24
jo
“Do you want a coffee?” Laurie waved for me to follow him into the kitchen. “Decaf or regular?” he asked, taking my getting up as an answer.
He opened a drawer and pulled out a box of coffee pods. As a barista, it made me roll my eyes, but the pods were nothing compared to the decaf offer.
“Decaf?”
He nodded.
“Decaf isn’t even coffee.”
He popped a Dunkin’ Donuts pod into the machine.
I rubbed my temples in a dramatic way and walked closer to the instant-coffee machine. “Your blatant disrespect for the bean is killing me right now.”
Laurie threw his head back and his hair was all over the place. “Hey, not all of us can be a barista extraordinaire.”
“You don’t have to be a barista extraordinaire to not want to drink coffee-flavored water,” I teased.
He set two mugs out on the marble counter. One had a penguin on it, and the other had the saying NAMASTE IN BED inside the outline of a sun.
I pointed to the mug. “Nice.”
He was the kind of boy who had quirky coffee mugs but drank decaf. He made no sense to me, but I liked the contradiction he was.
Once our “coffees” were ready, I followed him upstairs to his bedroom. I could smell his room before we even stepped through the doorway. His familiar homey smell coated my senses and immediately relaxed me. It was weird the way that worked.
“What cologne do you use?” I plopped down on the couch he had inside his room and put my feet up on his old oak coffee table. He’d told me it was from Spain and his mother had paid a fortune to ship it across the sea.
“I don’t know actually.” Laurie got up and walked over to his dresser and grabbed a little glass bottle.
Instead of asking me why I wanted to know, or giving me a weird look, he read the name of the cologne. I had never heard of it, and his accent made it sound even more exotic and expensive than I’m sure it was.
Over his decaf coffee, he continued telling me how he felt about his dad’s sending him away to live with his grandpa, who didn’t understand the way young men work. Laurie was a lonely yet social being. He confounded me.
“Do you miss your dad still?” Laurie asked me when he sat down. “Or are you used to this life now?”
“I miss him still. I don’t want to ever be that used to this life that I don’t miss my dad anymore.”
Laurie chewed on his bottom lip and asked me if I thought it made him a bad person to not miss his dad. I told him no, that if he was a bad person, he would never have asked that question in the first place. He took that in and we sat in silence while we finished our drinks in a peaceable calm.
Hanging on Laurie’s wall were old movie posters in no apparent pattern at all, held up with red tacks. The movies on the posters ranged from the original Planet of the Apes to Almost Famous. As with the other parts of Laurie, I kept trying to find the common thread among them, something that would solidify at last what kind of person he was.
Laurie stared at me while I looked at the posters. I could feel his eyes on me, though I wasn’t uncomfortable, which itself was a little strange.
“You hungry?” he asked eventually.
“I’m always hungry.”
He stood up and reached for my hand, and I hesitated for a second before I let him take it and lead me out.
On the way down the grand staircase, Laurie pointed to a row of family portraits on the walls. They were all in different frames of the same size. One of the frames was made of dark steel and had a picture of a row of men in uniforms. Not that everyone was dressed in Army green, though; some wore Navy white, some Air Force blue. At the end of the row stood a little boy, Laurie, the only one in the picture who wasn’t dressed in a military uniform. Dressed in a black T-shirt and ripped blue jeans, he couldn’t have been older than twelve. A thick mass of blond hair covered his forehead, and he wasn’t smiling.
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” he said in a taunting voice, and I examined the rest of the pictures while we finished the walk downstairs.
Near the bottom of the staircase were a few yearbook-style photos of more men in uniforms.
“How often do you see your mom?”
He shrugged. “It’s been a while now, but since I moved to the States, I usually see her once every six months. Christmas and summer break.”
I couldn’t fathom living in a different country from my mom and dad, and living with my grandparents. Granted, I hadn’t seen my dad’s parents since my dad’s commissioning ceremony almost two years ago. They stayed at a hotel right outside our post in Texas and came to the house once during the weekend they were there. My dad said my grandpa was sick, but that Sunday morning, the six of us, my parents and my sisters and me, went to Golden Corral for breakfast, and they were there, sitting at a table only two away from us. My grandpa was shoveling down sausage links and looked pretty healthy to me.
As for my mom’s mom, well, she and Meredith were in one of their nonspeaking tiffs, and I stopped caring a while ago when I couldn’t untangle their off-and-on moods. It never seemed worth the effort.
I would rather live in the janitor’s closet of White Rock High than live with any of my grandparents.
“Do you miss Italy?”
“Italy or my mom?”
“Both?”
“Yes to both.”
He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t ask him to. I was collecting little pieces of Laurie every time we talked, and I could be patient while I put them all together.
When we got into the kitchen, Laurie pulled open the industrial-sized fridge and tossed a little box at me. I struggled to catch it, but when I did, it was a Yoo-Hoo.
“Oh my God!” I held the carton up in front of me and couldn’t help the blossoming smile spreading across my face. It was like a blast from the past looking at the blue logo written over yellow. I pulled the little straw off the back, pushed it through the directed spot, and took a long gulp.
“So good, right? Our housekeeper brought them home a few weeks ago, and I’m obsessed. It’s like chocolate milk,” he told me, like it wasn’t a staple of millennials’ upbringing.
“You didn’t have these when you were a kid?” When he shook his head, I added, “The world is so big. You know? I swear most houses here had these bad boys at the ready.”
Laurie’s laugh was light like raindrops. “Better late than never.” He took a drink and licked the chocolate off his lips. “The world is small, not big.”
I looked at him and he turned away, to open the fridge again. He didn’t seem to find what he was looking for and shut the door.
“How do you think it’s small?” I asked his back as he raided the pantry.
“Maybe we should order something? Pizza? Chinese?”
As yummy as pizza sounded, I hadn’t brought any cash with me and wasn’t sure my card would clear because I’d bought a new laptop case and put the rest toward my move. I wasn’t the best at budgeting, but I was sixteen. I didn’t have to be.
“I didn’t bring any cash,” I warned him, but he was already holding the mailer with all the sales on it.
Laurie looked up at me through his thick blond eyebrows but didn’t say anything. He pulled a cell phone from the pocket of his dark jeans and licked his lips again. They were a little too big for his face, but I was sure that made him like honey to girls his age . . . and probably my age, too. Meg always said that boys would like my plump lips, but so far, outside of a few obnoxiously gross remarks about them, the boys didn’t seem to care. They liked Meg’s boobs more, which I thought was ironic because lips could make boys feel better than boobs could.
“Yeah sure,” he said into the phone.
Was it possible to order pizza without being on hold first? I didn’t think so.
“What do you like on your pizza?” Laurie asked.
“No meat, please.”
He ordered a large cheese pizza and bread sticks and we went back upstairs to wait. He never did explain to me how the world was small to him, but I knew he would someday.