Reminders of Him

I gladly volunteer as tribute.
“What can I get you?” I ask her.
“Water and a Diet Coke, please.” She doesn’t look up at me, so I back
away to fulfill her order. She’s still writing in her notebook when I return

---

with her drinks. I try to get a glimpse of what she’s writing, but she closes
her notebook and lifts her eyes. “Thank . . .” She pauses in the middle of
what I think is her attempt at saying thank you. She mutters the word you
and sticks the straw in her mouth.
She seems flustered.
I want to ask her questions, like what her name is and where she’s
from, but I’ve learned over the years of owning this place that asking
questions of lonely people in a bar can quickly turn into conversations I
have to maul my way out of.
But most of the people who come in here don’t capture my attention
like she has. I gesture toward her two drinks and say, “Are you waiting for
someone else?”
She pulls both drinks closer. “Nope. Just thirsty.” She breaks eye
contact with me and leans back in her chair, pulling her notebook with her
and giving it all her attention.
I can take a hint. I walk to the other end of the bar to give her privacy.
Roman returns from the kitchen and nudges his head in her direction.
“Who’s she?”
“I don’t know, but she isn’t wearing a wedding ring, so she’s not your
type.”
“Very funny.”

---

CHAPTER THREE
KENNA
Dear Scotty,
They turned the old bookstore into a bar. Can you believe
that shit?
I wonder what they did with the sofa we used to sit
on every Sunday.
I swear, it’s like this whole town is one huge
Monopoly board, and after you died, someone came
along and picked up the board and scrambled all the
pieces around.
Nothing is the same. Everything seems unfamiliar.
I’ve been walking around downtown taking it all in for
the last couple of hours. I was on my way to the grocery
store when I got sidetracked by the bench we used to eat
ice cream on. I sat down and people watched for a while.
Everyone seems so carefree in this town. The people
here just wander around like their worlds are right-side-
up—like they aren’t about to fall off the pavement and
land in the sky. They just move from one moment to the
next, not even aware of the mothers walking around
without their daughters.
I probably shouldn’t be in a bar, especially my first
night back. Not that I have an issue with alcohol. That
one horrible night was an exception. But the last thing I
need your parents to find out is that I stopped by a bar
before I stopped by their house.

---

But I thought this place was still the bookstore, and
bookstores usually have coffee. I was so disappointed
when I walked inside because it’s been a long day of
traveling here on a bus and then the cab. I was hoping for
more caffeine than a diet soda can provide.
Maybe the bar has coffee. I haven’t asked yet.
I probably shouldn’t tell you this, and I promise it’ll
make sense before I finish this letter, but I kissed a prison
guard once.
We got caught and he got transferred to a different
unit and I felt guilty that our kiss got him in trouble. But
he talked to me like I was a person and not a number, and
even though I wasn’t attracted to him, I knew he was
attracted to me, so when he leaned in to kiss me, I kissed
him back. It was my way of saying thank you, and I think
he knew that, and he was okay with it. It had been two
years since I had been touched by you, so when he
pressed me against the wall and gripped my waist, I
thought I’d feel more.
I was sad that I didn’t.
I’m telling you this because he tasted like coffee, but
a better kind of coffee than the prison coffee they served
to the prisoners. He tasted like expensive eight-dollar
coffee from Starbucks, with caramel and whipped cream
and a cherry. It’s why I kept kissing him. Not because I
enjoyed the kiss, or him, or his hand on my waist, but
because I missed expensive flavored coffee.
And you. I miss expensive coffee and you.
Love,
Kenna
“You want a refill?” the bartender asks. He has tattoos that slide all the way
into his shirtsleeves. His shirt is deep purple, a color you don’t see in prison
very often.

---

I never thought about that until I was there, but prison is really drab
and colorless, and after a while, you start to forget what the trees look like
in the fall.
“Do you have coffee?” I ask.
“Sure. Cream and sugar?”
“Do you have caramel? And whipped cream?”
He tosses a rag onto his shoulder. “You bet. Soy, skim, almond, or
whole milk?”
“Whole.”
The bartender laughs. “I was kidding. This is a bar; I have a four-hour-
old pot of coffee and your choice of cream or sugar or both or none.”
The color of his shirt and the way it complements his skin tone are no
longer impressive. Asshole. “Just give me whatever,” I mutter.
The bartender backs away to retrieve my basic prison coffee. I watch
as he lifts the pot out of the holder and brings it close to his nose to sniff it.
He makes a face, then dumps it out in the sink. He flicks the water on while
refilling a guy’s beer while starting a new pot of coffee while closing out
someone else’s tab while smiling just enough but not too much.
I’ve never seen someone move so fluidly, like he has seven arms and
three brains and they’re all going at once. It’s mesmerizing watching
someone who’s good at what they do.
I don’t know what I’m good at. I don’t know that there is anything in
this world I could make look effortless.
There are things I want to be good at. I want to be a good mother. To
my future kids, but mostly to the daughter I already brought into this world.
I want to have a yard that I can plant stuff in. Stuff that will flourish and not
die. I want to learn how to talk to people without wishing I could retract
every word I said. I want to be good at feeling things when a guy touches
my waist. I want to be good at life. I want to make it look effortless, but up
until this point, I’ve made every aspect of life appear entirely too difficult to
navigate.
The bartender glides back to me when the coffee is ready. As he’s
filling the mug, I look at him and actually absorb what I’m seeing this time.
He’s good looking in a way that a girl who is trying to get custody of her
daughter should want to stay away from. He’s got eyes that have seen a
thing or two, and hands that have probably hit a man or two.

