoulder bag onto their table and produced from it the set of office keys Ari had been waiting for. "Why don't you make your escape and set yourself up, Ari? I need to go over some stuff with your brother anyway."

"You got it.” Ari swept the keys into his palm and disappeared with them in a hurry. For all he knew or cared, Blake was about to get an earful about creating a poor environment for customers by bringing his family drama to work, and Ari was more than prepared to make it look like he'd had nothing to do with that. That meant zipping to Zoe's office to rescue the tiny amp and mic stand from behind the paper goods boxes Zoe stacked up around them to protect her investment.

It was Zoe's belief that the evening crowds enjoyed watching the acts set up, though Ari had never gotten that impression while he was fumbling to fit the magnetic pickup in place and find a spot for the mic where it picked up his voice but not the efforts of the shop’s aging HVAC. The 'stage,' which was raised only five inches from the floor and tucked into the shop's least convenient corner, was by only the slimmest margin any better than busking on Church Street. 

By the time he had the amp cooperating, the mismatched chairs set around the copper-clad tables nearest the stage had cleared out, their patrons driven into the cafe's darker recesses by the looming promise of inescapable noise. The amp Zoe had bought was too beefy for the small space, but she'd made its use a condition of their arrangement anyway. Ari was done fighting about it. Nobody ever left-left, anyway.

He walked to the backside of the stage and fiddled with the panel that could, in theory, tone down the overhead lights. It worked the first time, which was a pleasant change of pace. The ambience set as best as he could set it without help, he returned to the mic and started his usual spiel.

Thanks for reading! This is one of two chapters (Well, two halves and one whole, for a total of three posts. Thanks, character limit.) that will post today. From tomorrow until Friday, April the 10^th, this series will update once daily. After that, starting on April the 14^th, it will update every Tuesday and Thursday.