Cafe Counter (Credit: Author)
Allison Graves
Now Playing: “I Wanna Be Adored” by The Stone Roses
I have spent precisely five mornings back in town, and I’ve seen the sunrise for almost all of them. None of it has ever been by choice. At least this morning I got some sketching done. I hadn’t picked up a pencil for the last year I spent on the west coast, but since I’ve been back, I’ve sketched four scenes from around the town, and this morning saw the sunrise on the ocean immortalized by my colored pencils and dry hand.
Mom hasn’t taken great care of our old kitchen table. I see far more stains and marks on it. Gouges I can trace my fingers over gouges from knives at tense family dinners when someone wasn’t paying attention to the ham they were slicing on the platter, or paint stains from an arts and crafts project gone awry.
Sounds a little like my life. As long as I live, the image of Casey’s face as he turned on me with disgust will be burned into my memories. It was a pleasant day, I felt like I could fly. Everything was the way it used to be. And then he darkened in a way I had never seen him do before. “That was before you left me,” has been crashing around my head like thunder rolling across the plains.
“What’s going on?” Kat strolls in wearing an oversized Grantchester High School Football t-shirt and sweatpants with her hair in the messiest of buns. She’s bouncing a rubber ball against the ground and catching it as she walks towards the fridge, with her eyes barely half open. Kat has this ease about her at almost all times; she makes this look effortless. I remember the days she’s snap my head off if I even breathed near her before she had fully woken up.
Just another way things have changed since I went away.
“Casey.”
Kat groans. “You did something stupid again, didn’t you?”
I recount the story of the last 36 hours, starting with my dramatic appearance at the bar. I had been hemming and hawing all week over whether to contact the boys, be it a text or a phone call, or just walking over to Casey’s house and knocking on the door. My sister had informed me that the boys were in a band. Actually, she told me they had actually been in multiple bands over the years, and they were pretty good. And that they were playing a show on Friday night.
I decided that would be how I’d strike.
I never gave it any thought as to what would happen if Casey was dating. Hell, I didn’t realize an ancient crush would reassert itself so aggressively until I found the blackberries and memories came rushing back the way those waves dashing them against the rocks below us. The smell of early autumn, the sound and smell of sea foam, the sight of our resolute lighthouse, and the impending taste of blackberries. Yesterday could have just as easily been five years ago.
“I guess I’m just looking for a lighthouse.” Metaphor should stave off my sister.
“You were at a lighthouse yesterday,” Kat responds flatly. Sadly, she’s not buying. Drat.
“Okay, so I’m feeling lost. I came back and everything is different. You’re finishing high school, Casey has a girlfriend, half the people I knew moved away. It’s all just so different. I guess being
“Did you just want to get back to the way things used to be? Or did you want to steal him away?” Kat poses the armor piercing question. Yeah, it pierces my armor.
“I don’t mean to steal him away,” I protest. I don’t. I just got swept up in the moment. Spilled a secret I had held onto for far too long. Catching up is good, but diving straight into the deep end is causing trouble.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Kat hits me with a rhetorical sucker punch in between bites of toast.
I grit my teeth and look away from my sister. The twist of this particular knife is that she’s not wrong. High school Allison was less than upstanding in some avenues. Casey always saw the best in me regardless. It’s why he was my best friend. We persevered through my frequent acting without thinking and his single-minded pursuit of goals without thinking how it’d affect everyone else. We just accepted each other as people.
“Why don’t you call Jess? She’s back in town. Been working at the bookstore for a few months. She’s someone worth catching up with. Maybe give you that lighthouse. Besides, might help you get a job. Or you could go for the record store. Oh! Ask Casey if he’ll hook you up at the radio station!”
My sister offers a good idea with several overly helpful suggestions. It’s not that I don’t want to work. I know I desperately need to find a job, my bank account is currently screaming for relief. Some people would see it as a challenge. To paraphrase an oft-used expression of Casey’s, unlike Giles Corey, I’m the definition of candy-ass.
“I do not want to work with Casey,” I declare. Perhaps too authoritatively. But it’s true. I found back in college that it’s not a good idea to work with friends. Even when it isn’t, it gets messy quick. It strains and breaks friendships, and I cannot bear to lose Casey a second time.
“Don’t want to be working with him if you guys start fucking?” Kat chooses being crass to annoy me. I suppose I never set a great example in that regard, because I used to do the same thing.
“Katrina Rose Barton,” mom scolds with just my sister’s name, the right tone, and a short look as she enters the room.
