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There were only two people in the café that day: a man and a woman, both approaching middle age. The woman, a redhead with loosely rolled curls, stood behind the counter, staring at the old television set on the wall and absently clicking her power bead bracelets together.
"In law enforcement news," the anchor on the screen was saying, apparently unfazed by the fact that her bright red lipstick seemed to be bleeding all over her face and a translucent doppelgänger was looking over her shoulder, "a suspect in the Grace Havenford murder was arrested today…"
The other occupant, a waif of a man in surprisingly smart thrift store apparel, was seated in the exact opposite corner of the room, sipping a mocha latte with extra cream. "Would you like a little coffee with your dairy products?" the woman had asked when he'd placed his order.
"Just what are you insinuating?" The man had huffed and flipped his hair, which was gelled up in a way that was probably supposed to be debonair, but in fact made him look a bit like a drowned poodle. "I doubt that you're paid to crack jokes at your customers' expense. I'll have a word with your manager, if you don't mind."
"I am the manager. This is my shop."
"Hmph! No wonder it's empty, then. An impertinent staff is not conducive to enterprise. Coffee is sold everywhere these days. Exemplary service is paramount in a market of this—"
The manager had languidly flicked a mote of dust from the countertop at him. It landed in his mouth, which he promptly shut. "Mister, if what all this babble means is 'I'm taking my business elsewhere,' please do so quickly and spare me the lecture."
"Hey! I'm doing you a favor here! Do you want to make money or not?"
"Do you want to drink coffee or not?"
Apparently he did, and enough so that he had not deigned to punish her ill manners by withholding his patronage. He had deigned, however, to seat himself as far away from the counter as possible and force her to cross the entire shop just to serve him. For her part, the manager had handled his offenses with the utmost outward grace and cordiality—and secretly spat in his mocha latte.
Presently, he finished his cup. "Barrista!" he called, holding it out and tipping it upside down to demonstrate how thoroughly he had drained it. "Bring me another! I'd like a little more cream and a little less snark this time." Without a word, the manager poured a cup of equal parts cream, milk, and chocolate syrup and flavored it with a few drops of coffee.
The woman on the TV screen droned on as she carried the lactic monstrosity to her hapless customer. "…had better look out, because ace attorney Phoenix Wright will be defending…"
There was the tinkling crash of breaking ceramic from both sides of the shop.
The man went pale. "Turn that thing off!" he shouted. But the woman was two steps ahead of him; no sooner had he finished the sentence than the image of the graying, broad-shouldered man on the television shrunk to the size of a pinprick and blinked out. The manager turned her back to the screen and stared off into the distance, eyes vacant, teeth gritted, viciously kneading the hem of her apron. The man at the table looked at her sideways. "You know him?"
"Huh?" She snapped into focus. "Oh, Mr. Ace Attorney? Not really. We met once, a long time ago. Why, is he a friend of yours?"
"Not even close. I… also met him once. Also a long time ago. And I suppose you could say our brief association was… mutually detrimental."
In silence the manager cleaned up the mess they had made, then went back behind the counter to fix him a proper coffee. When she came out she was carrying two cups, one of which she set before her customer and the other she sipped from herself as she slid into the chair opposite him. "You're a bit worse than an obnoxious poof, aren't you?" she asked.
"And you're a bit worse than a nosy bitch." He stared at the thin black liquid in the cup she had given him. "What is this?"
"Straight java. It's on the house, so take it like a man."
"You laced it!"
"Puh-leeze. You think I want to go back? Twenty years is enough for me, thanks." She switched their cups and took a drink from his. "There, see? And no, I don't have cooties." She watched as the man drew an uncertain sip, and smirked at the face he made. "So, what's your story?"
"If you must know," he replied, sighing dramatically, "it all began in the reckless heat of my youth…"
---
"The right car door? He caught you on one word?"
"Uh-huh. Killer, isn't it? All that time I was talking like Ini, and my biggest mistake was not being vague enough. I just gave up at that point. It seemed like it was in my best interest. I'm only alive today because I turned on the old woman." She looked up from her coffee cup, which until that point she had been staring into wistfully. "That's something I've been wondering about you, Mr. Wellington. How are you walking free when your feet shouldn't even touch the ground? Cop-killers don't get deals."
"Not under ordinary circumstances. But I was involved in more than just that one conning ring."
"Oh yeah? Like what?"
"I am a Renaissance man, Ms. Miney. I dabbled in everything: forgery, drug-running, smuggling, anything that paid well enough to be worth the risk. I had only one reservation; up until the incident, I never harmed anyone."
