Coffee, Pigtails, a Cat With No Name

I called out to the cat that I was running to the store and would be back soon. Not that it cared. For all I knew, it wasn’t even in the apartment, but sunning itself on the fire escape and staring disapprovingly at the pedestrian traffic below.

The door caught on the jam. I gave it a hard tug and hung my weight off the knob to get the latch in line with the strike. The decrepit wood of the apartment building always swelled arthritically with the warm, spring humidity, and complained loudly, with creaks and pops, as the temperature dropped suddenly at night. I wrinkled my nose in the close, damp stairwell. The heavy air brought out the potpourri of age and bouquet of various molds bursting to life in every corner and crevice.

On the sidewalk, I pressed my way past couples holding hands, dodged strollers, avoided eye contact with other singles and business people in sunglasses and AirPods. Standing at a street corner, tapping my foot to encourage the little white stick figure to appear, I caught the faint smell of espresso over the stench of fermenting garbage, animal and human biological waste.

I took a detour, seeking the source of the smell, and found a café with its door open. Someone had optimistically set a TV dinner tray and folding chairs out in front of the shop. A little girl with playful pigtails and solemn eyes placed a small drinking glass with a single flower in the center of the table. She looked up and saw me staring at her.

“Do you want cap-chino?” she asked.

“I was considering it,” I confessed.

She nodded. “Wait here,” she said, and tripped away before I could say anything.

I shrugged, to myself, no one else was paying attention, and settled into one of the folding chairs. I watched the people and cars as they passed. It is comforting to know that, in a city, one can stave off the crippling loneliness of one’s situation simply by taking a walk down a street full of strangers, while simultaneously clinging to that same loneliness by keeping oneself estranged from all those strangers.

The girl returned with a latte in a large, ceramic mug, a flower carefully crafted in the foam on top.

“Want ice cream?” the girl asked.

“No, thank you. But if you’ve got any cookies, I could go for one of those,” I said.

She looked through the open door into the café, considering, and disappeared again. I took a sip from the mug. It tasted even better than it smelled. The girl returned again, a plate with a cookie tilted dangerously in one hand and a small bowl of ice cream with an impossibly small spoon in the other. I watched with only mild concern as the cookie sloshed this way and that before bouncing to a stop as the plate slammed down in front of me. The bowl scudded onto the table with a similar lack of decorum. My new companion climbed carefully into the folding chair next to mine and scooped a tiny bite of ice cream into her tiny mouth.

“What flavor?” I asked.

“Lemon raspberry,” she said.

“Fancy,” I said.

No response. I took a bite of cookie. It was warm, light, gooey. I think I groaned a little.

“It’s choc-late chip,” the girl said.

“My favorite,” I said.

“I warmed it up. In the mic-kro-wave,” she said.

“I appreciate it,” I said.

We sat in silence for a while. A particularly repulsive, lovey-dovey couple walked by. An old woman in bedroom slippers. A rock-star wannabe in a huge puffed jacket, despite the weather, gold rimmed black sunglasses covering half her face, talking loudly on a cell phone as a bear-sized dog padded demurely after her.

“Do you have kids?” the girl asked after a while.

“Nope,” I said.

“Husband?” she asked.

“Nope.”

“Pets?”

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“Well, there’s a cat that lets itself into my apartment through the little window in my bathroom. It’s not really mine, but I give it food and, every now and then, it lets me pet it,” I said.

“Boy or girl?”

“Never asked.”

She almost smiled. Almost.

“What about you? Any pets?” I asked.

“Goldfish,” she said.

“Do you name them?”

“His name is Spike,” she said.

“A good name for a fish,” I said.

“My mom’s gone,” she said.

“Gone?”

“Mhm. With Uncle Jimmy,” she said.

“I see,” I said.

“He isn’t actually my uncle. He’s daddy’s friend. But now he’s married to my mom. But he isn’t my daddy,” she continued.

“That sounds complicated,” I said. Her eyes crossed slightly as she aimed the tiny spoon at the side of the ice cream hill.

Conversation twisted and turned through tales of a new school, a turtle she saw once in a park, a daddy who used to wear suits but doesn’t anymore, and visiting her grandparents at the beach.

“Do you have a mommy and daddy?” she asked.

“I did, but they’re gone now,” I said.

“Like my mom?” she asked.

“Kind of,” I said.

She suddenly patted my arm, and, caressing it, liking the feel of it, I suppose, she left her hand there for some minutes while we watched the world going on around us.

