Enon (16 page)

“I drew the short straw, man,” I said, surprising myself by the lie. A sudden, made-up story sprang into my mind, of me being on a painting crew and somehow having lost some kind of bet to determine who had to fetch and pay for coffee before work. I could even see the guys I was working with, and imagine the cramped pickup truck cab we were all stuffed into, bleary, smoking, irritable, one or two of the guys already draining nips of vodka and tossing the little plastic bottles out the window into people’s front yards.

“I’m the sap who has to get the joe today. And pay for it,” I said. The man at the register did not change his serious expression.

“Yes,” he said. I lifted a twenty-four-ounce coffee cup from the top of the stack.

“This the largest size?” I asked. “These guys are coffee freaks.”

“Yes,” the man said. The urge to fling the cup and run out of the store seized me, and the cup did skitter out of my hand, across the counter, and drop onto the floor. I stooped to pick it up and dizziness swept through my head. I was suddenly mortified by the fact that I had not spoken to another person for nearly a month, and that I was high and drunk every waking moment, and that I was so discombobulated all the time that what I considered to be my relatively clearheaded state at the moment might seem to any normal person the brink of a coma. I grabbed the edge of the counter and took a breath and pulled myself up.

“Mondays, man,” I said to the man at the register. He frowned and stepped down off the cashier’s island and came toward me. I was placing the cup I’d dropped on the floor under one of the carafes. As the man took the cup from my hand and tossed it into the plastic trash barrel next to the counter, I saw that I had been about to serve myself something called vanilla cinnamon hazelnut coffee. The man took a clean cup from the stack and put it under the coffee dispenser.

“No, no, man,” I said. “You saved me. I don’t want that crazy sweet stuff.” I winced at myself for calling him “man.”

“What do you want?” the man said. He was clearly anxious to see me out of the store. “And,” he said, “it is not Monday. It is Sunday.”

“Sunday,” I said. “Sunday, Sunday.” I tried to sound humorous, resigned in the way that people who have terrible jobs with too many hours and awful pay use to try to keep their spirits up. “Work so much I can’t remember what day it is. Terrible that us stiffs have to work on Sundays, isn’t it?”

“What would you like?” he said.

“Oh, four. Four large of whatever dark roast stuff you have, without any flavors.”

“The French roast,” he said. He lifted a carafe with a laminated card taped to it that read
PARISIAN CAFÉ, NOIR!
and raised and lowered it by the handle to test how much coffee was left. “There is not enough for four. You will—” I could not understand what he said after. I lost the English words in the accents and syntax of his first language.

“I’m sorry, man,” I said, now so irritated with myself at saying “man” that I just wanted to storm off with neither coffee nor smokes; I didn’t deserve them because I kept calling this guy “man” and I couldn’t even understand what he was saying. “I’m kind of half out of it this morning,” I said. “What?”

He repeated himself and I still could not understand. It sounded like he was saying something about how I would not find any of the sort of coffee I wanted available for my friends, but also like there wasn’t any left in the whole world, or something like that, which I knew was wrong. It was upsetting to listen so closely and just not be able to understand the guy. I felt like I was insulting him. I winced and shook my head, trying to show him I was sorry, but it just wasn’t getting through my thick skull, it was all my fault. He repeated himself, but I still could not understand a word he said. I felt like I was in a weird dream, like it was just a matter of paying closer attention, but that I couldn’t get myself to concentrate.

Embarrassed as I was, I knocked on the top of my head and said, “Oh, brother, I’m so sorry; I just can’t understand a word. You know, I’ll just get four cups full of whatever’s made and the guys can just like it or—”

He put a hand up and said, “No.”

I said, “No—”

“No,” he said again. He folded his raised hand so just the forefinger stuck up. “Wait.”

“Oh, no, man; it’s okay; it’s fine. You don’t need to—”

“Wait.”