"I'm not sure the people you scammed would agree with that."
"It was only money. And it bought them a good lesson in the ways of the world."
"Yeah, whatever. Point is, it sounds like you ratted out half the crooked figures in Los Angeles. You must have been real popular in prison."
"Solitary confinement was part of the deal."
"Well, that would explain the arrested development," Mimi muttered into her cup.
"What was that?"
"Uh, I was just wondering how long you'd been out for."
"About a year now. You?"
"Half that." A pause. "How are you living?"
"I've held a few jobs, but none of my employers could appreciate my genius eccentricity." Agitated by something, he toyed with a lock of his sluiced hair. "Mostly, I pan-handle."
"I can't imagine that pays well."
"Not as well as conning. But I get by."
"With enough for mocha lattes."
"Hey! There's no compromising on the essentials!" To illustrate, he took a long chug from his cup, apparently forgetting that it was currently full of black joe. The way his cheeks bulged out and his eyes teared up as he forced the draught down his throat somewhat marred the effect. "What about you, though?" he asked once he'd recovered. "You were a nurse, right? You're an educated woman. Couldn't you do better than a failing coffee shop?"
Mimi grimaced and began kneading her apron again. "Are you crazy? Even aside from what I did to my last boss, there's no way any doctor is ever going to hire me!"
"Ah, right. Just as well, then. No one dies if you get their drink orders mixed up."
"It's. Not. Funny."
Wellington noted her burning eyes and bared teeth and decided that a change of subject was in order. "So where did you go to school?" he asked a bit too quickly.
"Huh? Oh!" Mimi got a hold of herself and smiled awkwardly as she smoothed out her apron. "UCLA. Although I actually had a lot of— Hey, what're you sneering about?"
"Oh, don't mind me. I recognize that some people do well enough for themselves attending a second-rate alma mater on their home turf and spending their whole lives in the city in which they were born, but to me that just seems so depressingly plebian."
"'Plebian'?" Mimi practically spat. "Are you for real?"
Wellington shrugged, putting his whole arms into the motion. "Why wouldn't I be?"
"All right then, Mr. High-and-Mighty, where did you go to school?"
His posture deflated instantly. "I didn't. I had almost made my decision when it happened." Wellington sat in heavy silence for a moment. His hands clutched the edge of the table until his knuckles turned white. Then, taking a deep breath, he physically pulled himself up out of his slump, leaned out over the table, and barreled headlong into a rant. "I was cut down in my prime! I never got the chance to show the world what I was made of! It's just like the Bobby Kennedy assassination! He would have been a great president, even better than his brother, but they had to go and shoot him, and we got Nixon instead, and he plunged the country's politics into a downward spiral of moral decay that we still haven't come up from!"
"Wait, when did we start talking about—"
"It wasn't fair! Anyone dumb enough to get conned deserves to lose a few bucks! Anyone who wants to buy and use drugs should be allowed to do so—it's their hide! International enterprise shouldn't be stifled just because the country next door sells products for cheaper! Is this a free market or not? None of the things I did at first were that bad! I shouldn't have had to be afraid! There shouldn't be laws like that in the first place! 'That government is best which governs least'! Henry David Thoreau said that, when he got out of jail! If there's a useless law, it shouldn't be heeded! 'The only obligation I have is to do at any time what I think—'"
"Stop it!" Mimi pressed her palms flat against her ears. "Seriously, just… stop! Urk! Can't… speak. Too… embarrassed for you."
For the first time since he had begun his diatribe, Wellington looked at her rather than through her. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Ugh. Just… like…. martyrs are supposed to be… like… graceful. You know?" Her expression as she spoke was strangely dazed and distant.
Wellington pulled back against his chair, looking as though he had been struck. "Are you insinuating that I, Richard Wellington, am lacking in grace?" he squeaked.
Mimi shook herself. "Cool it, prettyboy. I'm sure you're plenty light on your feet, but that's not what I'm talking about. Look, even second-rate schools cover important American writings. I don't suppose you remember what your old friend Henry had to say about what you should do when—not if, but when—you get caught breaking the law?"
"Uh… Hm… That is…" The man's face flushed. "Why, he said you should fight for your rights, naturally."
"Bzzt! Wrong!" Mimi twirled her long-emptied coffee cup by the looped handle and smirked. "Just as I thought. You've never even read 'Civil Disobedience', have you? I bet you've never read any of the literature you talk about." She slammed the cup down on the table like a gavel. "You really need to get over yourself, you know that? You didn't go to prison for misquoting Thoreau. You went to prison because you killed a cop."
