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Coffee with the Queen of Pentacles
Sep. 9th, 2020 07:15 pmchapter 3
After my shower I went upstairs to pick something to wear. Always an issue with my mom. I usually choose comfort over style, and my sense of style appalls my mom, so there’s no way I can pick something that makes both of us happy. Given that it’s cool and rainy, I select a vintage dress, watermelon pink sleeveless A-line, and a zip up hoodie to go on top. Sandals, too of course. I look closely at my feet. Potatoes- my toes look like tiny potatoes. Oh well. Nothing I can do about it- they’re clean, just calloused. I put my hair in a single braid down my back and set off for my mom’s house on my bike.
My mom was, is I guess, in real estate, and back before the world fell apart she did really well financially. Still does, I guess. The house she had custom built by the lake is still a showplace, it’s just that the rest of the neighborhood has gone downhill. The rest of the world has as well, of course.
I coast to a stop in our driveway, seeing my Jeep parked there still. It’s a little annoying that Gary’s boat can be parked in the garage, but the Jeep has to be parked outside. It doesn’t matter, because I don’t drive it anyway, but it was my dad’s. He gave it to me.
Mom always keeps the door locked, even when she’s home, and she’s almost always home now. I ring the bell, then knock on the door. I don’t know if they have electricity- sometimes they do when my side of Preston doesn’t. I hear the dogs barking, then she comes to the door, looking at me through the leaded glass sidelights.
“Willow!” She set her coffee cup down on the oak library table next to the door and unlocked it. “What a surprise! Don’t you look bedraggled in your cute little dress!”
See, the dress is cute, I am bedraggled. “Hi mom!” I go in for a hug, then remember. We keep our distance.
I leave my sandals on the front porch, and immediately go to the powder room next to the front door and wash my hands. My mom is very concerned about germs still. Hygiene has kept her safe this far, and she intends to keep it up.
“To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“I wanted to come over and get a book or two.”
“Ooh, take them all, and I can turn your room into a craft room.”
“Haha, you already have a craft room.” Mom does elaborate paper crafts- scrapbooks with a detailed history of my entire childhood- stopping at about age 12.
“I can always use more storage space for paper.” She grabbed her coffee cup off the table. “You can take some of your books- your Nancy Drews, your Agatha Christies.”
“Yeah, my apartment is pretty full of books as it is.” I catch her looking at my feet. She doesn’t say anything about my toes. Good. “And other stuff- I keep my inventory there too.”
We head up the stairs to my old room, lined with bookshelves, big mullioned windows trimmed with white, shiny enamel painted wood. I go straight to the bookshelf over my old desk, and find what I’m looking for immediately.
“Yearbook?” mom is surprised.
“Yeah, did you hear about Kaisa?”
“I saw the search and rescue boats, I didn’t know who it was they'd found. Oh, that’s terrible. You knew her, right?”
“We were in student government together- she was a year ahead of me.” I flipped to her class, and found her photo. She had scrawled a signature over her picture. I couldn’t remember if she had signed the back also. I flipped to the blank pages in back- no. Not very many people had signed. It was the last normal year. Wish I’d gotten more signatures. Although I don’t know what difference it would have made.
My mom is over by the window, looking out. “Whatever happened with the neighbor guy I set you up with?”
“Oh, he’s not out there, is he?”
“He’s working on the lawn.”
“Oh, no.”
“Was he so terrible?”
I sighed. “No. He wasn’t that bad. It’s hard, to go out with a police officer.”
“I don’t see why.”
“I know.” there's so much she doesn’t see because she doesn’t want to. “I think he thought I was, I just...there wasn’t a spark, you know. I think there has to be a spark between people.”
“Ok, I guess.”
“Anyway, if we had gotten together, the poor man would have had to move, there’s no way I would spend the night with him next door to you.”
“It would be nice to see more of you.”
