Cecilia
The best part about my current sleeping situation was that the world was my oyster. I could live anywhere. I could go at a moment’s notice over the bridge to Canada if I wanted, a different country! I could drive to Chicago, or just out to one of the pretty suburbs around the city. Although that was a little tough. A ratty old van stood out like a sore thumb in some of those neighborhoods and the residents were pretty quick to call the cops.
A bad part was that sometimes I got a little afraid at night. And a little cold. There wasn’t much between me and the outside. Sometimes, Jason’s parents let me park in their driveway in front of their beautiful house on the West Side in the Rosedale Park neighborhood, but I hated to impose on them. My yellow van with the bubble window really didn’t go with their well-kept house!
The other hard part was bathing. It was a real adventure sometimes, but three months ago I had joined the YMCA and could swim some laps most mornings and take a shower. No matter what my mom believed, I had developed into a person who was huge supporter of being clean! I was on my way walking from my swim at the Y to the coffee shop when I saw my drawer. He was driving an old Jeep into the garage of one of the big office buildings. I couldn’t see any bumper stickers at all, but that was something I would need to clear up. So he was an office guy, as I had suspected! I stored that little tidbit away, and got my buns to work on time.
“Hey,” my other coworker, Neveah, called when I came in. I waved back at her. She was super nice but we had gotten off to a bad start when I’d overheard her making fun of my hair. It was a bit of a sore spot for me. But when she realized that I really didn’t know what to do with it—think forty pounds of curls on a short person’s body—she took me to her mom’s beauty salon and they helped me A LOT. Now I had a head of thick, shiny ringlets down my back, not a giant mass of frizz (that frizz actually had given me a little addition in the height department, so it wasn’t all bad). Her mom had banned me from using a brush, like entirely. No brushing! Who knew?
“Cecilia,” she called to me now, “come on over here and tell me what this says.” Neveah held up a piece of paper with some words written in Spanish on it. I had first picked up a little Spanish in the Dominican Republic when we were there during hurricane season to stay with my mom’s friend. Her special friend, if you got my drift.
“It’s just a grocery list,” I explained to her. “See? Leche, pan . Milk and bread. More food stuff, cereal, then it says dry cleaning, the part that’s underlined.”
“Damn, you’re good!” she told me admiringly.
I laughed. “It’s just a few words! I don’t think I could get by anymore all in Spanish. ”
“Tell me again how you learned it,” she demanded, and I launched into the story of my mom sending me out to make friends on the beach when we first arrived in the DR. I had ended up going home with a girl I had met and rejoined my mom three days later. In the meantime, the family I stayed with had a gigantic party for one of their older relatives, with a huge barbecue and tons of delicious food. They were a super nice family and it had been an awesome way to start to learn Spanish. I still wrote them letters sometimes.
Neveah always marveled at the part that I hadn’t come home for three days. “Seriously, your mom didn’t call the cops?”
“Nope,” I said, straightening up lids for the take-out cups. “Hand me the cleaning spray?”
She passed me the bottle. “Damn, my mom would have freaked out if I was gone for days when I was nine! I had to call her at the salon the minute I got off the school bus.”
I had been eight. “Well, she trusted me to come back, I guess, and my mom’s a little different. I was one of the original free-range kids.”
“And where’s your mom now?”
I smiled and shrugged. “California! San Francisco, I think. I’m going to save up a little more and then I’ll head out there and find her.” After I finished up my stuff in Detroit.
Neveah was impressed. “Driving all that way, all by yourself. You’ve got nerve, Cecilia! I don’t even like driving to the airport alone.”
“Well, I’m older than you are,” I told her. She was only 19, but I was 24. There was a world of difference once you got into your third decade. Also, we had been raised a little differently. Her mom and dad were kind of the opposite of free-range.
“What is she doing in California?”
“She writes poetry, sometimes. She meets her friends. She does yoga.”
Neveah stared at me. “Doesn’t she have a job?”
The idea of my mom holding down a job made me laugh out loud. “No! She’s never worked. Her parents set up a trust for her, and we always just lived off that.” My grandparents had owned a bunch of car dealerships in Connecticut, where my mom had grown up, and from what I had gathered, they had left her fairly well-off. Hard to know now, though, how much money was left. If I knew my mom, and I did pretty well after being her constant companion and best friend for the first fifteen years of my life, she had been tapping into the principle for a while.
“Where does she live in San Francisco?”
That was always the hard part. My mom was sometimes a little hard to run to ground. “I’m not exactly sure where she is, but I know her friends there. Once we stayed with one of them for months when the boat was dry-docked, getting repaired in Florida.” Going to California had been my first time on an airplane. My mom had blessed it with sage before we got on and had made the flight attendants nervous.
“You mean your mom didn’t tell you where she is?” Neveah’s eyes were huge. “Really?
My mom was hard to explain to those who didn’t know her. “She has a friend in New York, and we have this deal that if anything is really wrong, she’ll get in touch with him, and he’ll get in touch with me. She doesn’t have a cell phone, because of the energy fields they create, and she moves around a lot so she never has an address.” At least she was on land now, though, since our boat had finally met its end a few years ago. She was terrible at maintaining it when I wasn’t there to keep an eye on things.
Neveah was clearly entranced. “You have the coolest life, Cecilia! You’re so lucky that your mom doesn’t care what you do.”
