Brooke started showing up more at The Clover. Blair poured her coffee, making sure to push the ground ginger she always sprinkled on top within reach and said, “I’m glad you keep stopping in Brooke.”
“Thanks,” said Brooke. “You guys make me feel like I fit in, as if I belong here somehow. I like that.”
Da Mayor looked up, “What’s that? You’re the kind of girl who’d fit in anywhere!”
Brooke smiled shyly, “It may look that way, but I’ve never felt that way, at least not until Mel introduced me to you guys, and The Clover Café.”
Later the two men said to each other how you never know what other people are thinking, or feeling – never.
Brooke was a Xennial. They’re a shy group, never thinking they fit. She’d studied her kind – a lot – and often practiced a speech she’d give when anyone cared to listen:
“I live in two worlds, born analog but raised digital. We Xennials are a small group wedged between our older Gen-X and younger Millennial sisters and brothers.
“I didn’t get my first cellphone until I was 19. When I was a kid, we needed to dial a friend’s house to ask a parent if our friend was at home and could they come to the phone. Being sure to say, ‘Please.’
“But Millennials are different. They’re raised with their parents handing them a sippy cup for one hand and a cellphone for the other as soon as they’re weaned off mother’s milk.”
That’s why it was normal for Brooke, being a Xennial, to worry about her time with Blair. Were her visits keeping him from his “owner duties,” (whatever those were)?
The times she watched him work the register, she noticed how backed up things got as he asked each customer about their plans for the day. Then when he stepped in as the barista, people complained because they got the wrong thing. Blair told them to try it, they might like it, but they grumbled all the same.
Blair wasn’t at the register or being the barista often. Mostly he just visited with people, so maybe that was his job – his real “owners job.”
Once when they were talking, Brooke told Blair how much she missed Katie and her music. “I wonder why she doesn’t come around anymore?” asked Brooke.
“She’s been traveling,” Blair said with a smile suggesting good news. “Her music was always popular but has really taken off since she got back from St. Lucia with her boyfriend last spring.”
Blair told Brooke how Katie had packed her guitar, planning romantic evenings when the two of them could be alone by the beach, having a few drinks, with her strumming and singing soft melodies. Turns out, Katie spent more time sitting in with the group at Kalimé, a tiny bar, than with her boyfriend by the beach.
Katie had thanked her boyfriend for being a good sport and how he told her he was proud of the way she had blended her old-school country with the reggae of the Caribbean, Blair said. That’s why, since that first trip, Katie had saved her money so she could fly back to St. Lucia every chance she got.
Her rose-tinted Aviators, topped off with a weathered straw hat and red cowboy boots, fit the rum and beer filled hole-in-the-wall hangouts on the small island. It was her style and it got her noticed, but it was the energy in her voice and the spirit of her guitar that the vacationers and locals fell in love with.
Charlotte’s music scene couldn’t hold Katie after she got the offer from a label in Nashville. She needed to leave Charlotte (and her apartment) behind.
That’s when Blair asked Brooke, “What would you think of moving in Katie’s old place, now that she’s gone? You don’t need to worry about the rent, at least not until you get a job and all. That’s my best offer, whaddya say?”
Her hug took the wind out of Blair as the two sat down to talk dates and such.
Everything was coming together for Brooke. She had a place to live, friends, and even some restaurants nearby, like the one with fried chicken her mom and dad had used for her oldest brother’s party. It was a place where you needed to eat on the grass by the tracks because they didn’t have tables – or chairs.
There was a burrito shop on the other side of her little street with walls and tables all covered in business cards. Maybe she could find a job if she called some of those, but there were so many.
The Baptist Church had been there for years. The guy who owned the chicken place took dinner to the choir every Thursday as they practiced this week’s hymns.
She wished there was a grocery near by, but the old one sold furniture these days. When she needed a few things she would walk to the one she passed on the way to the park where she ran most mornings.
Brooke would go up and down each aisle, grumbling about things always being rearranged – not like The Clover. When she finally found the few things she needed, she waited in line.
Once the manager said, “Young lady, the self-scanner is open.” (She was glad he said, “Young lady” and not “hey, stupid.”)
“No thanks, I like the personal touch,” she replied and stood there until Flo, her favorite cashier, finished her conversation.
Flo apologized. “Mr. Miller’s wife has been so sick and he never gets out of the house and I just thought he needed a little human conversation, you know? I hope you ain’t in too much of a hurry.”
“Mr. Miller probably needed a minute with you, no problem.” Brooke said to Flo, adding a big smile.
“Well, I appreciate that, I love this job. I looked for months trying to find someone to hire me. I’m a good worker, I just don’t have a lot of schoolin’ and there ain’t many jobs out there for people like us. I’m just afraid soon these big grocery chains will take it away, like the gas stations done to so many of my folk.”
Brooke thought about how a scanner would never replace the Flo’s of the world. And “that’s the name of that tune,” as Brooke’s grandmother would say. She packed her things in the red backpack she’d gotten on a trip to Yosemite and started walking the twelve blocks home.
Brooke was about fifteen on that Yosemite trip. The family of five had made reservations for a campsite months in advance. There was another family across the trail, with a girl about her age, who they got to know the first of the week. But apparently something happened because their new friends needed to leave early. “Things happen sometimes,” said her dad, in his way of summarizing events in one obvious throw-away phrase.
Not long after the family left, a man with a beard walked in, carrying everything he owned on his back. He set up his small tent, but slept outside, under the stars. Sat on the table with his feet up on the bench, as only men do, and ate his meals from small pouches he carried in his pack.
Brooke went over to speak to the bearded man who looked so much like a young John Muir. She had been reading Muir on this trip and had memorized some of his quotes:
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe,” Muir had written years before.
Brooke liked how the young man knew Muir’s words, adding a few of his own. He asked what she enjoyed doing when she wasn’t camping with her family or in school. “Running,” she said. “Running is my favorite of all.”
The next day, as the Muir guy was walking out of the campgrounds, he paused, looked over his shoulder and yelled to Brooke and her family, “Take care of your legs!”
Funny how a simple statement, like the one her dad used when the family moved out, would stay with Brooke. “Things happen sometimes,” and “Take care of your legs!” Just statements that linger in your head, that’s all.
The Muir guy was about 25, it’s hard to tell when beards cover so much. Brooke wondered if he was still out in the woods somewhere. Maybe?
Yet another thing to think about, but not now.
What Brooke needed now was a job and it wasn’t going to come from any of the old cards in the burrito shop. She was sure of that.