I pulled the plush letter P off the bulletin board behind my desk, with the single pin for the single activity I had been involved in during my short high school career- a golden goblet, the Grail for the Preston High School Knights Round Table Club.
The same pin I had found in the pocket of the pale blue sweater that had made me pass out at The Curiosity Shop.
We head downstairs, “Hey mom, I was wondering, do you have any extra coffee?”
“Oh, I have...some…”
“Can I have a bag, if you don’t mind?”
“Well, I can’t always find it at the store.”
“I know- but you are hoarding it like a dragon.” I said, “And I quit smoking weed, so without coffee, I don’t have a reason to get up in the morning.”
“I guess I can spare a bag.. She looked at me appraisingly.” Quit marijuana, huh. Well that’s good. Would you like some coffee right now?”
“How old is it?”
“I can make a fresh batch.”
“Then I’ll drink it with you.”
“Cookies?”
“Of course.”
We head into the kitchen, and I sit at a tall stool at the island, resting my palms on the cool granite counter, swinging from side to side. I look out the back window at the lake- the water is lower than I’ve seen it in years- until today there hasn’t been rain all summer. Greeley has lowered the level of the lake by so much that all I can see is sandy beach for hundreds of yards. They do own the water rights.
I think of my stepdad, and his boat. “How’s Gary doing these days?”
“Not bad. He played 9 holes yesterday. He’s wiped out now, of course- he still isn’t back up to 100 percent yet.”
She’d been saying that for years- he had been hit pretty badly by the red flu, and it had damaged his lungs. But then many years of drinking had damaged his liver. He had survived, but as Mom said, wasn’t 100%.
“He doesn’t want to let go of his boat- of course he hasn’t had it out on the lake all summer, because there’s no water.”
“Yeah- I hadn’t realized how terrible it had gotten. It’s super low.”
“Especially for this time of year.” She poured coffee into a mug for me, and refilled her own cup. I hopped off the stool and went over to the fridge, opening it quickly to get out the cream. Then I reached up to the cabinet over the fridge to see what cookies she had. “Sugar free fat free? What’s in them?”
“Those are Gary’s- they’re not worth eating. There should be almond cookies up there.”
I found the box and brought it over to the island.
“I can’t believe that poor girl took her own life.”
“Wait, who? Kaisa?”
“Well, yes, didn’t she drown herself?”
“Who told you that?”
“Well, I put two and two together- on my walk this morning, I spoke with your old science teacher, Mrs Peterson.”
“Ms.”
“What? Right, Ms, and she said she had heard that they body they found was a suicide, that she must have drowned herself. So sad. MIZ peterson was coming back from a jog- her knees are in better shape than mine.”
“Yeah. Kaisa didn’t seem the type.. ” I flipped to the page I had been looking for- the clubs, and there was the photo for The Round Table, the high school government club. I was there next to Kaisa, and another girl- what was her name? Behind us were three boys, arms over each other’s shoulders, and next to us, coincidentally, Mr. Peterson, government teacher and husband of science teacher, and Mom’s neighbor. “To kill herself, I mean.”
As I left, she not only loaded me up with coffee, but with a fresh bag of almond cookies of my own. She also offered me cheese, but I didn’ think it would do well as I biked home uphill.
Mom walked me to the door, but just stayed inside, watching as I stowed my stuff on my bike’s back rack.
As I was putting my sandals back on, Bobby looked up from pulling weeds in his yard and smiled at me.
I smile back, “Hey, Bobby. How’s it going?” At least this time I remembered his name.
He stands up and arches his back, then tosses a thistle into the trash bin. In the bright sunlight, there is no halo visible. I am both relieved and disappointed.
“Wow- you got most of the root with that one.”
“Yeah.” he looks at me as if he can’t decide whether I’m teasing him or not. As it happens I’m not- pulling weeds sucks, but there is something so satisfying about getting a big long root, when the soil is moist. “So, visiting your mom, huh?”
“Yeah, I needed to get some stuff. Coffee, mostly.” I walk my bike over to the property line.
