Chapter 28
Coffa Cupee, a play on the words “cuppa coffee,” had been Jojo’s get-away-from-the-uncles retreat ever since she returned to Somerset County. It hadn’t been there before she left, but she had called Ali as soon as she got back into town in February, and Ali couldn’t wait to show it to her.
“I am a bona fide member of the Somerset County Chamber of Commerce, a business owner,” Ali had said, her grandiose announcement tinged with genuine pride.
For all the years that Jojo had known Ali, she had gone from one job to another in much the same way as she had gone from one man to another … and one tattoo to another.
She’d actually been married and divorced twice, swore she would never take the plunge again, that she was going to concentrate on her career, which at that time had been as a hairdresser.
Apparently, she was very talented, though Jojo didn’t know how talent was measured in that world.
She did know that the styles Ali brought back to Somerset County from conferences and hair fairs all over the country were not styles any woman in rural Pennsylvania would have chosen. Ali grasped that reality.
Ali saw herself as an artist in the same way that fashion designers were artists, pointed out that those crazy clothes models wore strutting down runways weren’t suitable to wear on a trip to Walmart to get a jar of bean dip, either.
They were the outside edge, the fringe, and toned down, very toned down versions of them became the accepted style of the day.
Jojo got the analogy, but she had not seen it play out in real life. Ali had shown her dozens of pictures of strange hairstyles, and Jojo had never seen anything remotely like them among the general population of the world.
But about the time that Jojo left the military and went to work for the DEA in Chicago, Ali had made a career move of her own.
She was reluctant to say specifically where she’d gotten the money for the startup and Jojo didn’t press her.
If it was something Ali didn’t want to talk about, chances were Jojo was way better off not knowing.
Ali gave only veiled references to her “new business endeavor” in cryptic texts every three or four days.
Ali hated to talk on the phone, so texting was their sole means of communication, and Ali was brief and abrupt in her texts, didn’t provide a whole lot of information.
And so it was that when Jojo returned to the county in February, Ali had been as proud as punch to show off the little coffee shop she had opened where a small jewelry store had gone out of business on Hancock Street.
The location was perfect. The business itself was perfect, too—Ali-perfect, which was totally off-the-wall glorious.
The building was painted bright purple, with orange shutters and pink trim.
A yellow brick road led customers from the parking lot on a curving, circuitous route to the building, where the conspicuous body of a dead witch protruded from beneath the foundation.
The roof of the building was an artificial flower garden, with six-foot-tall plastic daisies, daffodils, pansies and sunflowers.
When you stepped inside, you saw that the “roots” of those flowers dangled through the ceiling, complete with little clods of plastic dirt.
The chairs were in the shape of hands—you sat in the palm and leaned back on the fingers.
The tables were mushrooms, each unique, plastic molded in the different colors and shapes of mushrooms—big fat ones as a table for four, and small, skinny spotted ones set for two.
Each piece of decorative art was designed to look like it had been hurled through the wall from the outside—the head of a rhino, the tip end of a missile, the prow of a sailing ship.
And the hindquarters of a deer, upside down and bleeding from the impact of a car striking it.
There was a life-size statue of Queen Elizabeth facing the windows, with football helmet gray hair, a purple hat, dress, shoes and white gloves holding a handbag with a solar cell in it that powered her perpetual sideways “royal wave.”
A real jukebox with real vinyl records blared out music from the fifties and sixties at a quarter a song. You could select from among five bathroom options. Men. Women. Both. Neither. And Whatever.
Knock, knock jokes and limericks dotted the walls. Any customer clever enough to make up a good one was treated to a free lunch—and handed a Sharpie to print it on the wall. A crazy spiral painted on the floor in front of the cash register was so realistic it gave customers vertigo.
Every coffee mug was unique, each with sayings like “I came, I saw, I forgot what I was doing, retraced my steps, got distracted on my way back and have no idea what’s going on. Is this my cup? And now I have to pee.”
But the coffee … oh, my. Move over Starbucks, Coffa Cupee coffee was the best in the county!
When Jojo arrived, she threw her shoulder against the driver’s side door of her pickup truck and almost fell out into the street because the latch had chosen, at that particular moment, to open easily. She staggered to regain her balance.
“Drinking on the job again,” Ali said from the doorway. “Dang, girl, will you ever learn?”
Jojo straightened herself up with exaggerated dignity, and slurred her speech, “I’m sorry, osifier, that tree jumped out and bit my car.”
Then they hugged long and hard, rocking a little back and forth.
Jojo had no memory of what color Ali’s hair had been originally.
Today it was cut short and colored in shades of pale green and blue and aqua, looked like a tropical fish.
As soon as Jojo made that connection in her head, she flashed back to the little girl who’d been standing on the retaining wall in her pink snowsuit crying out for her father the night of the shootings.
“Whoa, I just felt an Arctic breeze,” Ali said, looking at her critically. “Your countenance just plummeted thirty-two degrees.”