The comfortable silence more than anything else alerted me to the alarming camaraderie that was perhaps growing between us. I felt like I could sit there the rest of the day, relaxing in the paltry sun between skyscrapers, listening to the random prattle of the child. My stomach clenched. And then what? I meet “daddy”? On his second career, so probably middle-aged. Drove his wife away? Stern. Inflexible. If hippies could run coffee shops, so could he. I shook my head. The girl, sensing my tension, the spell broken, removed her hand from my arm. And then what? I become her special friend? Big sister/mother stand-in? Daddy calls me when her period starts. When he gets remarried. When she has her first boyfriend. More images: our lives irrevocably twisted up in each other until the end of time. I felt a migraine gathering behind my right eye.

“I think it’s time for me to go,” I said. “I told the cat I was only going to be gone for a little while. Guess I better pay inside.”

I gathered the cup and the plate, gripping them tightly to hide the fact that my hands were trembling. She picked up her bowl and struggled out of her seat. She took up just enough space between the table and the building that I had to wait for her to drop to her feet, to lead the way inside. My heart clutched and hiccupped with every swing of her pigtails.

Straight to the store and straight back. That was supposed to be the extent of this outing. Now I knew this café was here. I felt the responsibility of the knowledge settle heavily between my shoulder blades. I was going to have to find a new store. In the opposite direction. I could never take this route again. It would never do.

The little girl turned left inside the door, but I turned to the right, my attention caught by heavy floor to ceiling bookshelves extending the entire length of the wall to the back. Readers sat in mismatched armchairs, their feet resting on thick rugs. On the left side of the café, patrons sat at tables and at a long bar that ended in a cash register. I could see a courtyard through French doors on the far side of the shop. Everything was worn, comfortable, and impeccably clean.

A man behind the bar lifted the girl into his arms and kissed her cheek. He took her dirty dish and placed it in the sink. In reality, he wasn’t much older than me. His smile warm, unaffected, humble, dimpled his cheeks and twinkled his eyes. Damn, damn, damn. He turned to me, glanced at the cup and plate in my hands. I did not like the squiggly way my stomach turned when his eyes found mine. I cleared my throat.

“Well, I have to be going now, I was on my way to the store,” I said, stupidly.

“Sure,” he said, clearly confused. He said something to the little girl. It sounded like Spanish, but could have been Italian. I have no gift for music and am similarly tone deaf to languages other than my own. She answered defiantly. He laughed.

“I apologize about the service, ma’am. I didn’t realize there was actually someone out there. My daughter asks for coffee for her imaginary friends all the time,” he said.

I looked down at the mug in my hand. “You made a latte for an imaginary friend?”

“Nina’s imaginary friends are very sophisticated. And you never know when one might decide to be real,” he said.

“I am not imaginary, nor was I ever,” I said.

“Right. What do you think, Nina? Is she real?” he asked the girl.

Nina shrugged.

“I agree. It’s hard to say,” he said.

“This is ridiculous. Of course I’m real,” I said slamming the cup down on the counter. “One latte and one cookie.” I thrust some money at him.

“I can’t charge you for the cookie. It came from our own kitchen upstairs. And I really don’t see how an imaginary friend could pay for coffee. First of all, friends don't pay for coffee. And second of all, what if I put that money in my register, and when I gave it as change to another customer, it disappeared?” He looked at Nina, his eyes big and round. She smiled. A teeny smile. “Nope. Can’t take the risk. You’re just going to have to come back sometime. To prove you aren’t a figment of our imaginations. Two or three visits will probably do it,” he said. A playful, dare I say flirtatious smile, quirked the corner of his mouth.

“Come back?” I said. Probably do what? I thought. And then it came again, in a flash: coffee with Nina in the afternoons, cookies from daddy, homemade meals upstairs, work in the café, stories in bed, movies together, bowls of popcorn, trips to the beach, a dog, a sibling for Nina, school plays, graduations, weddings.

I turned and ran out the door. Forgetting the trip to the store, I rushed back to my apartment. Held my breath on the stairs, jammed the key in the lock, forgot about the warped wood, tugged hard on the knob, turned the key, tripped inside. The door slammed shut as my body collapsed against it. I sat, shaken, catching my breath, absorbing the stillness, the silence. Then the damned cat appeared, meowing. It approached me and dropped itself onto my lap, where it ceased meowing and began to purr.

“Don’t you start now, too,” I said. “You think you would like a little girl? You wouldn’t.”

It looked at me. It had green eyes. I’d never noticed.

“Here, get off of me,” I said.

I went to the kitchen and threw something together with scraps I had in the pantry. I sat on the couch and ate. I did dishes. I went about my evening as usual. But the smell of coffee and cookie and books lingered in the air.