“What’s the book?” he looks at the yearbook bungeed to my rack. “Expect the Unexpected,” Preston Knights Yearbook?
“Yeah- I wanted to check some things- about Kaisa Tagliaferro. We were friends, in high school. I wanted to look at some pictures, I guess.”
“Oh. I didn’t know you knew her.”
“It’s kind of a small town. Although, not that small, I guess. I was surprised she came back- all through school, she was like “I’ve got to get out of this place” and so I was shocked that she came back to kill herself.” Why was I babbling?
“To what?”
“Wasn’t it suicide?”
“Ummm...I’m not supposed to...they did an autopsy. It’s an ongoing investigation, but not about suicide.”
“Oh.” well that’s interesting. Also, Bobby is not very good at keeping secrets.
“Can I see her photo?”
“Sure.” I un-bungee the cookies and coffee, and wind up handing them to him to hold while I flip through the book. I showed him the picture I had shown my mom earlier. “She was a grade ahead of me.”
“Wow, she was pretty.”
“Yeah. Yeah, she was. I guess everyone is pretty when they’re 16. And not being brought up out of the lake.” i cringed a little when I said it.
“Who said it was suicide?”
“My mom mentioned she had heard it from somebody- a neighbor.”
“Which neighbor?” he looked around.
“Umm, one of our old teachers actually-” I flipped to the staff page, and showed him the shot of Ms. Axton-Peterson and Mr. Peterson. “And they live around the corner. I actually helped them get the house- it was one I had cleaned out after the owners had died, and they were able to get it so cheap.” sometimes I can’t help talking real estate. It’s in the blood, maybe.
Ms. A-Peterson and Mr. Peterson had planned the photo out in advance, that their pictures would be next to each other in the year book. They were facing each other and making finger guns. It was cute. They had been a cute couple.
That’s what I thought at the time.
“If she was in a different grade, how did you know her?”
“Well, before the world fell apart, I did student government stuff.” I took the coffee and cookies back from him, balanced them on the rack of my bike, then flipped to the page with the Round Table picture.
“Round table, I get it, like King Arthur.”
“Yeah. Cheesey. The P-town Knights were all about the cheese. At least we weren’t the Savages, or the Warriors, and had to change our mascot because it was offensive.”
I pointed to the folks around the table, “Mr. Peterson, your neighbor, Michael and Alex seniors, Theo and Angelica, juniors, Kaisa and Ricardo, Sophomores, Dakota and me. Freshman. We didn’t have any power. I don’t know if there are places where student government does have power, but we really didn’t.
“I know at my school, there was no power- it was a popularity contest.”
“Yeah.” I began pointing again, outlining the web of “popularity” between all the members of the group. “Kaisa dated Alex, then he broke up with her to go out with Angelica, then Kaisa and Angelica had an experimental thing, then Alex went out with Dakota, who broke up with him, then he asked me out. I said no.” That was almost true.
Bobby reached out for the book, and I was disconcerted to see the green halo around his hands. Why just him, why not Rossi, or my mom, or any of the other people I saw? “Can I borrow this?”
“Umm…” I was reluctant to let it go.
“I just want to copy some info, I know it’s 10 years out of date. I think it might be able to help with the investigation.”
“I guess so.”
“Tell you what, how about I buy you dinner, and I can give it back. Friday?”
“I guess so,” why am I polite? Why can’t I just say, ‘no, I want to keep my book, and no, I will not eat in public with you.’
“I’ll pick you up.”
At this point, I woke up from my politeness. “Ooh, actually, can we meet somewhere? Christina’s Tacos, on 4th street?” I did not need a cop car coming to my door to pick me up on Friday night.
“Sure. I love tacos. 7:30?”
“Sounds good.” I secured the stuff on my rack, swung my leg over and biked off, thinking hard.
I needed to talk to Michael and Alex and Theo and Angelica, and everyone else who Kaisa dated, who was still in town. Why would she come back here?
