Chapter Thirty
CHAPTER THIRTY
And so Joan would have Lee back that year for Christmas after all.
In December she brought out all her favorite decorations, the ornaments and lights and Jamie’s old nutcrackers from woodshop.
Once these were arranged, she set up the camera’s self-timer, and the three of them stood in front of the tree.
It was not the outcome Joan desired. That Jamie had returned home had been the natural order of things, given that if he hadn’t, it would have meant something awful (though something awful had happened to Jamie).
But this—Lee and Jamie both near, both defeated—this Joan had never wanted.
Perhaps she had wished for them to be with her too much; perhaps this was Joan’s punishment for all her desires.
Joan had liked Marc, whom she thought handsome and hardworking; she’d hoped the couple would have a very nice life together.
Of course, you never want your children to be unhappy, but Joan worried that perhaps she’d taught her children to expect too much.
She knew very well that even the best marriages could not always be satisfying. But how did you teach that?
Joan had prided herself on not pressuring Lee or Jamie for grandchildren. Now she wondered if she should have pressured more. I have no grandchildren, she despaired. Neither of my children is even married!
“Don’t talk to her about it,” Misty said when Joan brought it up on the phone.
“Have you spoken to her? Did she say anything?”
“We talked a little, but not about the engagement,” Misty said, and Joan could tell Misty wanted to know more too.
“He seemed like such a nice boy,” Joan mused.
“Oh, please. Everyone’s a nice boy. Until they aren’t. Believe me, I would know.”
Joan was surprised by this. She hadn’t known Misty to date nice boys—she’d always assumed Misty liked her boyfriends precisely because they weren’t nice. “Do you want to come visit? The weather is good.”
“I’m busy with the store.” Misty had gotten married several years back, to an orthopedic surgeon in Scottsdale whom she’d sat next to in first class on a plane.
Misty hadn’t appeared too upset by the divorce, which transpired a year later—she had stayed in Arizona and opened a furniture store.
She was already talking about expanding to a second location.
Joan had purchased an outdoor teak set when she visited in February, though two of the chairs were already splitting from the rain.
“Do you know what happened?” Joan asked Jamie the next time he visited the café.
“With who?” Jamie asked, scooping out malt balls from a snack jar.
“Lee,” Joan said with exasperation. “I think something might have happened over Thanksgiving. But what could it be?”
“If Lee doesn’t say, it means she doesn’t want anyone to know,” said Jamie, who did know something about it, or at least more than Joan.
He didn’t have specifics, only that it had to do with Marc’s parents.
Well, naturally a family of military contractors would be problematic, he thought.
Jamie really did have a bias against such contractors, especially wealthy ones, though he had been in the military and his parents wealthy; it was one of the many contradictions within Jamie.
Lee showed no outward distress over having lost both a fiancé and an apartment in London in one week.
As she’d already done once before, Lee moved back in with her mother.
She spent her mornings accompanying Joan to the café—she never worked as a host, but helped with the cleaning, and if they ran out of Pellegrino midday she drove to Costco to buy more.
Most nights she also made dinner, which she and Joan ate in the kitchen.
Lee was always pleasant, never miserable, but Joan knew something was wrong.
“Don’t you think something is strange?” Joan asked Jamie.
Although Joan thought something strange about Jamie as well.
“She needs more to do,” Jamie said. “Maybe I’ll take her shooting.” He didn’t tell Joan that he believed Lee might prefer an especially aggressive activity; he didn’t wish to be drawn into that quicksand.
“ Shooting? Do you even have a gun?”
“Yes.” In response to her look, he added: “It’s in safe storage.” Which for Jamie meant the top shelf of his closet, underneath a stack of pillows. It was where Jamie had hid things ever since he was a kid.
On the day Jamie was to take Lee to the range, Joan moved about the café, half distracted by paranoia (her particular paranoia being that they would accidentally shoot each other). Lee finally called that afternoon. “Are you okay?” Joan asked in a hurry.
“Yes. It was fun. Relieved some stress.”
Joan stopped herself from asking what sort of stress Lee needed to relieve. “No injuries? Everyone is safe?”
“Yes, everyone’s fine. Do you want me to come over?”
“No,” Joan said, a little peevish at Lee’s nonchalance. “Why don’t you keep spending time with your brother?”
“He’s going to the gym.”
“Why don’t you go to the gym too?” There were men at the gym, weren’t there?
Or perhaps Lee could at least meet some friends, as it seemed strange to Joan that she didn’t have many (never mind that neither did Joan).
“Exercise is good for you,” Joan added. “Please don’t come to the café. It’s not busy.”
There was a pause. “All right,” Lee said, and hung up.
Though Joan was busy, quite so. Most of her days were busy now; the café was at capacity nearly every weekend, and the weekdays had begun to fill as well.
Despite her rapid hiring of hosts, many worked part-time, and Joan remained short-staffed.
Nearly every day she’d have to sit with a customer to accommodate walk-ins or hosts who’d called in sick.
Over her time sitting with customers, Joan had begun to notice commonalities. Naturally each individual was unique, but humans also shared certain qualities, like ego and loneliness. On the break room wall Joan had taped a large poster board which featured her writing in block letters:
HOW TO START A CONVERSATION!
Ask questions—about them!
If they look troubled, ask what is bothering them!
Everyone is interesting—you just have to discover what it is!
And how about their parents ?
For nearly everyone did eventually speak of their parents; in Joan’s experience, the sole topic which regularly surpassed it was divorce, but then only a certain population was divorced, whereas everyone had parents. Joan was fortunate in this regard: she had relevant experience with both matters.
