Dark Water - Laura McNeal [57]
“I guess so. Why?”
Another overly big laugh. “You know she works here, right?”
I felt my neck prickle and wondered how many of the people sitting on the big comfy sofas and big comfy chairs were listening in on our conversation while pretending to work on their laptops. As far as I could tell, the Cup o’ Europe was not a bookstore. There were some used books in the back, where a sign said, LEAVE ONE, TAKE ONE!! but most of them were large print. Also, the two girls working the coffee machines were teenagers, not grown women like my mother.
“What a coincidence!” I said, trying to work up a laugh. It seemed really, really strange that no one I knew, such as Greenie, had mentioned my mother’s new job at Cup o’ Europe. During the school year, I would have heard about my mom’s job from seven people within ten minutes of her first shift. But since school let out, I’d stopped speaking to practically everyone.
“I guess you two need to talk more, huh?” Chloe the manager said. “I’ll bet you’re like my kids. Always rushing off to do whatsit with whosit.”
“Pretty much,” I said. “Ha!” I paused because it’s hard to follow up a fake laugh. “Probably we shouldn’t work together, actually,” I said.
“You’d want different shifts?”
“No. I think I should just, you know, withdraw. Don’t tell her I was here, even.”
But of course Chloe told her. The next night during our soup course (the only course), my mother set down her twisted shred of a napkin and said, “Chloe said you came by.”
“You said you worked in a bookstore,” I said.
“They sell books. After a fashion.”
“I don’t know why you had to put it that way to me is all.”
“I think they’re planning to sell books. That’s what they told me when I applied, anyway.”
I blinked at her, and she picked up the remote. We watched anchormen, crime tape, the fuzzy progress of car chases, and finally, for comic relief, a tour of the thing I had thought existed only in my imagination: a house that was literally upside down. A man in Poland had painstakingly wedged the pitched roof of a house into the ground and built the rest of the house up from there, balancing the weight somehow on the point of the triangle. The foundation was high and flat like a tray held up by a waiter. On the edge of this elevated foundation, a little cypress tree grew (or merely pointed) straight down.
“The house took twice as long to build as an ordinary structure,” said the newscaster, “because being inside the house made the workers dizzy.”
Long lines of curious families waited outside the house for a tour. “Some people have waited as long as six hours to see the inside,” the newscaster announced as Poles and Germans, looking just like Americans in their baby carriers, Windbreakers, T-shirts, and track shoes, traipsed unsteadily through upside-down doorways to run their hands along upside-down beds. I began, sitting there beside my lost and lonely mother, to plan my pilgrimage to this place where I would finally be at home.
Thirty-five
The next day, Subway called to say I was hired, which meant long bike rides, no time to sink myself down in the river, and the persistent smell of mustard on my skin. Twice that week I got phone messages from my father, but they didn’t mention his condo or Paris or plans of any kind to see me, so I didn’t call him back.
I rode home that Friday at five o’clock, long after Amiel would have gone home. The grove felt empty, and I knew the guesthouse would be empty, too, because it was open-mike night at the Cup o’ Europe, a shift my mother was unhappy to take. I was halfway up the porch steps when I saw something small and dark beside the screen door: Amiel’s tin box. The black enamel felt so warm from the sun that it almost burned me when I picked it up.
I sat on the porch in case he was out there somewhere, watching me, and I pried open the lid. I could hear crows calling and lizards rattling through the dried bougainvillea blossoms and eucalyptus bark. “Is that you?” I called hopefully, not daring to say Amiel’s name in case my aunt was outside. A lizard