Other than to get murdered.
After my shower I went upstairs to pick something to wear. Always an issue with my mom. I usually choose comfort over style, and my sense of style appalls my mom, so there’s no way I can pick something that makes both of us happy. Given that it’s cool and rainy, I select a vintage dress, watermelon pink sleeveless A-line, and a zip up hoodie to go on top. Sandals, too of course. I look closely at my feet. Potatoes- my toes look like tiny potatoes. Oh well. Nothing I can do about it- they’re clean, just calloused. I put my hair in a single braid down my back and set off for my mom’s house on my bike.
My mom was, is I guess, in real estate, and back before the world fell apart she did really well financially. Still does, I guess. The house she had custom built by the lake is still a showplace, it’s just that the rest of the neighborhood has gone downhill. The rest of the world has as well, of course.
I coast to a stop in our driveway, seeing my Jeep parked there still. It’s a little annoying that Gary’s boat can be parked in the garage, but the Jeep has to be parked outside. It doesn’t matter, because I don’t drive it anyway, but it was my dad’s. He gave it to me.
Mom always keeps the door locked, even when she’s home, and she’s almost always home now. I ring the bell, then knock on the door. I don’t know if they have electricity- sometimes they do when my side of Preston doesn’t. I hear the dogs barking, then she comes to the door, looking at me through the leaded glass sidelights.
“Willow!” She set her coffee cup down on the oak library table next to the door and unlocked it. “What a surprise! Don’t you look bedraggled in your cute little dress!”
See, the dress is cute, I am bedraggled. “Hi mom!” I go in for a hug, then remember. We keep our distance.
I leave my sandals on the front porch, and immediately go to the powder room next to the front door and wash my hands. My mom is very concerned about germs still. Hygiene has kept her safe this far, and she intends to keep it up.
“To what do we owe the pleasure?”
“I wanted to come over and get a book or two.”
“Ooh, take them all, and I can turn your room into a craft room.”
“Haha, you already have a craft room.” Mom does elaborate paper crafts- scrapbooks with a detailed history of my entire childhood- stopping at about age 12.
“I can always use more storage space for paper.” She grabbed her coffee cup off the table. “You can take some of your books- your Nancy Drews, your Agatha Christies.”
“Yeah, my apartment is pretty full of books as it is.” I catch her looking at my feet. She doesn’t say anything about my toes. Good. “And other stuff- I keep my inventory there too.”
We head up the stairs to my old room, lined with bookshelves, big mullioned windows trimmed with white, shiny enamel painted wood. I go straight to the bookshelf over my old desk, and find what I’m looking for immediately.
“Yearbook?” mom is surprised.
“Yeah, did you hear about Kaisa?”
“I saw the search and rescue boats, I didn’t know who it was they'd found. Oh, that’s terrible. You knew her, right?”
“We were in student government together- she was a year ahead of me.” I flipped to her class, and found her photo. She had scrawled a signature over her picture. I couldn’t remember if she had signed the back also. I flipped to the blank pages in back- no. Not very many people had signed. It was the last normal year. Wish I’d gotten more signatures. Although I don’t know what difference it would have made.
My mom is over by the window, looking out. “Whatever happened with the neighbor guy I set you up with?”
“Oh, he’s not out there, is he?”
“He’s working on the lawn.”
“Oh, no.”
“Was he so terrible?”
I sighed. “No. He wasn’t that bad. It’s hard, to go out with a police officer.”
“I don’t see why.”
“I know.” there's so much she doesn’t see because she doesn’t want to. “I think he thought I was, I just...there wasn’t a spark, you know. I think there has to be a spark between people.”
“Ok, I guess.”
“Anyway, if we had gotten together, the poor man would have had to move, there’s no way I would spend the night with him next door to you.”
“It would be nice to see more of you.”
I pulled the plush letter P off the bulletin board behind my desk, with the single pin for the single activity I had been involved in during my short high school career- a golden goblet, the Grail for the Preston High School Knights Round Table Club.
