10. Parker Jonathan Bishop
Chapter ten
Parker Jonathan Bishop
After Lance leaves I make drinks on autopilot. Syrup in the cup, pull the shots, steam the milk, pour. My hands know what to do. My brain is still out in the courtyard with the string lights, where Lance Broussard kissed me and the world tipped sideways.
I can still taste him. That’s the problem.
“You okay, dude?” Liam asks.
“Fine,” I say, and overshoot the foam on a cappuccino.
He’s been waiting a year. Today he stood in that courtyard in his dress uniform and asked if he could call me, and I told him I’d call him instead. I still don’t know which one of us I was lying to.
I look up at the sketch I hung this morning. The one I thought Lance frowned at, for about half a second. I’ve been staring at it all afternoon, trying to see what he saw, and I finally do.
It’s a pencil sketch of the Bean Stop interior. The tables, the bar, the chalkboard menu, the espresso machine. Every surface rendered in careful detail. I spent weeks on the blending alone.
There are no people in it.
I pull my portfolio from under the counter and page through it.
Sketch after sketch. The courtyard. The street outside.
Aunt Shelley’s kitchen. The view from my bedroom window.
They’re technically good—better than anything I did in high school.
But every one of them is empty. No faces.
No figures. No bodies in the chairs, no hands around the cups.
I’ve been drawing the world with everyone removed from it.
I close the portfolio and set it down. I look at the sketch on the wall, and then at Liam beside me, laughing at something a customer is saying. I remember Lance in the courtyard with the light on his face. It’s like seeing color for the first time after months of pencil graphite.
I let myself imagine it, because I’ve spent all afternoon refusing to. Lance in that uniform, coming through a door somewhere with his bag over his shoulder, and me going to him. That part’s easy. That part I could have tomorrow.
Then I imagine the rest of it. Lance leaving. Lance leaving again. Me here, in the same apron, behind the same counter, keeping everything warm until the next time.
I’ve been telling myself I’m waiting for something to find me. Some idea, some reason, whatever it is that’s supposed to knock on the door and tell you what I’m for. But nothing is going to knock while I’m standing here holding still.
He’s out there doing things. Boot camp. The Corps. A life he chose and went and got. And in his version of the future, I’m exactly where he left me.
It’s not cruelty. He doesn’t even know he’s doing it. But I feel it settling over me like a weight.
If I don’t move now, I never will.
I finish my shift. I close out my register, wipe down the bar, restock the syrups. Then I make a chai latte to go and walk home.
Aunt Shelley is looking over work papers at the kitchen table when I come in. She’s in her reading glasses and one of her oversized cardigans. She looks up and takes the chai like I’ve given her a surprise gift, even though I bring her one every day.
“Lance came by the café,” I say.
She sets down her pen. “And?”
“He kissed me.”
She takes a sip of the chai. “And how was that?”
“It was—” I sit down across from her. “It was really good. And that’s the problem.”
She waits. She’s really good at waiting for me to find the right words. She doesn’t fill silence the way Lance does.
I find the words, and they scare me more than I want to admit. “He’s in the Marines. He’s doing things. He’s got this whole life. And seeing him really made me think about what I’m doing with my life.”
“So, what are you doing with your life?” she asks me.
I open my mouth and close it. “I don’t know.”
She takes off her glasses and folds them on the table. “You know what I think about, sometimes? The difference between a rut and a grave is how long you spend in it.”
I stare at her.
“Parker, I love having you here. You know that. But I always pictured you somewhere that felt like an adventure. Being yourself for once.” She takes another sip. “Whoever that turns out to be.”
I look at the chai latte in her hands. The cinnamon on top. The cardamom I always add because she likes it The spices smell like somewhere else when I grind them. They come from someplace I have never been and can’t even imagine.
“What if I went to India?” I say. “Just for a little while.”
She looks at me over the rim of the cup. She doesn’t blink. She doesn’t say “are you sure?” She doesn’t say “what about Lance?” or “what about your job?” or even “what about me?”
“What do we need to get so you can be ready?” she asks. She reaches for a pen. “Let’s make a list.”
“I have the insurance money,” I say. “And the savings from the Bean Stop. I have the passport we never used.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
I laugh. It comes out startled and wet, like I’ve surprised myself. “I don’t know anything about India.”
“That’s the point, honey.”
I take a deep breath and look out the window.
On this side of the apartment, I can see the bus slowing to collect students waiting by the curb.
I wonder, suddenly, where they’re going, and about what kind of lives they have when they leave this place.
The sketches in my portfolio are empty. All those rooms with nobody in them.
All those careful, technically perfect drawings of a world I’ve hollowed out.
I remember Lance’s face when he kissed me. It would be so easy to call him, to say yes, to let him build the life he’s already planned for both of us. San Diego on his leave. Fairhaven when he’s home. The café and the courtyard and the string lights. It would be a good life.
But it would be his life, with me in it, and I want my own.
I turn back to Aunt Shelley. “So, how hard is it to get a visa to go to India?”
“Why don’t we find out?” she asks, pulling open her laptop and spinning it to me.
I pull up the flights. Delhi. Mumbai. Jaipur. The names alone feel like doors opening. Aunt Shelley reads over my shoulder and points at Jaipur. “Rajasthan,” she says. “I had a colleague who did fieldwork there. She said it was like stepping into a painting.”
“Rajasthan,” I repeat. I click the link. A one-way ticket is cheaper than I expected.
I close my laptop and get my passport from the drawer. BISHOP, PARKER JONATHAN. I run my thumb over the name. In the photo I’m barely eighteen, taken that spring for a trip we didn’t take, my face still thin from the months after the fire. I barely recognize him.
“Well?” Aunt Shelley asks.
“I’d need a visa. I can get one from the consulate in about three to five business days. That’s long enough to work out my notice at the Bean Stop.”
Aunt Shelley cocks her head and looks at me closely. “You know I’m going to ask this. I know you say you’re okay, and I have to trust you when you say you are, but if things get…black again, you’ll call me, right?”
“I will. I want to be part of things. I don’t want to be living in a cloud, isolated and empty forever. I want to…I want to eat food that has a story to it and dance in the rain and…colors. I want colors. I want to be surrounded by them. I want to be bombarded by them.”
“That is literally what Holi is about.”
“Yes! That’s the thing where they throw the things at you, right? I want to feel alive. And I want to try out being this guy,” I say, staring at my face in the passport. “Jonathan Bishop. Somebody who’s not one quick browser search away from Lance and the fire.”
Aunt Shelley looks at the passport, and then at me. “Jonny for short,” she says.
“Isn’t that running from being Parker Bishop?”
“No,” she says. “It’s giving you an honest chance to experience the life you should have had, regardless of what name you went by. Just remember that inside, you are Parker Bishop, and he’s special. Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater.”
“You’ll need to tell Lance,” she says.
“I know.” Suddenly I feel very lonely and really scared. I don’t feel adventurous. I feel young and stupid. “I’ll tell him tomorrow.”
She squeezes my shoulder, picks up her chai, and takes a sip. “You can do this, Parker. And if you don’t like it, you can come home.”
My hands itch for a pencil, and for the first time in months, I want to draw a person.
I set the passport on the table next to the laptop.
In the morning, I’ll book the ticket. I’ll call Greg at the Bean Stop and give my notice properly.
I’ll sit down with Lance and tell him the truth: that he was the best thing in the worst time of my life.
And then I’ll arrive in a new place as Jonny Bishop.
Someone nobody knows yet. Someone I haven’t met either.