Ali could read Jojo’s moods so well it was almost like she could read her thoughts. There was no hiding anything from her. “Sorry, I was just thinking about …”
“I know what you were thinking about. Now get your ass in here and sit down, I’m going to give you some coffee and then you’re going to tell me the whole story.”
Ali hooked her arm through Jojo’s and practically dragged her into the establishment, with Trident padding along behind.
Ali directed Jojo on a circuitous route through the strange tables to the counter in the back where she positioned her on a stool, went behind the counter, did things with strange Starbucks-esque machines and placed in front of Jojo a chocolate caramel latte with whipped cream because she had decided that was Jojo’s favorite drink.
It did no good whatsoever to protest that she liked her coffee black.
“Come on, spill it,” Ali said.
“What are you doing here? Why are you home?” Jojo asked.
“You think I would stay away after what happened? Saw the news and I was on the first flight I could catch. I knew you’d be right in the middle of it and damned if you’re not.”
Ali dropped the banter, reached out and took Jojo’s hand and Jojo spotted a new tattoo on Ali’s wrist. It was a simple line drawing of a single Hershey’s kiss—unlike the more elaborate pictures that adorned most of the available real estate on her body.
Ali had once bragged that she had “tats in places some girls don’t even have places,” but Jojo had been spared more details on the subject.
“It sucked, didn’t it?”
Jojo looked into her friend’s almost purple eyes and fell into the depths of them as she always did. “Sucked on steroids.”
Then Jojo gave Ali a blow-by-blow of the nightmare at Royal Oaks Ski Resort on Wednesday night.
She didn’t realize herself how much detail she recalled until she started telling Ali about it and discovered that her mind had recorded images and impressions and sights and colors and sounds that she hadn’t even been aware of at the time.
When she finished describing what Annie Miller’s mother had said to her at the wake, she looked down into a miraculously empty cup.
She didn’t remember drinking a single drop, and when she looked up she saw tears running down Ali’s face.
They weren’t hard to spot because she wore such heavy black eye makeup the tears traced thin black lines down her cheeks.
“I didn’t mean to upset you.”
“Yeah, you need to be real careful about my delicate sensibilities when you tell me about the absolute nightmare you and half of this county lived through while I was getting a tan on a beach in Maui.”
She patted Jojo’s hand, then got up and made her another latte. “There’s more,” she said and set it down in front of her. “Spill it.”
“What ‘more?’”
“The you-and-the-state-police-lieutenant more.”
Jojo’s head snapped up. “What?”
“I heard it in your voice—and with your voice, that’s an accomplishment.”
Ali had always teased Jojo about her sultry voice, said she sounded just like the actress Kate Mulgrew.
“I don’t know wh?—”
“When you said his name and described that gorgeous shock of red hair.”
Jojo’s face turned crimson. “I did not, I?—”
“Oh, put a sock in it, you did, too.”
Jojo recoiled. “Seriously Ali, I don’t even much like the man. He’s abrupt and bossy and?—”
“And he did a really hard job well that night and you were impressed.”
“All right that much is true.”
“And if I am any judge of male human beings, and despite my personal matrimonial record I am, there are some feelings deep in that man’s chest for Jojo Kaufmann. You don’t walk around with your body and your face and not attract male attention.”
Jojo had spent most of her adult life determined not to attract male attention. She’d been a soldier and when you looked into the eyes of a soldier, they all looked alike—scared to death.
“And the rest?” Ali said.
“What rest? I came in here to get a cup of coffee, and I got a colonoscopy.”
Ali threw her head back and roared. She had the most glorious bubbling laugh, the kind that invited everyone to laugh with her. “That was good,” she sputtered, “that gets you points, and I don’t give points easily.”
There was little in Ali’s life she admired more in another human being than a sense of humor—so of course it became a competition to see who could be the most clever.
“Seriously, there isn’t a rest …” and then Jojo stopped. “Well, I was in the pasture after I fed the calves and somehow Roosevelt got out.”
“Dear God in heaven, you mean that bull was in the pasture with you?”
“Yep.”
“Holy shit, why aren’t you six feet under?” Ali was terrified of farm animals, had leapt up onto the hood of her car once to escape a mildly grumpy goose.
Jojo reached down and stroked Trident’s head. “This fella saved my ass.”
Ali smiled. Her overwhelming fear of farm animals was matched by her equally ardent affection for pets, dogs in particular, but cats or canaries or pet lizards, all of them lit her up.
“Can I give him a treat?”
Jojo rolled her eyes. “Sure.”
Ali stepped over to the counter, reached into a jar, pulled out a maraschino cherry and threw it in the air. Trident caught it before it hit the floor.
“Soooo … are you sure Roosevelt in that field was an accident?”
Jojo was done and held up her hand. Ali knew not to push.
“Okay, let me make you a chocolate caramel latte for the road.”