Chapter Thirteen Nomi
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
NOMI
Uncle Dimitri stops by later in the week with either a homemade bomb or an espresso machine, hard to say. For all the shuddering, thunking, and weird gasping shrieks it makes, maybe it’s both.
“Barely used, excellent condition, makes a beautiful cup of espresso.” Eve’s uncle slaps the machine as it spits out a tiny cup of dark, murky liquid. “Some sad Italian guy brought it in the pawn shop, got it for a song.”
“Why does it matter if he was sad?” I frown at the belching machine.
“The sadder the person, the better the item they’re pawning,” Eve explains.
“Here, try it.” Uncle Dimitri hands me a cup to taste.
I stare into it. “What is espresso?”
Uncle Dimitri’s eyebrows bush together, like sentient shrubbery. “What’s espresso?” He lifts his palms up to Eve. “What’s espresso?!”
“Calm down, Nomi doesn’t drink coffee. It uh, doesn’t agree with her.”
I give her a small smile, relieved that Eve and I are okay.
I don’t have many close friends, and the day I got sick this week is basically why.
Not everyone can handle my sudden need to withdraw, or how, when I’m gripped in the kind of pain that makes you moan, I become someone different for a while.
Someone they don’t know and can’t understand.
Maybe even someone they don’t like. But Eve gives me the grace to get through the pain however I need to, and I know she’ll always be there, waiting for me on the other side.
“I better not.” I push the tiny cup back.
“How are you gonna run a coffee shop if you don’t know what it tastes like?” He huffs.
After two days of tinkering with espresso and brewing Costco brand ground coffee out of a substandard machine, the answer is badly and to great critical condemnation.
“Sorry!” I call out as the customer, a woman in her thirties pushing a double baby stroller filled with infants, chokes and splutters on her first sip of latte. She eyes the paper cup in her hand warily, grimaces, then glugs down another swallow before struggling out the door.
That’s the first person I’ve seen go back for more. I must be getting better!
Stranger Drugs, now renamed Stranger Coffee thanks to Eve taping a piece of printer paper over our painted glass door, is in a great spot to serve coffee downtown.
Literally five minutes after she taped up the sign, a big guy named Carl popped his head inside to ask if we were open.
Like Carl, many city employees pass by on their way to work.
Yesterday, the first day we claimed to sell coffee, we had a line for a solid two hours.
It was horrible. We only have the one coffeepot, and the little fucker takes ten minutes to brew a pot every time.
I couldn’t believe it! The espresso machine isn’t much faster, though that’s in large part due to user error.
Uncle Dimitri must’ve shown me a dozen times how to brew the tiny cup of motor oil, but I still can’t get it right.
Half the time it doesn’t work at all and spews out a thin, gruesome water flecked with black grounds.
The other half of the time I have to use a spoon to dig it out.
While I’m new to this world, I’m pretty sure espresso shouldn’t have the consistency of facial scrub.
This morning’s been much slower since the city employees that came in yesterday are now walking briskly past and avoiding my gaze.
Only new, uninformed souls have come in today, like the woman saddled with babies.
I check the receipts for the morning—a whopping eighteen dollars—and sigh before pulling out my laptop to work on the mobile dispensary license paperwork.
What else can I do? Without the farm stand, we have nowhere to publicly sell our product and have resorted to quietly fulfilling orders via home visits for my longstanding customers.
The irony isn’t lost on me that I’m basically dealing drugs the old-school illegal way, but I’m sorry—I’m not going to let Mr. Gutierrez or Edna D’Angelo go without and suffer.
The door jingles as it opens, and the mail carrier enters carrying a package, which she leaves on the counter along with a thick stack of bills. “Here you go, sweetheart.”
“Wait,” I call out as she turns. “I didn’t order anything.”
“It’s addressed to here.” The carrier shrugs and continues out the door.
“Huh.” I read the package’s label and frown.
It’s addressed to here, alright, but the label states it’s for JM Enterprises, LLC.
Must be a mistake. I’m the first and only tenant since the deed passed from the original owners to the city council.
I turn my attention to the envelopes, anxiety stitching like a needle through my heart, drawing it up, tight.
After tallying what we owe and comparing it to the balance in my checking, savings, and emergency fund, the feeling only gets worse.
Getting fired a month early and paying for expensive CObrA coverage while I wait for my marketplace health insurance to come through dealt a major blow to my cashflow timeline.