“Sorry,” Kat drops her eyes to the toast as she mutters her tiny apology. Mom doesn’t like Kat cursing as much as she does, but my sister is feisty to say the least. No person on earth can hold Kat back. Mom, on the other hand, is the height of regal femininity in fluffy slippers. Both of us picked up smaller behaviors from her, less obvious ones. Outwardly we take after dad, which is why he and I butted heads so much while I was a west coaster.
“Your sister does have a good idea, though, Ally. You should call Jess, I know she’d be delighted to see you. And maybe it’ll resolve some of that yearning for the past you’re so fond of lately.”
Damn, mom. Drop the second sucker punch in the span of two minutes why don’t you?
“I do not yearn.”
My mother and sister share a silent conversation, no doubt mocking my assertation. Katrina even directly challenges me on how much I actually believed that, and I reluctantly answer to a meager thirty percent. If I’m so transparent, it’s no wonder yesterday was a total disaster.
“Allison, you have been yearning since you were born. Your cradle was next to the window because you wouldn’t stop reaching for the ocean and the moon. You’ve been obsessed with things you cannot reach since you could walk. Call Jess.”
Once again, mother knows best. Damn, I hate when she’s right.
Now Playing: “Sleeping Lessons” by The Shins
In an old brick storefront that once headquartered a newspaper which advocated for the colonists to fight the British Empire, Fables and Footnotes has been Grantchester’s premiere bookstore for decades now. It is also Jessica Elizabeth Reed’s current place of employment. Jess was my best girl friend in high school. Casey and I had always been something special, but I wanted to make sure I was learning to continue being social. Then Jess and I met the first day of rehearsal for our high school’s fall play. She was the star, I was working with the stage crew, and we got along like a house on fire.
The old bell rings as the door opens, and the smell of old books hits me. Fables and Footnotes was one of my favorite stops when I was growing up. I haven’t read for pleasure in ages, so I’m hoping amongst our reconnection, Jess can give me some book recommendations. Since I came home, I might as well get back into old habits. Some old habits.
There she is, behind the counter. She’s still regal, skin still pale as milk and hair still the shade of orange topaz in firelight. Her characteristic small smile and almond eyes brighten and widen when she sees me. Before I know it, her tall frame slams into me with way more force than her mass would suggest, and lanky arms wrap around me in a bone crushing hug. I can’t help but laugh.
“Hi, Jess.”
“Oh my God! Allison!” She finally finds hers words, which threaten to smash my eardrums through brute force alone. “I can’t believe you’re back!”
I get bashful as Jess breaks the hug. I’m worried she’ll have moved on like everyone else did. “Yeah, I got back at the beginning of the week. Figured I’d make the rounds.” I cannot meet her gaze out of fear.
“Hey, you had to get yourself settled. Come on, let’s go get coffee. Sovereign Light Café is just down the street, where it’s always been. I practically lived at that place while I was working on my book.”
“You’re working on a book? Tell me everything!” I gesture for her to lead us on. The bell chimes, and the scent of leaves dying wafts through the air, mixed with the saltwater and the smell of apple pie from the bakery a few stores down. That sounds divine. I’ll text Casey to get me a piece once he’s done with his movie.
I try to pay attention to Jess, but my mind starts to drift off to Casey again. Willpower refocuses me on Jess and her book struggles. After she graduated high school, Jess started writing poetry seriously. Took a couple creative writing classes for it in college – she went to UMass Dartmouth – and really pulled together a collection. An author popped in to do a reading a few months back and gave Jess the contact info for her agent. Now she’s working on getting the collection published.
I congratulate her. All of my Grantchester friends, barring Martin, write to some degree. Casey actually keeps up with it though he’ll never admit to what degree. But I know him and his desire for songwriting, he’s trying to find the right way to say what he wants to. I dabbled, but Jess was the one with the real talent for it.
In another quaint storefront on Market Street, a block down from the bookstore, is a café I frequented in my high school years. When home was a little too hectic with my parents and sisters and our beagle, Pickle, I’d come here for a hot chocolate on a cold winter’s day to do my homework. It was the perfect balance of cozy, rustic, and charming without feeling forced. I never found a place in Seattle that matched its feeling. If the city of coffee shops cannot even come close, you know the Sovereign Light Café is special indeed. When Jess and I started hanging out, it became our place. Every Friday, a standing lunch date after school.