The same pin I had found in the pocket of the pale blue sweater that had made me pass out at The Curiosity Shop.
We head downstairs, “Hey mom, I was wondering, do you have any extra coffee?”
“Oh, I have...some…”
“Can I have a bag, if you don’t mind?”
“Well, I can’t always find it at the store.”
“I know- but you are hoarding it like a dragon.” I said, “And I quit smoking weed, so without coffee, I don’t have a reason to get up in the morning.”
“I guess I can spare a bag.. She looked at me appraisingly.” Quit marijuana, huh. Well that’s good. Would you like some coffee right now?”
“How old is it?”
“I can make a fresh batch.”
“Then I’ll drink it with you.”
“Cookies?”
“Of course.”
We head into the kitchen, and I sit at a tall stool at the island, resting my palms on the cool granite counter, swinging from side to side. I look out the back window at the lake- the water is lower than I’ve seen it in years- until today there hasn’t been rain all summer. Greeley has lowered the level of the lake by so much that all I can see is sandy beach for hundreds of yards. They do own the water rights.
I think of my stepdad, and his boat. “How’s Gary doing these days?”
“Not bad. He played 9 holes yesterday. He’s wiped out now, of course- he still isn’t back up to 100 percent yet.”
She’d been saying that for years- he had been hit pretty badly by the red flu, and it had damaged his lungs. But then many years of drinking had damaged his liver. He had survived, but as Mom said, wasn’t 100%.
“He doesn’t want to let go of his boat- of course he hasn’t had it out on the lake all summer, because there’s no water.”
“Yeah- I hadn’t realized how terrible it had gotten. It’s super low.”
“Especially for this time of year.” She poured coffee into a mug for me, and refilled her own cup. I hopped off the stool and went over to the fridge, opening it quickly to get out the cream. Then I reached up to the cabinet over the fridge to see what cookies she had. “Sugar free fat free? What’s in them?”
“Those are Gary’s- they’re not worth eating. There should be almond cookies up there.”
I found the box and brought it over to the island.
“I can’t believe that poor girl took her own life.”
“Wait, who? Kaisa?”
“Well, yes, didn’t she drown herself?”
“Who told you that?”
“Well, I put two and two together- on my walk this morning, I spoke with your old science teacher, Mrs Peterson.”
“Ms.”
“What? Right, Ms, and she said she had heard that they body they found was a suicide, that she must have drowned herself. So sad. MIZ peterson was coming back from a jog- her knees are in better shape than mine.”
“Yeah. Kaisa didn’t seem the type.. ” I flipped to the page I had been looking for- the clubs, and there was the photo for The Round Table, the high school government club. I was there next to Kaisa, and another girl- what was her name? Behind us were three boys, arms over each other’s shoulders, and next to us, coincidentally, Mr. Peterson, government teacher and husband of science teacher, and Mom’s neighbor. “To kill herself, I mean.”
As I left, she not only loaded me up with coffee, but with a fresh bag of almond cookies of my own. She also offered me cheese, but I didn’ think it would do well as I biked home uphill.
Mom walked me to the door, but just stayed inside, watching as I stowed my stuff on my bike’s back rack.
As I was putting my sandals back on, Bobby looked up from pulling weeds in his yard and smiled at me.
I smile back, “Hey, Bobby. How’s it going?” At least this time I remembered his name.
He stands up and arches his back, then tosses a thistle into the trash bin. In the bright sunlight, there is no halo visible. I am both relieved and disappointed.
“Wow- you got most of the root with that one.”
“Yeah.” he looks at me as if he can’t decide whether I’m teasing him or not. As it happens I’m not- pulling weeds sucks, but there is something so satisfying about getting a big long root, when the soil is moist. “So, visiting your mom, huh?”
“Yeah, I needed to get some stuff. Coffee, mostly.” I walk my bike over to the property line.
