I slide over to the smoothie station and start making her drink. If I don’t make much of a mess, I won’t have to break the machine down again or anything.
“Yeah, you should be fine. I won’t put any ice in the cold brew for you. Just pop a few ice cubes in there in the morning and you will be on your way, okay?”
“Fantastic, you’re a lifesaver.” She groans gratefully, fishing in her giant handbag for her credit card. “I wish there were a way to make this just a little bit easier, you know? Like, if one puzzle piece was just a little bit closer to the other puzzle pieces, everything would just be a little bit easier.”
I shake my head, confused but trying to appear nonjudgmental. She chuckles self-deprecatingly.
“Okay, I probably sound like a crazy person,” she smiles as she rubs her forehead with her knuckles. “I just mean that if the office was closer to the daycare, or if my condo was closer to the office, or if the daycare was closer to the condo… You know what I mean?”
I visualize a triangle as I’m blending ginger and banana with some orange juice and crushed ice. The orange shape quivers in the imaginary space, trying to stretch in all directions at once until it shatters into a billion bright sparks.
“And which one is close to the coffee shop?” I ask, just making conversation.
“Oh, actually, you’re right in the middle,” she answers brightly. “You’re probably the only convenient thing about my life, Chelsea.”
“If only we did childcare!” I smile as I dump some cold brew into another cup and fit them both in a environmentally friendly, recycled board carrier.
Her eyes widen dramatically. “Oh my God, that would be amazing!” she sighs as she snatches the smoothie away and immediately pops a wax paper straw into it and begins sucking it down. “I mean, seriously amazing. That would cut out…”
She stares over my head again, mentally calculating as her cheeks are caved in by the smoothie.
“You would save me twenty hours a week!”
I gasp in surprise. Is that even possible? How does her life even work?
She takes a few more seconds t
o fantasize, then finally her shoulders slump in defeat.
“Well, dare to dream!” she quips. “Thanks again for hooking me up. See you soon!”
As she leaves, those numbers keep nagging at me. Twenty hours a week? I guess that means she spends about an hour a day on one of those parts of her commute. I guess a half hour back and forth from daycare doesn’t really seem unreasonable. It’s not until you add it all up that the magnitude of her responsibility falls into place.
Finally I get everything cleaned up, leaving the rubber mats in the kitchen sink to dry after hosing them down. Closing down is just the worst, but if I don’t do it well then the morning crew is going to suffer. That’s not fair to them. Even if I am the boss’s girlfriend, I can’t just inconvenience everyone else so that I can feel special.
The night air is warm and sultry, but with a little bit of a cool breeze coming off the lake as I walk home. I like the way the tree-lined streets of Evanston change at nighttime, becoming almost spooky with the historic mansions and uneven, ancient sidewalks.
As I come up closer to our two-flat, I notice the friendly glow of the front window. The living room light is on. Boy, I hope I didn’t do that. It might be safer, but it’s just such a waste.
As I slide my key in the door I could feel that it is loose and just turn the handle, surprised to find Ronnie sitting in the middle of the living room couch with his feet up on the coffee table, his ankles crossed. With his eyes still glued to the baseball game, he raises his Heineken in the air in my direction.
“Welcome home,” he sighs, still not actually glancing in my direction with his actual eyeballs. Baseball has his complete attention.
I command myself to count silently to ten before I say anything. My jaw already hurts from grinding my teeth together.
“You’re here,” I finally say. “You said you couldn’t make it in to the shop.”
He follows some play on the television, leaning forward on the sofa for a few seconds before answering.
“Um, yeah. Well, I got home a little earlier.”
Dropping my keys in the bowl by the front door, I let my heavy bag slide from my shoulder.
“So I just closed the coffee shop by myself,” I announce, though he really should know that.
“Yeah, thanks, babe,” he answers vaguely.
I have book called Getting Along. In it, the author suggests that couples really should not bicker about the small stuff. Also, most stuff is, in fact, small stuff. The goal, the author says, is to get along.