Someday Never Comes

Chapter Eight

"So you are still here," Jamie said come morning, when I'd followed the smell of brewing coffee into an avocado and gold kitchen. "After that performance last night, I thought you'd probably jogged to Cortez."

The sister- What had Jamie called her? Erin? -had been bending to look into an olive green fridge. She stood as he spoke and slammed the door hard enough that dishes rattled in the overhead cupboards.

I winced and at Jamie's feet, the doberman I'd seen the day before raised its head to stare balefully at the racket. Its owner, on the other hand, didn't react. He was sitting at an old formica topped table, drinking black coffee and smoking a cigarette like it had personally offended him. As the sister yanked open and then once again slammed a cabinet, he took another aggressive drag, jaw muscles clenching.

I didn't know what to say. To any of it. What exactly was the conversational etiquette with two strangers whose home you'd spent the night in? Whose familial blowout you'd recently been party too? Was I supposed to make like the atmosphere in the room wasn't really flavored with a air of murderous intent? Discuss the weather? The only thing I wanted to do was hightail it out of there and find a cozy foxhole before little sis went nuclear again. Did she take the shotgun with her to breakfast? But I needed to thank Jamie for letting me spend the night, even if it hadn't been particularly restful. More importantly, I wanted to know if my help was still needed at the bar or if I was back to reading at Granny Homophobes' clubhouse to kill time.

"I'm going out," Erin said, looking from one to the other of us hatefully.

Snatching a coat from where it lay across the back of a chair, she shrugged it on and was gone; out a door the opened onto the alley.

"I get the feeling I may have inadvertently caused the third world war," I said into the charged silence that lingered in her wake.  
Jamie took another, deliberate drag.

"She's nineteen," he replied on the eventual exhale. He cocked his head, motioned me towards the coffeemaker. "Everything causes World War III."

That sounded like comments Wesley had recently taken to making; a result of his own, eldest son having turned fifteen. I remembered a little of that from my little sister's teen years- that feeling that breathing wrong might instigate a meltdown at any given moment. Although, having been a teenager myself for some of those years, my own hormonal hair-trigger may have played a part in the overall Cold War atmosphere.

I wondered what Angela was up to these days. Probably busy penning freudian fan letters to Michele Bachmann and haranguing her ivy league, trust fund pals with Jew jokes.

Not being one to pass up coffee, even in an active combat zone, I headed for the proffered brew.

Taking a cup from a nearby dish drainer, I asked, "Did you make this yourself or should I check for the smell of bitter almond?" Or signs of phlegm?

Jamie gave me a tired smile, "That's like, what? Strychnine?"

"Cyanide."

"The more you know," he said, tipping his own cup to me. "There's sugar in the cupboard above the pot, milk in the usual place. If you take either."

I took both, on those occasions they were real and not flavored 'coffee creamer' concoctions of horror.

Jamie didn't speak while I did my doctoring. Finished, I turned around and found him still idly smoking, his gaze fixed on an empty patch of wall. I'd been laboring under the assumption that there was a certain amount of smoke and mirrors behind his looks. Even at six a.m. though, his hair sticking out at odd angles and sporting what looked suspiciously like the clothing he'd worn the day before, he was cover model perfect. Disheveled, but attractively so. Like someone who'd been carefully made up to play the part of the boy next, the morning after. It was starting to get a little offensive.