I nodded. He tested the other carafes in the rack and picked up three of them and walked into the back room. Although he was clearly irritated, he did not hurry. I looked outside, worried that someone would pull up and come in while he was out back. The weather was changing. The sharp, blustery cold from overnight looked like it was being pushed away by warmer, billowy winds that seemed to be turning the dew in the grass to fog before my eyes. The meadows behind the stone walls across the street, at the end of the Tucker estate development, seemed to be steaming. While he was rummaging around in the back I looked at the items for sale near the cash register—pens with lights in them, beef jerky, car air fresheners. The cigarettes were stored in an overhead rack, in push trays, above the counter. Taped to the rack, facing out toward where the customers stood to pay, were two photographs, one of a boy about two years old, one of a girl around eight, I guessed. I leaned in toward the picture of the girl. She was dressed in a blue sari and there was a white flower in her hair. Her hair was dark and braided and very long. The braid was draped in front of her, over her shoulder, and reached below her waist. I thought she must never have had her hair cut. From the size and shape of her hands and her cheeks, I decided that, yes, she was in second grade, or whatever the equivalent was in what I now guessed must be
India, given what I thought was her Indian sari. Kate had looked like that when she was eight, skinny, getting taller, but still almost somehow like not a baby or a toddler but what Susan and I had always called a little kid, as distinguished from a big kid. “Ooh, look at you!” I’d say to Kate and scoop her up in a hug and kiss her cheeks and ears and head. “You’re almost a big kid!”

The man came from the back of the store, lugging four carafes of coffee. He hoisted them onto the counter.

“I made you an extra amount of the French roast,” he said, slowly, as if speaking to a dull child. I was afraid that he was going to help me fill the cups, but he replaced three of the carafes in the rack and left the fourth one on the counter and returned to behind the register, beneath the racks of cigarettes.

I began to fill the cups. The pumps on the carafes squeezed out only a couple of ounces of coffee at a time, so I had to keep pumping—almost, I imagined, like the old well water pumps people used to have in their yards. As I pushed on the pump, I nodded toward the photographs.

“Are those your children?”

“Yes. Those are my children,” the man said.

“They are beautiful.”

The man said, “Thank you.”

“How old are they? Two and eight, or so?”

“My son is now five and my daughter is eleven.” The pictures were old, then, I thought.

“Do they go to school here?” I asked.

“They are in India, with my wife.”

I finished filling the first cup. I put a cap on it and began filling the second.

“Are your kids finishing up the school year before they move here?” I asked.

“I am saving up money so that they can move here,” the man said. I understood that the man’s situation was bad. I felt terrible suddenly for trying to win him over with pleasing small talk about his kids and bringing up a painful situation instead. But, I thought, the pictures are facing out and that must mean that he wants people to know about his family.

“Are they coming soon? Have you been away from them long?” I asked. I figured that I might as well show concern. I
had
real concern now, in fact, and there was no reason not to show it, I guessed. The guy couldn’t think any worse of me, anyway.

“I do not know when they can come. I have not seen them in three years,” he said.

“Oh, man,” I said. “That’s awful.” The second cup was full. I put a lid on it and placed it next to the other full cup and started pumping coffee into a third. The coffee was scalding hot, even through the paper of the cup, and I had to keep letting go of it to cool my hand off. It smelled sour and acidic.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I took a step toward the register and offered my right hand toward the man. “My name is Charlie,” I said. “Charlie Crosby.” The man shook my hand, limply, not because he lacked backbone or character, which was what I’d always been told by my grandfather a limp handshake indicated. (“Don’t offer a wet noodle,” he’d say. “Don’t try to break someone’s hand, either, especially a woman’s. But be firm, outgoing, confident. It makes a good first impression.”) I guessed he offered such a poor handshake because it was not
something to which he was fully accustomed. I hoped that I hadn’t offended him. I felt like an idiot for worrying that I’d offended him and for thinking vaguely ignorant things like maybe in his culture people thought shaking someone else’s hand was unsanitary or demeaning. Too late now, I thought. I might as well just plunge forward, in good faith.

“I am Manprasad,” he said.

