Chapter 1 #3
He taps his card before I can finish the sentence.
He always does, saving himself the trouble of ever having to talk to me longer than necessary.
It’s transactional, in every way possible.
There’s not an exchange of words we have that isn’t an exchange with purpose.
Would never dare a friendly hello just for the sake of it.
(I bet Ramon doesn’t give him any cherries.) His drink is made, he retrieves it with the obligatory ‘thanks’ and takes his seat like he does four days a week.
We’ve never figured out where he is on Fridays, and it makes Toby insane, like it’s his very own white whale.
“He’s definitely a hitman,” Chandler says. Propping her elbows on the counter and tilting her head toward him. She clearly is fully committed to this theory and will not be accepting counterarguments.
The three of us have worked here long enough to have developed what I can only describe as a shared second sight for other people’s lives.
I should call them strangers, but they stop being that very quickly.
(When we make up stories about them.) What spawned from boredom became something closer to a science and exercise in anthropology and story-telling.
Toby thinks about human behavior in terms of patterns, tracking the orders of our regulars.
He can tell you, with an unsettling accuracy, when someone has a new partner, a new job, or a new baby.
When a to-go flat white suddenly becomes a flat white and a maple latte, and then after three weeks when the maple latte doesn’t continue to make an appearance, we know the relationship was short-lived.
“He’s too obvious to be a hitman,” Toby says. “Too attractive. It’s finance.”
“No vest,” Chandler refutes. Knowing the Patagonia vest and button-down shirt is a sure fire way to identify a finance guy.
“He’s a lawyer,” I offer, for the hundredth time. “He literally told me the day we met.”
“He said he had court, that’s not the same thing,” Toby says, like he has considered this distinction and to quote him, ‘found it non negligible but not definitive proof.’
“He could've been the one on trial, he has the jaw for it,” Chandler agrees. Always interested in supporting the most outrageous of answers. I peer my head around the espresso machine to catch a glimpse of our not-hitman. (At least I hope I’m not living next to a hitman.) The only thing he’s responsible for killing is someone’s good mood.
“What does that even mean?” I ask. “I didn’t think a strong jawline was a prerequisite for being a hardened criminal.”
“Clearly you and I are on different parts of the internet,” Chandler says through a smirk.
If Toby focuses on behaviors, and Chandler on beauty, I hear voices.
(Not like that. Not usually like that.) But the voices and sounds from people around me are the sounds that I squirrel away for later in the recording booth for inspiration.
Not just how they sound but what they’re busy doing underneath what they’re trying to communicate.
The performance beneath the ease, or the calm driving the chaos.
The thing someone is half a breath away from saying, or the words they say without ever voicing them.
It is a professional skill and a personal problem that most days I cannot find the fold between.
I grew up fluent in the language of subtext, and like most things, I can attribute it to my parents.
They are just two people who never should have been married, and despite that, have been married for thirty-one years.
They taught me the subconscious difference between ‘It’s fine’ and ‘I'm fine.’ The tone that means dinner will be quiet and the one that means dinner will be a vacuum of silence as my brother and I stare at each other trying to make the other one laugh. He always won, which means, I did.
Understanding the dynamics of two people who should have called it quits before I was born made me desperate to be able to feel the pulse of personalities for my own survival.
And that extended to my life in a way they have resented ever since.
The idea that my investments are in experiences and not a corporate-matched 401k, that my job ‘telling dirty stories’ is not one they share with their friends even though it keeps my bills more than paid.
(And I was able to get a Labubu and max out my Roth IRA last year— even if Theo was the one to set up my autopay to the IRA.)
But for all the ways they don’t understand (or respect) the choices I’ve made, the great irony is so much of who they are is how I became who I am.
They built a life on structure. And in that, I learned to look for the cracks where something softer might sneak out and grow.
I became inspired by the wonder of things they never looked for, found my happiness in the small joys they would have (and still do) consider unnecessary.
The idea that things don’t need to serve a purpose to be loved or felt, and in that, I sometimes feel too much, but it’s a worthy exchange.
And yes, I hate disappointing them, I hate disappointing anyone, really.
It’s the most common, age-old, dynamic to exist between parent and child.
(Even though it’s different for my brother.) But disappointing myself?
That’s something I could never live with, so I wake up every morning and make sure I don’t.