Joan had left room on the board for additional maxims; she first wrote them on index cards which she kept in her pocket, and only after she’d reviewed them days later and still found them relevant did she add them to the poster with black marker.
Ask , she wrote over and over. Keep asking, she exhorted her hosts. Ask!
For Joan had discovered this was what people wanted, to be asked about themselves; often a few questions were all it took, and then an hour or two was gone.
As time passed, Joan became increasingly convinced of a serious epidemic of lack of attention in the world: the old man throwing a fit at the post office when his package wasn’t found; the young mother staring despondently at the wall in the hospital as her baby screamed and name after name was called.
Come here, Joan wanted to say. Come, I can help!
She had business cards made up with the address and phone number of the café, which she gave out; she left little piles at Neiman Marcus and the car wash, both places she’d witnessed customers behaving badly.
Perhaps because she was so small and harmless-looking, people at least took the cards (though most threw them away right after).
Some came, however. And then more and more.
Until one Tuesday afternoon (usually her slowest period), Joan looked around and saw the café was full.
The tables were packed with hosts and customers; they were drinking coffee and eating Black Forest cake and spooning chili paste on top of dumplings.
Joan had recently added some of her childhood breakfast favorites to the menu, and she noted with pleasure a woman at a corner table dipping fried dough sticks into soy milk.
With success came worry over competition.
Unknowingly Joan followed the paths of other chief executives in constantly iterating her product.
She read business books and took notes. She agreed that only the paranoid survive.
She reevaluated her menu and nixed the egg-chive pockets (while tasty, their aroma could be controversial).
She also charted the demographics of existing customers and determined they should be marketing more to married people—though they should make it clear the café wasn’t a sordid destination, simply a place to speak with someone different.
Perhaps there would be fewer divorces if more husbands and wives knew of the café.
People wouldn’t be so desperate for variety that when any opportunity arose, they thought it was the excitement, the thrill, the meaning they’d sought all along.
Sometimes one just needed a little release, to prevent a big explosion.
But was there a way to communicate this? Joan pondered. How did you possibly market such a feature?
Between all this brainstorming, Joan continued to fill in for hosting duties.
Some clients enjoyed their conversations with her so much that they requested her again.
Joan really didn’t have time for regulars, though she was reluctant to extricate herself, as she knew from her business studies that one must always strive to Delight Your Customer.
Joan’s most loyal client was a redhead with a ghostly complexion named Dustin.
The first time Dustin visited the café, there had been no available hosts, and so Joan sat with him at a table.
Dustin brought with him a green duffel which his hand kept meandering to and petting the top of.
Joan had eyed it nervously during their introductions and was relieved when he pulled from it a large yellow hardcover.
“Do you know what this is?” he asked. She shook her head. “It’s Greek mythology,” Dustin said. “I’d like you to read it to me.”
Joan had not studied the Greek gods in school.
She knew who Zeus was (he seemed like a jerk?) but barely, and the others were strangers.
Joan liked the book: it had clear prose and lovely watercolor illustrations.
Each appointment Dustin had her read a chapter, after which Joan asked questions about the material.
Joan decided Dustin’s enjoyment was both in being read to and in playing the expert.
One afternoon Jamie happened to visit during her usual Friday session with Dustin. “This is my son,” Joan said.
“Oh?” Dustin replied in a possessive tone. He was wearing what Joan had come to recognize as his lucky hat, a baseball cap with the word SORRY embroidered in yellow thread. When Jamie introduced himself, Dustin did not shake hands but hugged his book to his chest, as if afraid Jamie might take it.
“That guy seems like a creep,” Jamie remarked the next morning. He had recently begun accompanying Joan and Lee on their Saturday walks, as it was the most exercise his knee could tolerate.
“Which guy?” Lee asked. Jamie explained to her.
“It’s just reading stories,” Joan said. “It’s not so bad.
” In truth, her time with Dustin was far preferable to some of her other conversations.
While Joan had a rule that any host could drop a customer without explanation, she had an owner’s sense of fiduciary responsibility when it came to her own bad customers.
As such, she currently tolerated in at least semiregular rotation an unpleasant Korean woman who told long, complicated stories about her appalling behavior toward her own family; there was also an arrogant, fitness-obsessed mortgage broker named Lincoln who complained of his dating failures, uniformly characterizing the women as ungrateful bitches who would one day be sorry.
Compared to such customers, Dustin was harmless, easy—if only her calendar could be filled with Dustins.
“Which book?” Lee asked. Joan told her. “I read that in elementary school. Why is an adult having you read it? I don’t think it’s normal.”
Sure, Dustin’s habits may not have been normal. But was Lee and Jamie moving home, spending so much time with their mother, normal? Joan felt she was losing her grip on normal day by day.
She could see Jamie and Lee up ahead, kicking stones the same way they had years earlier, the first time they visited High Rock Park.
The sun was just cresting as they strode over the hill, and it lit the ocean so that it appeared filled with stars.
It was a family joke now that despite Joan’s many attempts, a barrier or sign warning of the cliff had yet to be installed.
On their way back to the car, Joan took another comment form: THIS TRAIL IS DANGEROUS !
People may not know they are approaching an unprotected cliff , she wrote, along with her phone number.
“Why do you keep writing those cards?” Lee asked. “You know no one reads them.”
“But they have the box,” Joan insisted. So it must be for something.
She could not imagine a person would have created such a system—one that included printed cards and little white pencils and the green metal box—without having arranged for someone to open the box from time to time; to retrieve the words that someone had put down on paper for another to receive.