Cups

Fumbrella

I walked into the coffee shop soaking wet, fumbling my umbrella shut. I looked like a hooligan fiddle farting around like that, but the damn thing was so cheap I was lucky it even repelled water. 

But where was Aria?

Sertraline

“Mom—hi!” called a voice from across the room. Aria popped up from a booth and made her way over to me. Small, blonde, and bright-eyed, as though she were ready to listen to the world and remember every meaningless mumble it had to offer. 

“Hi you,” I said, giving her a huge hug. “How have you been?” I asked. 

“I’m good,” she replied. 

“Good? Good is good.” And I believed she had to be good. The sharp shimmer in her eyes, the rosy flush in her cheeks, her perfectly young, clear skin—she looked different, a good different. “Well, whatever you’re doing, keep doing it,” I said. “You look stunning.” 

“I do?”

Where to?

“Thanks,” she replied softly. “I really do look well?” 

“Terrific. Now what’s this I hear about your summer plans?” 

“Well, I’m considering traveling abroad.”

“Where to?”

“Oh, I don’t know just yet.” 

“Well, get thinking about that. Exciting stuff is happening.” She was changing—afraid to get her license last year, now travelling the world? 

But I was changing too. Everything was changing: Stephen, the business, the dogs, my world. My tiny, tiny world was on the edge of combusting right in my face. Where do you go when the future stops holding the things you had placed in it?

Clever, very

“Are you all right?” I heard Aria ask. 

“Fine, fine. Your aging mother just needs a cigarette—that’s all. Be right back.” 

I watched Aria from the window outside. Small, yet well proportioned. She sat so poised, waiting for me. She took out her phone and poked around at it. What was a young person like Aria doing always poking around on her phone? Probably something more entertaining than having coffee with her aged mother. When I was her age, I never had coffee with my mother. We would have been drinking at someone’s house—someone whose parents were away. But we were never as clever as they are, were we?

Yellow Paint

I inhaled the last precious drop of nicotine and re-gathered my courage to go back inside. I’d apologize for smelling like smoke, if Aria made a face. Did Aria smoke? She can’t—not with that skin. 

“Do tell me what you’re doing with yourself these days to make yourself look so… so fresh,” I said, sliding back into the booth. Aria sipped her latte, smiling her father’s big-gorgeous smile.

“Yoga,” she said, “And lots of good, hot, romantically inspiring sex.”

“Well, I can tell you about a time or two when,”

“God—no! Kidding. I’m kidding,” she laughed. 

“What then?”

“Meds,” she said. “The right ones.” She inhaled the froth from her latte, smiling up at me from mid-sip. I stared at her for a moment, then at the face in my coffee. The dark brown gleam of the liquid took the wrinkles away. 

“This is good. We don’t want you turning out like…”  

“You know,” said Aria, grabbing my hand. “Van Gogh used to eat yellow paint, because he thought it would make him happy inside, like the sun. We all have our yellow paint, don’t you think?”