Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

950 A Day in My Life (Without You)

A Day in My Life (Without You)

In the morning we woke up to find Courtney had already left for Janine's. She'd gone with Remo, of course. Remo wasn't exactly what I'd call a morning person, but he had a kind of fortitude for keeping a daytime schedule that I just didn't seem to have. Maybe it was related to the whole moral character equals early riser thing that we seem to have in American culture which of course I didn't follow since most Americans would've considered my moral character to be completely degenerate anyway, no matter what time I got up. At least according to Janine.

Since we didn't have to ferry Courtney to the house, we decided that meant we didn't have to rush. So we went over to the coffee shop attached to the motel to have late breakfast/early lunch. Or at least coffee. The motel looked like it used to be a Howard Johnson's but had gone off-brand. I'd seen that before in other parts of the country and I wondered if Howard Johnson's was slowly dying and I hadn't noticed? The place was no longer Day-Glo orange and blue, but the giveaway was the peaked roof of the registration hut.

We nursed our coffee while Ziggy looked through some pages that had come through that morning. He squinted at the tiny screen on his pager. "I better call the office."

"Something up?"

"They want me to do a show." He said it like you might have said "my roommate wants me to buy toilet paper on the way home." As if it were a slightly distasteful inconvenience to him, but probably urgent to someone else. He called over the waitress, who looked to be high school age, and ordered a fried egg sandwich. "Can I take it up to my room, though?" he asked.

"Sure. I can put it in a box and give you picnic-ware." She did that thing of smiling and rocking from side to side like Ziggy was so cute she couldn't stand still. She glanced at me. "You want one, too?"

"Just some toast and jam, and I'll eat it here," I told her. "And a refill on coffee."

"Coming right up." She flounced away.

"I'm not used to people being so chipper this early."

Ziggy snorted. "It's like eleven already."

"Like I said." I rubbed my eyes. "I didn't anticipate that the tough part of being with my family was going to be synching up to their timetable."

"I don't think your sister ever sleeps, what with working two–or is it three?–jobs and taking care of a kid." He shook his head. "Have you noticed that even though she technically has a live-in babysitter in your mom, she never leaves Landon alone with him?"

"I had not noticed that, but now that you point it out, yeah, wow. What do you think is up with that?"

"Either your mother's an incompetent guardian or Janine's afraid of what she'll teach him when left unsupervised."

"Or both," I said.

"Or both," he agreed. "Undoubtedly both."

I thought about something Court had asked me the night before. "So has Claire warmed up to you, yet?"

"We're getting there. She's not sure if she can... control me the way she does everyone else, so she's still feeling her way around. There's a mutual respect, anyway." He looked at his fingernails unhappily and I wondered if he was thinking about painting them again. "She really is happy to have you and me and Remo following her around like a harem, though. So long as we stay in line, I guess."

"I feel like as long as she has someone else to pick on, she hasn't gotten around to me," I said. "Which feels weird, because I was always first in line for her criticism when we were kids."