“What’s the book?” he looks at the yearbook bungeed to my rack. “Expect the Unexpected,” Preston Knights Yearbook?
“Yeah- I wanted to check some things- about Kaisa Tagliaferro. We were friends, in high school. I wanted to look at some pictures, I guess.”
“Oh. I didn’t know you knew her.”
“It’s kind of a small town. Although, not that small, I guess. I was surprised she came back- all through school, she was like “I’ve got to get out of this place” and so I was shocked that she came back to kill herself.” Why was I babbling?
“To what?”
“Wasn’t it suicide?”
“Ummm...I’m not supposed to...they did an autopsy. It’s an ongoing investigation, but not about suicide.”
“Oh.” well that’s interesting. Also, Bobby is not very good at keeping secrets.
“Can I see her photo?”
“Sure.” I un-bungee the cookies and coffee, and wind up handing them to him to hold while I flip through the book. I showed him the picture I had shown my mom earlier. “She was a grade ahead of me.”
“Wow, she was pretty.”
“Yeah. Yeah, she was. I guess everyone is pretty when they’re 16. And not being brought up out of the lake.” i cringed a little when I said it.
“Who said it was suicide?”
“My mom mentioned she had heard it from somebody- a neighbor.”
“Which neighbor?” he looked around.
“Umm, one of our old teachers actually-” I flipped to the staff page, and showed him the shot of Ms. Axton-Peterson and Mr. Peterson. “And they live around the corner. I actually helped them get the house- it was one I had cleaned out after the owners had died, and they were able to get it so cheap.” sometimes I can’t help talking real estate. It’s in the blood, maybe.
Ms. A-Peterson and Mr. Peterson had planned the photo out in advance, that their pictures would be next to each other in the year book. They were facing each other and making finger guns. It was cute. They had been a cute couple.
That’s what I thought at the time.
“If she was in a different grade, how did you know her?”
“Well, before the world fell apart, I did student government stuff.” I took the coffee and cookies back from him, balanced them on the rack of my bike, then flipped to the page with the Round Table picture.
“Round table, I get it, like King Arthur.”
“Yeah. Cheesey. The P-town Knights were all about the cheese. At least we weren’t the Savages, or the Warriors, and had to change our mascot because it was offensive.”
I pointed to the folks around the table, “Mr. Peterson, your neighbor, Michael and Alex seniors, Theo and Angelica, juniors, Kaisa and Ricardo, Sophomores, Dakota and me. Freshman. We didn’t have any power. I don’t know if there are places where student government does have power, but we really didn’t.
“I know at my school, there was no power- it was a popularity contest.”
“Yeah.” I began pointing again, outlining the web of “popularity” between all the members of the group. “Kaisa dated Alex, then he broke up with her to go out with Angelica, then Kaisa and Angelica had an experimental thing, then Alex went out with Dakota, who broke up with him, then he asked me out. I said no.” That was almost true.
Bobby reached out for the book, and I was disconcerted to see the green halo around his hands. Why just him, why not Rossi, or my mom, or any of the other people I saw? “Can I borrow this?”
“Umm…” I was reluctant to let it go.
“I just want to copy some info, I know it’s 10 years out of date. I think it might be able to help with the investigation.”
“I guess so.”
“Tell you what, how about I buy you dinner, and I can give it back. Friday?”
“I guess so,” why am I polite? Why can’t I just say, ‘no, I want to keep my book, and no, I will not eat in public with you.’
“I’ll pick you up.”
At this point, I woke up from my politeness. “Ooh, actually, can we meet somewhere? Christina’s Tacos, on 4th street?” I did not need a cop car coming to my door to pick me up on Friday night.
“Sure. I love tacos. 7:30?”
“Sounds good.” I secured the stuff on my rack, swung my leg over and biked off, thinking hard.
I needed to talk to Michael and Alex and Theo and Angelica, and everyone else who Kaisa dated, who was still in town. Why would she come back here?
Other than to get murdered.
