and retrieved my glasses from my nightstand. There was a bobbing pinpoint of orange down below. It took me a moment to realize that this was the end of a cigarette. And the cigarette was attached to a person who was leaning against the back of a bus shelter. I watched him for a few moments, wondering that someone would be outside in the rain in the middle of the night. It took me several minutes to realize that this person was looking up at me. I stood very still, then backed away from the window. I felt rattled, unsettled. Before I went back to bed, I went to the door and made sure it was locked, the security system fully armed. Once the latch was pulled across the French doors I’d be secure. And then, feeling much like my aunt, I made a cup of chamomile tea—her favorite—and drank it in the kitchen.
The photo was still on my kitchen table, propped against the sugar bowl. I thought about what Johanna had said. See Evan? I sighed and looked down at the woman’s face, that hint of a smile not for the photographer, but for the man—my father?—who I’ve always thought was just about the handsomest man I’d ever seen.
I slept again after that, and dreamed that Aunt Rose was my real mother and that I had no father, and she’d forged my birth certificate and made up the story about my parents being in an accident just because she didn’t want anyone to know that I was illegitimate. I got up, peeked around the side of the blind in the half light of early morning, but the cigarette smoker had gone. So had the cat.
Still tired, I went back to bed but tossed and turned until close to dawn, and when I finally did wake up, I had overslept. Since I’d forgotten to set the alarm, I ended up racing to get ready. I couldn’t get my contacts in, so had to opt for a pair of thick glasses with black frames. I had purchased them a few years ago when I’d been in an artsy period, but now in the mirror all I saw were glasses. But my eyes were puffy from lack of sleep and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it.
By the time I ran to the café for my coffee, my winking coffee stranger had already been and gone. I had no idea where he worked. I assumed it was somewhere around here, maybe even the mystery bookshop, although I’d never seen him in there when I’d gone in for some reading material.
Where he came from and where he went each morning were a mystery. The only thing I knew about him was that he came in each morning at the same time for a dark roast coffee, which he took black. And, that he winked at me.
I was too late today, but with the way I looked this morning, it was just as well.
It was strange how I missed him, how disappointed I felt. If I believed in omens—which I didn’t—I would have thought that not seeing him meant that this already bad day was going to get a whole lot worse. I walked into my shop, and today for the first time it seemed a desolate place. The rows upon rows of needlecraft kits and yarn and scrapbook supplies and watercolor kits and mirror pieces and mosaic tiles just looked like organized rows of so much junk. I went to the back and looked at Beryl’s mirror tiles picture again. My parents. Or maybe not. But if they weren’t my parents, who were they and how were they connected to me? If they were?
Before she left last night I told Johanna not to tell anyone about this picture. I knew she would respect my wishes. I didn’t need to share the patheticness of my life with anyone else. Johanna had also carefully placed the photo between two sheets of cardboard and put it in a large envelope, still convinced that I would see Evan. I laid that next to my coat. When Barbara came in after lunch, I’d head over to the photography studio and force myself to deal with the infamous Evan Baxter.
I met the morning customers with cheery hellos. I helped two older women from my seniors’ class pick out ribbons for their scrapbooks. I helped a young pregnant woman with yarn and doll faces. She kept going on about her new baby and decorating the room, and that made me feel blue. If my ex-fiancé hadn’t jumped ship I would be married now. Quite possibly I’d even be pregnant. We’d talked about that. We’d wanted children right away. Mark, my ex-fiancé, worked as a computer programmer for a cable company. Everyone in church loved him where he was one of the leaders. He just couldn’t stick it out with me when the going got tough. I sold the young mother-to-be some yellow yarn, a doll form and a pattern, and wished the new family well with a cheerful smile.
A gentlemanly old man named Marty Smythe and his friend Dot, both from my seniors’ scrapbooking class came in and bought two children’s needlepoint sets for Dot’s grandchildren. When I first met Marty and Dot, I figured them for an old married couple. Then one afternoon in the shop when Dot was talking to Barbara about ribbons, Marty whispered to me that he was going to ask Dot to marry him, he was just waiting for the right moment. I thought it was sweet. Barbara told me later that both Marty and Dot had lost their spouses a long time ago.
He looked at me and his eyebrows came together. “You okay?”
I nodded. “I must look horrible. I think I’m coming down with something.” Coming down with something. Right, like a miserable life.
“Well, you take care, sweets,” he said as I rang up the order.
I promised him I would and I watched him leave, the back of him, white hair bunching out under his black woolen cap. Something about the back of his hair under his cap made me start for a moment. I looked, but couldn’t put a finger on it. I shook my head and went back to work.
Just after noon, Barbara came in cheerful and breezy the way she always does.
“How was the class?” she asked, unzipping her raincoat and hanging it in the back. “Oh, I can see how the class was. How lovely!” Barbara’s one of those wonderfully warm maternal types who talk nonstop. I knew she’d have lots of good advice for me if I told her about my parents and the picture questions. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Not yet. She stopped her chattering and looked at me. “Are you okay, Marylee?”
I attempted a laugh. “Everyone keeps asking me that. I think it’s my glasses. I don’t usually wear them, so when I do, everyone looks at me strangely.”
“I think they’re very charming. They make you look quite studious.”
I told her that I hadn’t slept well, and that when I’d gotten up in the night someone had been standing down across the street smoking in the bus shelter. “It unnerved me,” I said. “I didn’t sleep much after that.”
“Well I don’t blame you!” Her eyes were wide. “Did you call the police?”
“Last I heard it wasn’t a crime to stand in a bus shelter and smoke in the middle of the night.”
“Still, it would be kind of spooky, I’d say, someone looking up at your window like that.”
I looked down at my hands. “It was just somebody smoking.” But it wasn’t, was it? I had seen a face upturned in my direction.
A little while later, I told her I had an errand to run and left her in charge of the store. I walked the three blocks through a gray drizzle to Evan Baxter Photography. I wasn’t sure this was the wisest thing I’d ever done. After what he had done to Johanna, not to mention to his fiancée, I knew I should probably just steer clear of him.
I was surprised that his store was so close to my own. I had done a bit of walking in the neighborhood, but never in this direction. Usually when I head out I go down Main Street, and then turn right at the ferry terminal and into the waterfront park. Most of the time, when I get to the coast guard building, I turn around and go home.
Evan Baxter Photography is located in an upscale brick building just up from the railroad yard. In the same building is a design studio and a law office. Inside it was quiet and no one seemed to be around. There was a ring-for-service bell
