Tides and sandcastles (Fiction)

Jana was despondent.

Her plans for the future had been vaporized and she was not sure it had been necessary.

While it had not been possible for her to envision what it would be like to be in her late-70s when she was a young woman, she was an intelligent woman and she realized that she would be less mobile and that her horizons would be closer than when she was in her forties, fifties and even into her sixties. Back then, she thought nothing of driving to Chicago or flying to the West Coast.

Knowing that there would come a day when she didn't want to drive as much, she fell in love with the idea of living in a “walkable community”.

It was easy in a college community. Many of the students did not have cars and the local businessmen had adapted to that fact. Everything she could possibly need except for medical specialists were within a half-mile walk of where she lived.

The center of her universe, (excepting Gowain her husband, of course) was her favorite bookstore, coffee-shop and bakery which were in downtown Asphodel...they cozily cohabitated the turn-of-the-last century brick-building down by the river.

Next door to the bookstore was a store that sold craft-beers and a revolving selection of pretty-good wines. Neither Jana or Gowain were “drinkers” but Gowain bought two bottles of craft-beer a week (one was his standard reference and the other was whatever caught his eye) and they milked a bottle of wine for an entire week, having a wee bit with each evening meal.

On the other side of the bookstore was a deli where Jana often ate her lunch. The selection was not huge but what they offered was right down the center of Jana’s “strike-zone”; lightly smoked turkey, a range of exotic cheeses, super-fresh locally-sourced greens, freshly baked buns with aromatic crusts. Jana had no way of knowing that the owner of the deli stocked it with an eye to attracting patrons from the book store.

Jana spent at least two days a week haunting the bookstore. She was a regular and her fellow book-addicts were her “tribe”.

And then Gowain upset the apple-cart. He came home with a wild-hare up his backside; something about a crack-house in the neighborhood.

Jana listened patiently. Gowain told her about the seemingly random bits of evidence that suggested that the new neighbors were unregistered retailers of pharmaceuticals.

Jana nodded but in her mind it simply wasn’t possible.

Then they took a walk by the house and she had to admit that every single item that Gowain brought up as clues were, in fact, were clearly there.

Then Gowain paid a couple of kids to play ball in the neighbor’s yard (with the neighbor’s permission) and the kids brought back seven of Gowain’s precious, African ebony-and-ivory artifacts out of the neighbor’s side-yard. Artifacts that had been stolen days earlier in a smash-and-grab.

Jana would have chalked it off Gowain's sudden passion to move to a mid-life crisis except for the fact that Gowain was 79 years old. Gowain had always been a late-bloomer but even that was a stretch for him.

Gowain said they HAD to move. And Jana was torn. The biggest part of her was in denial but the smash-and-grab had shattered her sense of living in a Norman Rockwell painting.

It sounds corny, but Jana went through every stage of grieving every day for a month.

In the end, she accepted that there were only two courses of action available to her: She could fight what was going to happen and poison the best thing in her life, or she could be gracious and go with the flow and trust in God’s infinite mercy. It was a very hard and very bitter pill for her to swallow. Bowing to her husband’s authority was not something that came naturally to her...a full professor at a small university.

She was going to leave her story-book perfect, cozy, walkable community with the bookstore at the center and she was going to leave with her head-held-high and with a smile on her face.

Or so she thought...until her mask slipped while waiting for her sandwich in the deli. Cassandra asked “What is the matter, Jana? You looks sad.” Cassandra was the co-owner of the bookstore and she was taking her break.

And Jana’s entire story spilled out.

“We are moving” Jana said.

“Florida?” Cassandra asked. “Lots of people move to Florida. They love it.”

“No. Not to Florida. We are not Florida people” Jana said. “We are moving out of Aesphodel to a little cottage about three miles away”

“Downsizing?” Cassandra asked, trying to make sense of why somebody would only move three miles away...and out of town to boot.

“No. It is almost exactly the same size as our house on Princeton Street” Jana said.

“So why are you moving?” Cassandra asked.

“Its complicated” Jana said.

Then looking at Cassandra, a person who she considered one of her closest friends, Jana added “Gowain thinks Aesphodel is in the middle of a crime-wave and it is only going to get worse.”

It seemed so improbable, looking out the window to the Thanksgiving decorations still draped on the poles of the street-lights and artfully decorating the windows of the shops across the street. The street sparkled in the sunlight.

A frown creased Cassandra’s face.

“Did you know that Penny was assaulted on Tuesday after she closed up the shop?” Cassandra asked.

Penny owned a small antique shop on the other side of the street.

“No! I didn’t hear that!” Jana said.

“Two guys knocked her over, grabbed her purse and ran” Cassandra said. “She has cuts on her face and the doctors are waiting for the swelling to go down before they decide if she needs surgery on her shoulder.”

“Oh my goodness” was all Jana could say. Penny closed her shop at 4:30 in the afternoon, well before dark. Mugged. In Aesphodel. In broad daylight.

Then Cassandra’s face grew pensive. “We lost money every month for the last half-year. We thought profits would pick-up when the students came back in August but our shrinkage went up faster than our revenue.”

“Sidney said we should sell the business but the broker said that brick-and-mortar bookstores are dinosaurs. Nobody wants to work the kinds of hours it takes to make this a going proposition. He said we could probably get twenty-cents-on-the-dollar for the fixtures.”

Jana looked at her friend’s face. She saw an old woman, not the vivacious thirty-year-old who had opened the store more than three decades ago. Jana saw weariness and sadness.

It was then that Jana realized that she had been living in a virtual world where she saw what she wanted to see. Up until this very moment she had seen Cassandra as the energetic, irrepressible thirty-year-old. She had seen Aesphodel as the idyllic, prototypical American small-town. She had not seen the changes because her mental images had not changed.

And in a moment of startling clarity, she saw that she was not leaving Aesphodel. Aesphodel had already left her.

The Aesphodel of her memory had left her like a man who stepped out for a pack of cigarettes and never came back; leaving behind his suits, his dress-shoes, his laptop and Keurig. 

The tide had come in when she wasn't paying attention and had obliterated her perfect sandcastle.