If something doesn’t change and fast, I’m not sure how we’ll make it through August.
With no customers to wait on, I pull up an espresso machine tutorial online and watch for the fifth time, hoping for a miracle.
JULIAN
“It’s coercion!” I spew into Eric’s voicemail. “He’s forcing me to drop the complaint! He knows if I’m dismissed from the clinic, Philly Gen will take it as proof that I haven’t learned anything, and I’ll lose everything—my entire career!”
I turn sharply into the Wawa parking lot. “Advise me, Eric, or I’m joining Doctors Without Borders and disappearing forever.” I hang up with a percussive sigh, shut off my car, and review Mom’s text again.
Julian. I’m finally ready to discuss your disappointing behavior at Nomi’s Pot Luck.
Come to Aunt Edna’s tonight with dinner for everyone, no excuses!
You haven’t seen her since you’ve been home, and she’s VERY pissed about it!
We want Wawa. Get my usual and loaded fries with extra ham chunks and a cheeseburger with barbecue sauce for Aunt Edna. Don’t forget the ham chunks!!
Ugh. I’d intended to go for a rage run in the next town over, but Mom hasn’t spoken to me directly in weeks, and living with a passive-aggressive South Jersey Italian woman who’s mad at you is one of Dante’s nine circles of hell.
I knead the stress knots in my forehead. The last thing I want is to spend the evening with Mom, a very pissed Aunt Edna, and her perpetually farting dog, BonBon Jovi, while they eat a metric ton of garbage.
But I don’t get the things I want, do I?
Five minutes later, I’m punching in our hot food order one-handed on Wawa’s touch screen. I have to laud Wawa’s commitment to reducing human interaction, allowing me to order my family’s trash food with as much dignity as possible.
When the ticket goes through, the Wawa worker, a thick, hairy thumb of a man, glances up from my order with narrowed eyes.
“You’re Julian D’Angelo? That asshole who filed the zoning complaint?”
Shit.
I hold up a finger, briefly consider lying, but my name’s clearly on my credit card. “Yes, but this entire food order is for my very sick Great Aunt Edna D’Angelo. Please don’t corrupt her food because you love weed.”
The Wawa man aggressively dishes out ham chunks onto Aunt Edna’s fries, his eyes glued to me the whole time.
I squeeze my own shut. I was supposed to lie low. Keep my head down. Serve out my probation and learn some people skills. So why did I think the best way to do that was by starting a public showdown with Nomi over her dispensary?
Because you have ethics, my brain insists, then helpfully flashes through a slideshow of my most unethical hits—the semi-erection during Nomi’s sutures, laughing aloud when that lifelong smoker asked why he’d developed a cough, the ill-fated night I called Lillian Corrington Van Dyke to her husband’s bedside and put my career on a collision course with a brick wall.
Ethics… not the most compelling argument, no.
Because you care about Sparrow Nook’s well-being!
Do I? I guess that’s true, in the same way I wish for world peace, or for Costco to carry my preferred vegan protein shakes. Vaguely, and without a lot of effort.
Because you’re hurt.
I immediately push that theory out of my head. So what if I hurt? I’ve always hurt, and it doesn’t change a thing.
When I arrive at Aunt Edna’s with her gas station cuisine, the first thing I hear is wild, witchy cackling and Billy Joel blaring over the stereo. “Mom? Aunt Edna?”
“Is that my son, ready to apologize?”
I trudge into the living room, and the sight takes me aback.
The 1980s wood paneling is still here, along with the tan paisley velvet couch and coordinating orange armchairs, but a hospital bed’s been shoved in the middle of the room.
Aunt Edna’s propped up to sitting, looking like the wrinkly, doll-sized version of herself.
Her dyed brown hair has finally been allowed to fade to a soft yellow-white, and she looks, for the first time in my life, truly old.
Aunt Edna’s always been a force of nature.
Irish by heritage, she married into the D’Angelo clan in the 1970s and was louder and brasher than any of my Italian aunts by a long shot.
They loved her, as did all of Sparrow Nook.
She was involved in everything. Secretary of the PTO, president of the South Jersey Rotary Club, she even drove my Uncle Joseph, a Shriner, in one of those little cars in the parades.
Every holiday was hosted here since her house was the biggest. The Ohs and I would be relegated to a wobbly card table in the corner, poking the bizarre casseroles Aunt Edna made while our girl cousins sat around a white, curly iron patio table set with fake roses and pink butt cushions.