---

His hair is fluid like his movements. Long, dark strands that hang in
his eyes and move in whatever direction he moves. He doesn’t touch his
hair; he hasn’t since I’ve been sitting here. He just lets it get in his way, but
then he’ll flick his head every now and then, the slightest little movement,
and his hair goes where he needs it to. It’s thick hair, agreeable hair, want-
my-hands-in-his-hair hair.
My mug is full of coffee now, but he lifts a finger and says, “One sec.”
He swivels and opens a minifridge and then pulls out whole milk. He pours
some into the mug. He puts the milk back, opens another fridge—surprise,
whipped cream. He reaches behind him, and when his hand reappears, he’s
holding a single cherry that he places carefully on top of my drink. He
slides it closer to me and spreads out his arms like he just created magic.
“No caramel,” he says. “Best I could do for not-a-coffee-shop.”
He probably thinks he just made a bougie drink for a spoiled girl
who’s used to having eight-dollar coffee every day. He has no idea how
long it’s been since I’ve had a decent cup of coffee. Even in the months I
spent in transitional housing, they served prison coffee to the prison girls
with prison pasts.
I could cry.
I do cry.
As soon as he gives his attention to someone at the other end of the
bar, I take a drink of my coffee and close my eyes and cry because life can
be so fucking cruel and hard, and I’ve wanted to quit living it so many
times, but then moments like these remind me that happiness isn’t some
permanent thing we’re all trying to achieve in life, it’s merely a thing that
shows up every now and then, sometimes in tiny doses that are just
substantial enough to keep us going.

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CHAPTER FOUR
LEDGER
I know what to do when a child cries, but I don’t know what to do when a
grown woman cries. I stay as far away from her as I can while she drinks
her coffee.
I haven’t learned much about her since she walked in here an hour
ago, but one thing I know for certain is she didn’t come here to meet
anyone. She came here for solitude. Three people have tried to approach her
in the last hour, and she held up a hand and shot them down without making
eye contact with any of them.
She drank her coffee in silence. It’s barely seven in the evening, so she
might just be working her way up to the hard stuff. I kind of hope not. I’m
intrigued by the idea that she came to a bar to order things we rarely serve
while turning down men she never even made eye contact with.
Roman and I are the only ones working until Mary Anne and Razi get
here. The place is getting busier, so I can’t give her the attention I want to
give her, which is all my attention. I make it a point to spread myself out
just enough so that it doesn’t seem like I’m in her space too much.
As soon as she finishes the coffee, I want to ask her what she’s having
next, but instead I make her sit with her empty mug for a good ten minutes.
I might make it fifteen before I work my way back to her.
In the meantime, I just steal glances at her. Her face is a work of art. I
wish there was a picture of it hanging on a wall in a museum somewhere so
I could stand in front of it and stare at it for as long as I wanted. Instead,
I’m just getting in peeks here and there, admiring how all the same pieces
of a face that make up all the other faces in the world just seem to
coordinate better on her.

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People rarely come to a bar at the start of a weekend evening in such a
raw state, but she isn’t dressed up. She’s wearing a faded Mountain Dew T-
shirt and jeans, but the green in the shirt matches the green in her eyes with
such perfection it’s as if she put all her effort into finding the perfect color
of T-shirt, when I’m pretty sure she gave that shirt no thought at all. Her
hair is russet. All one sturdy color. All one length, right below her chin. She
slides her hands through it every now and then, and every time she does, it
looks like she’s about to fold in on herself. It makes me want to walk
around the bar and lift her up and give her a hug.
What’s her story?
I don’t want to know.
I don’t need to know.
I don’t date girls I meet in this bar. Twice I’ve broken that rule, and
twice it’s bitten me in the ass.
Besides, there’s something terrifying about this one. I can’t quite put
my finger on it, but when I talk to her, I feel like my voice is trapped in my
chest. And not in a way that I’m left breathless by her, but in a more
substantial way, as though my brain is warning me not to interact with her.
Red flag! Danger! Abort!