I always loved our standing Friday lunches. Just after classes let out, we’d race to get here and gorge ourselves on soups and sandwiches, basking in the freedom of being somewhere only we knew. Plenty of plants with a light and airy décor, right by the windows that let in so much natural light that it felt bright and beautiful even on those cloudy, snowy days. We sat by the window, in the corner, and talked about our lives for ages. Each week there was something new, each week I never wanted it to end. I think our little lunches were my favorite thing.
Senior rolled around, and we kept up the tradition, but there was an air which hung over us. At the time, we were pretending college wasn’t about to separate us. Jess was the only person I told that I was moving away before it happened. None of our other classmates, especially Casey and Martin, ever came to this place. So this café became our bastion against the world. A place where we could talk about the things we couldn’t talk about elsewhere.
Blues and whites and reds, bouncing off the slightly quirky light fixtures, at home with the vintage-feeling art adorning most of the walls, our chilled feet warmed on a black and white checkerboard floor. For me, this was the closest I’d get to living like a movie: A regular order at a regular place with my regular friend, who is really an extraordinary girl. It was here that, backed by clattering silverware and the din of others’ conversations, that we navigated our lives the best we could.
Sitting down, with our old order of a chicken salad sandwich for Jess and a toasted turkey, bacon, and provolone on white for me, with two coffees made just the way we like them, makes me feel like nothing has changed. I get to talk. Jess gets to talk. We get to laugh. We get to solemnly remember the high school classmates that never left town and never made something of themselves. We get to grin at the ones who never left town and did make something of themselves. I relay a lot of the crazy stories I told the boys already, like my night seeing the Shins in Portland or my night in jail. Jess tells me about her failed foray into fashion modeling for a designer friend of hers, and the all-nighter to finish a project. Not because it took that long to get it done, but because her friends had gotten into some legally dubious problems the night before and she had to bail them out. Jess decided at the onset of that story to not give many details because the statute of limitations hadn’t run out on all of the events from that night.
“So, have you talked to the boys yet?” Jess, much like my sister, does not mince words. Growing up with Kat, having a strong relationship even despite the distance for the last few years, cutting to the point became a trait I sought in my friends. I never cared for half-truths and circumspect conversation.
I tell Jess I have and recount the story of yesterday again. I feel as though I should have recorded it and just played it for people. Apart from Casey, Jess was my best friend, and is the only one who knew about my, well, whatever the hell it was I had for him when we were younger. Jess was like me, another outcast back in the day. Certainly, a portion of our status was the foolish arrogance of youth in trying to not be like the other teenagers. Mostly, our divergent interests and the uncertainty with identity came from trying to figure out who we were, the way teenagers are meant to do. Jess was too cool for the dorks, too dorky for the cool kids, too nice for the mean girls, and too sarcastic for the wallflowers. I am not surprised she ended up working at the bookstore. She always had a love of literature. It was one of the things we bonded over.
Jess sits, and listens, and takes in my story with an open mind and a gentle heart. She could be intense and unforgiving to other people, but even at my worst, Jess would always reassure me. I need it right now. I was so goddamn stupid yesterday. Martin told me to be careful and I didn’t listen to him.
“Okay, so, it isn’t great.” Jess isn’t sugarcoating things like most people would. She always had a way of analyzing a situation logically. That helped balance my much more reckless, emotional nature. In many ways, Jess is the other side of the coin the way Martin is for Casey. Wonder why we never tried to set them up.
“I know, I’m an idiot.”
“A little. But I think you’re also feeling so lost right now. You tried to kiss Casey because you’re lonely and lost and coming home is all so overwhelming.” A gentle tone and soft eyes. Jess always knows how to handle me, and as I come to find out when questioning her thinking process, she was a double major in English and psychology. Cause what can’t she do?
“You think that’s it?”
“Not in the slightest!” Jess scoffs, “You still like him. But you guys didn’t talk about it last night. I say, let it lie. Just focus on reconnecting. It’s excitement kicking up right now. Hang out, learn to be friends again. Focus on normalcy and give yourself grace to figure everything else out before you address it with Casey. You’re smart, and have a good heart, Allison. I believe you’ll do the right thing.”
“Thanks Jess. Glad we decided to catch up.”
“Oh, you aren’t going anywhere, Graves. Except up to the counter to get us two more coffees. You have more stories for me!”
As I take my place in the small line forming at the counter, I cannot help but grin. Jess is still Jess, and out friendship picked up right where it was when we left. Not everything has to be so melodramatic. Maybe Casey’s mom has been bothering him more than I realize. More than he realizes.
Maybe we’re both just hurting.
Ark of the Lost Angels 
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