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I wondered what that would have been like, to never know Daddy. I imagined I would have been like Vera, wishing and wonderin’ about him. A bitter laugh threatened to escape my throat and it burned like bile in my body.
What a putrid thing, to wish for Daddy.
“I’m sorry you never got to know your daddy,” I finally said.
Our teas were long finished but Vera still took up space on my bed. We sat shoulder to shoulder, leaning on the cushiony headboard of my bed.
“We ever gonna talk about what brought you here?” Vera asked, her voice like a gong in our stillness.
“I told you. My brother.”
“What really brought you here, Grace.”
“Why do you care?” I felt defensive. If I told Vera the reason I’d left town then I’d have to admit it to myself and I wasn’t ready for that just yet. I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready for that.
“I’ll tell you why I left,” Vera whispered. “Why I really left.”
“Vera…” I trailed off, still staring out my window. People were starting to walk on the sidewalks and get into their cars. The sun had passed its zenith and the Carolina sky was replaced with the blue-grey of dusk. “I don’t want to do this right now. I have to get ready for work.”
“His name was Cruz,” Vera said, her voice almost as quiet as mine. “His asshole friends called him Zero. I loved him, or I don’t know, I think I loved him. He hit me and called me stupid. But there were times when he called me beautiful and said I was the reason he walked. I lived for those moments, ya know?”
I blinked, slowly turning my head to see Vera. She was already looking at me. Had she just said Zero?
“What?” Vera furrowed her brows, turning her head slightly in suspicion. “You look like I just told you your cat died.”
I shook my head. “Nothing, I just knew a man named Zero once…” It couldn’t be the same person though, right? Vera came by way of Louisiana, a full two states away from me.
Vera shrugged, shifting her attention back to the outside world. “Small world.”
“The Zero I knew was a bad fellow,” I remarked.
Vera laughed. “Cruz is an asshole, but he’s mostly harmless, like a kitty who uses his claws a little too much.”
I gave a broken laugh at her analogy. “My Zero—or at least the Zero I knew—was much worse than a kitty. He was poison.”
Vera seemed to contemplate my words. I’d never seen Vera like this. She was always carefree and bubbly. There in my bed she was haunted. I felt like she was letting me witness her insides. It was only fair to show her mine.
“His name was Eli,” I said, voice low like the quieting dusk. “And God help me, I still love him.”
It was past dusk, but before night, and the shop was in a lull. Everyone had received their afternoon pick-me-up and wasn’t ready for their evening caffeine. I was cleaning the glassware. The ministrations of my rag against the surface had me mesmerized. I watched the wet rag swipe away the dirt and make it clean. Over and over again, no matter how dirty, it was made clean again.
“Grace,” my manager, Marci, called out, interrupting my careful cleaning. That day her normally haphazard blonde spikes were slicked back in a chic do. “Can you get the front? There’s a man asking for you.”
I set down the rag, contemplating her question. “For me? You sure?”
She shrugged. “He said he was looking for Grace Wall. He’s really cute.” She winked and picked up the glassware I’d just been working on, taking up where I’d left off.
Marci, I’d discovered, was a wonderful person as well as a great manager. Though her outside was a little intimidating, decorated in piercings and tattoos, her insides were all mush. She always let me pick a muffin from the pastry section, even if I wasn’t hungry. “Take it home,” she would say. “You’re skin and bones.”
I thanked her for letting me know about the customer and made my way to the front.
Who was here for me? I hadn’t met any boys since moving to California, except my brother. I guessed it could be my brother. It could be Vic; that was the most plausible scenario. Vic was cute, I supposed, if you were to look at it objectively and not as a sister.
The only other person who would be here… No. I shook my head, getting rid of the nasty thought. Having spent the morning discussing Zero with Vera, he was fresh on my mind. But it wasn’t like that person could ever be considered cute, anyway, and I had left that person back in Georgia.
I entered the front, feeling a little bit like a zombie with all the people I thought I’d let die in my past resurfacing. I plastered a smile on my face, as I was used to doing when entering the front. Always smile; never let the customer see your pain.
The smile fell the minute I saw who was waiting for me. My body went cold, like ice water was running through my veins. Shock, I guess you could call it. I gasped, the name coming out of my mouth in a hollow rush, like wind exiting a cave.
