It was so early that no one was out yet. Columbia Road was strangely quiet and empty. The 7-Eleven wasn’t open, but it looked like maybe there were lights on at the Kozy Korner, at the other end of the street.
She pushed open the door to the café. Inside, it was warm and welcoming. John Owen stood at the counter, reading. When he saw her, he looked up and said, “Hey, Prudence.”
For some reason, “hey” instead of “hi” caught her off guard. It made her feel as though he’d been expecting her. She took a seat at the counter and looked around. They were the only people in the café.
“How are you?” he said, folding up the newspaper. “Are you a coffee drinker?”
“Coffee, yes. I’m, you know, fine.”
“You know, fine,’” he repeated, placing a cup and saucer in front of her. He filled her cup with coffee, strong from the look of it. “What’s ‘you know, fine’?”
She shook her head. “I don’t want to get into it,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” he said, sitting back down. “What’s going on?”
She looked at him. He was waiting for her to say something. “Okay, well, remember how, the first time you saw me, I’d just been dumped? Maybe there was a good reason for that. I took in the cat that my ex—Rudy—dumped at the same time, and it’s certifiably insane. Things have pretty much gone from bad to really, really, really bad.”
“It’s just a cat,” he said. “How insane can it be?”
She showed him the scratch across her forearm. “I’m telling you, it’s the Charles Manson of cats,” she said. “It should have a little swastika carved in its forehead. I can’t believe they actually sent him home with me.”
He was laughing. “Where did you get him?”
“The Humane Society.”
“So you throw out a two-thousand-dollar TV and keep the cat? What a deal.” She hadn’t seen him laugh before. Immediately she wondered if his wife had taken him back.
“You seem good,” she said.
“I’m feeling good. Better. Definitely better. And, it’s nice to have someone in here. You should eat something,” he added.
He brought her a cinnamon bun, but she was too tired to do more than poke at it. She drank her coffee and fell into a melancholy stupor, watching John finish his crossword puzzle. Every now and then the door would creak open and someone would come in. John would disappear for a few minutes, then return. Little tiny epiphanies, like mini electrical shocks in the brain, kept pestering her. She missed Rudy. Unfinished, uncouth, vulgar old Rudy. She missed him. She missed waking up with him, she missed his crisp, starched shirts in her closet. She missed walking to the Metro with him, holding hands. She missed having someone who would call at the end of the day, and say, So, how’d it go? Someone who didn’t make weekend plans without her. She felt unloved, unlovable. She deserved to be fired, and dumped, and to have a disgusting cat. Picturing John Owen, who stood frowning at the crossword puzzle, in the sack was not a difficult thing to do. Even easier, in fact, than the silent woman behind the counter of the souvlaki place. The cinnamon bun he’d given her was stale.
Things like that.
THE CAT WAS NOWHERE TO BE SEEN WHEN SHE GOT back. She turned on her computer and got to work designing her identity. First, business card.
She got a little sidetracked searching the Internet for a font. She wanted something that resembled handwriting, something casual but not sloppy, and after an hour or so she found what she was looking for. But when she tried to get her computer to use it, something went wrong. The computer was suddenly an older versionof itself, taking forever to load. Watching the desktop icons struggling to come up on her screen was like being at the Safeway checkout line behind some ninety-year-old sorting through her coupons.
She ran out to the local Radio Shack and the guy there told her to install more RAM. She managed to open up the computer, find the slots where the RAM was supposed to go, and put everything back together. But it turned out to be the wrong kind of RAM—it took her most of the evening online diagnosing this, so in the morning she went out for the right kind of RAM and started all over again.
Somehow she managed to stretch out the business card project over another three days. She’d work on it until midnight, moving the image around, adjusting the fonts, making up names for her business. When she could no longer blink without seeing the ghost of her computer screen burned into her retina, she’d stuff her ears with the foam earplugs she’d bought and go to sleep. The earplugs didn’t keep her from waking up to the sound of the cat every night. But they helped. If she was lucky, she could get two or even three hours of sleep before the cat started his scrabbling. Then she’d get up out of bed, stagger around chasing the cat until she cornered him, and throw him in another room. Then she’d lie in bed, listening to the cat’s rage at his banishment, until six, when John opened the Korner.
She got to recognizing the other early-morning regulars. Pru felt that anybody looking at them could tell that the one thing they had in common was not having a significant cuddler at home in bed. Their loneliness, their isolation, was practically a badge on their chests. There was the woman in the bad nylon dresses, the old man who scurried in to refill the same old