Well, I would have to be honest. That gave me a little pang when she said that. “She cares, in her own way. Look, we have customers at the counter!”
A few hours later, at around ten, in he came again. He looked better than yesterday. The wrinkled-up pain face was gone.
Maybe it would be a good time to sweep around the tables at the door. I took the broom and worked my way over toward him, being careful to edge the bristles around all the table legs, moving the chairs. Not looking.
But then, when I got close to his table, he was looking at me!
“Hi,” said my artist.
“Hi.” I smiled at him, so happy to see him back again. “Is your headache gone?”
He reflexively touched his temple. “Yeah, all gone.”
“Did you try the oil?”
“Sorry to say, I just went with pills from the drug store. Maybe next time.”
I peered over the top of his coffee cup to see what he was drawing, and he moved his hands over it. “What’s your name?” he asked.
“Cecilia.”
“I’m Alex. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Likewise,” I told him. Alex was a very nice name. If my mom’s friend Phillipe were there, he could have used numerology to determine if we were a love match. As it was, I was going to try my luck!
“I would offer to buy you a coffee, but it looks like you’re all set. Want a muffin?”
He looked so surprised, it was funny to see. “Uh, sure.”
I turned to go back to the counter. “I’m comping you,” I called back to him. “You’re like a coffee shop high roller.”
When I put the plate down on the table in next to his coffee, I sat down in the chair across from him. “Do you mind if I take my break here with you?”
“No, please.” He still looked a little shell shocked—maybe I was coming on a little strong. I tried to reel myself in.
“So, Alex, what do you like to do besides drink coffee? What are your interests?” Maybe he would talk about his drawings.
He considered. “I’m interested in collecting and identifying vermin found at rest stops.”
“Really?”
Alex started to laugh. “No, not really. Who would do that?”
“I’ll bet there’s somebody out there. There are a lot of people into a lot of weird shit!”
He looked at me. “If you don’t mind me asking, how old are you?”
“I’m twenty-four. How old did you think I was?”
He quirked his eyebrow. “I think answering that would be a losing proposition for me either way I went with it.”
I blew a curl back from my forehead. “Everyone thinks I’m young because I’m so damn short. Sometimes I feel like, if this guy pats me on the head, I’m going to bite him!”
The eyebrow shot up. “That would certainly prove your maturity.”
“How do you do that?” I held one of my eyebrows and tried to make the other go up on its own. In response, he moved his left eyebrow almost to his hairline, making me laugh. “How old are you?” I asked.
“I’m twenty-nine. Your elder.”
“Hmm. I would have guessed you were older than that. Not because you look old, just more mature, I guess.”
“Should I be insulted?”
“I meant it as a compliment! So what do you do around here? You come in for coffee a lot.”
Alex’s face lost its smile. “I work for Whitaker Enterprises. It’s a real estate development company.”
“Oooh, I love real estate.”
The smile was back. He had such a nice smile. “Really? What do you love about real estate?”
“Well, I’d love to own some. I never actually have, but it’s my dream to, someday.” A house of my own, with lots of land. And a vegetable garden, and a barn. And I would have pygmy goats and a horse. And a fence to keep the goats from the vegetables.
“You’re a renter?” Alex asked.
“Nope.”
“Live with your parents?”
“No, I live by myself. In my van,” I explained.
“You seriously live in a van?”
“Yes, seriously. A yellow van, the color of a highlighter. I call her Nina. I bought her a few years ago in Jacksonville. I’ve been working my way north. I’ve been in Detroit for four months.”
Alex was shaking his head. “You thought it was a good idea to spend the winter in a van in Detroit?”
“Sometimes things just work out how they work out,” I explained. I didn’t need to explain what I had been looking for in Detroit. “It’s just kismet. And I have a really great sleeping bag. It’s rated to zero degrees.”
“You live in a sleeping bag in a van,” he repeated. “You’re on your own, I’m guessing?”
“Just me. I can show you, if you want. It’s parked by the Riverwalk right now. Near Rivard Plaza, but I can’t stay there overnight. I like to walk around down there after I’m done here. ”
“Wait a minute. You live in a van, down by the river?” Alex started to crack up. Like laughing, really hard. I started laughing too because he looked so cute, it was contagious.
“Is that a TV show joke? I didn’t grow up with a TV,” I finally said when he calmed down. “Except one summer when I lived with my mom’s friend Carolina in Costa Rica, but I only watched telenovelas . I never get TV show references.”
“You grew up in Costa Rica?”
“Partly. It’s too long to explain—I have to get back to work.” I stood up, then remembered my question. “One thing. Do you have any bumper stickers?”
“What?”
“Stickers on your bumper, back of your car, you know, stuff on your car windows.”
He seemed perplexed. “I think I have one for my condo complex.”
“Just the one?” I confirmed.
“Why?”
“I have a theory that the more stickers a person has on his car, the more likely he is to be a serial killer.”
Eyebrow up. “No, I’m not a serial killer. If you don’t mind me asking, how many stickers do you have on Nina the yellow van?
“None,” I assured him. “But there’s a picture of the sunset painted all across the left side.”
“Cecilia, you are an unusual woman. ”
“Should I be insulted?” I asked, repeating what he had said to me.
Alex smiled. “I meant it as a compliment,” he copied my answer right back.