“Manprasad,” I said. “What are your children’s names?” Again I cringed, for thinking both that maybe it was rude to ask something so intimate of a stranger as the names of his children and that I was pathetic for making up such possibly insulting things about Indian culture, which I suddenly regretted not having read more about at some point in my life. Twenty-plus years as a
reader’s reader
, I thought, and not a page about India. It’s only one of the most important cultures on the planet, I thought. I’ve read libraries full of books about Enon and New England and next to nothing about the experiences of the vast majority of other souls on this planet, who have never even heard of New England, never mind this insignificant self-important spot of a village, as I suddenly thought of it. I imagined how this guy would have never heard of Enon when he’d been a kid, either, and yet it had always been where he was going to end up, stuck behind a cash register, scrounging for enough money to be with his family. I wondered what the opposite would have been like for myself—what obscure little village somewhere in the middle of India waited for my miserable and astonished arrival? None, of course, I thought, since what had always awaited me was the loss of my daughter and the suffering afterward.

Manprasad leaned forward and ducked his head under the cigarette rack and pointed up at the picture of his son. “That is Swapnil.” He pointed to the picture of his daughter. “And that is Anandita.”

“What beautiful names, Mansaprad,” I said.

“Manprasad,” Manprasad said.

“Argh! I mean, Manra—”

“Manny,” Manprasad said. “I am called Manny.”

“Manny,” I said. “Your children have beautiful names.” I finished filling the last of the cups and brought them in pairs to the counter. “Can I have three soft packs of Reds, too?” Manny pulled three packs of cigarettes down from the rack. I was about to ask Manny more about his kids, but I felt strange, as if he might wonder what my motives were. I wanted to show him that I was just interested as a fellow parent. Before I thought it out, I said, “I have a daughter a little older than your daughter’s age.”

Manny said, “That is very nice.” He tapped the prices of the coffees and the cigarettes into the cash register.

“Well, had,” I said, wanting nothing more at that moment than to be safely back on my couch, smoking, savoring the flood tide of the next dose of pills, savoring the anticipation of narcotic peace. “I had a daughter. Kate. But I lost her about a year ago. About”—I counted—“about seven months ago, actually.” I was shocked that it was only seven months. It felt like years already, like I’d been in mourning for years.

“I am sorry for your loss,” Manny said.

“Ah, it’s all right—” I almost called him “man” again, which seemed as if it could have been a further contraction of his name in a different life—Manny truncated to Man
after, say, years of cordiality had deepened into a real friendship between us. The image of Manny and me sitting on milk crates across from each other, behind the cash register, playing cribbage all day and talking in the shorthand we’d settled into over the years, and laughing and breaking whenever he had to ring up a customer.

“That is thirty-one dollars and fifty cents,” he said, and instead of the picture of us being friends and him helping me get through the grief of losing Kate and me helping him wait out the arrival of his wife and children, I found myself irritated at his reserve. Good for you, Crosby, I thought. So now he’s the inscrutable Indian. All the better; he’s not even that kind of Indian. You’ve managed a two-for-one special on bigotry. I pulled the plug of old, dirty ones and fives I had in my pants pocket and started to count out the money. I felt awful for ruining both of our days. What knowing creature, passing overhead, able to see the two of us through the roof of the Red Orchard, standing there, face-to-face, exchanging money and coffee and tobacco, wary, suspicious, provoked, could look down and see us for our better selves?

I had only twenty-two dollars and thirty-five cents.

“I’m sorry, man—Manny,” I said. “I thought I had more. Or the stuff would be less. Um, how much are the generic cigarettes, the red ones?”

“Four seventy-nine. Five for twenty.”

“Okay, I need to give you these other smokes back and can I get three of those?”

“Yes, very well.”

I noticed the piles of newspapers. I realized I had lost track of all current events—local, national, international, all
of it. Next to the Boston papers was the latest copy of Enon’s weekly newspaper,
The Daily Bread
. The cover story was about the prizewinning garden owned and tended by a local woman whose yard I had taken care of for a brief time several years earlier. Her name was Wallace. I had the urge to study the paper, to read all of the local tidbits and details about town meetings and library events and bake sales and the police blotter—all of the current village minutiae, attached to familiar names. I took a copy of the paper and put it on the counter.