"Yeah?" Wellington grit his teeth and leaned into the assault. "Well you should talk about owning up to one's past! I'm not the one who changed my face because I couldn't stand to look in the mirror."
The woman's smile evaporated. "It wasn't like that. I was only being practical. When the jig was up, I was practical about that too."
"Yeah? Then why do you do your hair like that?"
"Excuse me? You are going to criticize my hairstyle?"
But Wellington shook his head. "It's your sister's, isn't it? You said you dyed and curled it when you were in disguise, and you're dyeing it now. I can see the brown in your roots."
Mimi's fingers wandered over her apron. "Maybe I just like a good perm. Ever think of that?"
"Ms. Miney," he insisted, "what color was Ini's hair?"
Her eyes flared dangerously. "How dare you?"
"I think it was red. Go on and tell me it wasn't red."
She tried to stifle the shriek by bringing the hem of the apron up to her mouth and biting down, but it escaped through the corners of her lips. "You sound just like that damn lawyer," she mumbled through clenched teeth and a mouthful of cloth. Spitting out the fabric, she continued more intelligibly. "And just who do you think I'm hiding from, huh? Myself? Because of what I did to that bastard doctor? You think I feel sorry for him at all? Think again! Do you know what the monster said to me when he handed me that Coke? 'For the road,' he said! 'You look like you could use the caffeine,' he said! 'Wouldn't want you falling asleep at the wheel.' Can you believe that? Can you imagine the balls that took?"
"I can't."
Mimi took note of his concession and steadied herself. "I would have done it sooner or later even if he hadn't made it necessary for me. It would have been better if I could have waited. People were still talking about the 'accident'. I needed 'Ini' to have some distance from that. But then he got it into his head to channel me, and it couldn't wait any longer. And I had to do something to make sure 'Ini' wasn't the first person everyone thought of when they heard what happened to him." She paused. "I should never have done it. I should never have set up that Fey girl. That's what got Mr. Wright involved."
That last sentence hung pulsing in the air between them. It slithered through their haunted consciousnesses, distracting them both, and a long silence followed.
"So what now?" Wellington asked once he had returned to the present.
"Hm?" Her eyes seemed fixed on his cup. He moved it. She didn't blink.
"What now?" he repeated. "I'm assuming you didn't initiate this little tête-à-tête just because you like bitching."
"It seems to me," the woman said dreamily "that, like… the problem is that we've been, like… running from the past. Maybe we should be, like… walking toward the future." He stared at her. She stared at him. "What?"
"That's the second time you've done that! What is that?"
"What?" Mimi repeated. "What is what?"
"What is that… that…" He sighed. "Never mind. You were saying?"
"I don't know anymore. I think I was saying that what we need is a goal. Something to work toward. Something to do."
"Sounds good. Any ideas?"
"Well," she said slowly, "we could always…" She stopped herself, but her eyes flitted to the television in the corner.
Wellington followed her glance. "What? We could always what?"
"It's nothing. Forget it."
"We could, you know."
Mimi's breath caught. She examined Wellington's expression, trying to determine whether they were really on the same page. "We certainly have the experience," she ventured.
"And we must have learned something from our past mistakes."
A pause. This new silence was different from the last: not isolating and nostalgic, but charged with a dangerous energy that sparked between them like electricity between two poles. Unsmilingly they stared each other down, each waiting for a cue from the other.
Mimi was the first to look away. "It isn't going to happen."
"No," Wellington agreed. "I suppose it wouldn't do us much good."
"None at all."
"He didn't actually do anything wrong. He was just inconvenient for us."
"Yeah. And revenge isn't all it's cracked up to be, either."
"Isn't it?"
"Don't get me wrong, it was certainly... thrilling." An almost alien expression flickered across her face and was gone before Wellington could even begin to identify it. "But it was also kind of really horrible. It was so intense, but I felt like it was someone else doing it, like I was watching my own hands, watching even my own mind. Like once I'd started it, it couldn't stop, and I was just along for the ride. I felt sort of… helpless." There was a moment of dazed silence, but she shook herself and went on. "The memory's burned out, mostly. Nothing except the feelings left that strong of an impression. It wasn't anything I hadn't seen before, as a nurse. It wasn't even the first time I'd killed someone, just the first time I'd meant to." She stopped suddenly, bit her lip, opened her mouth to continue, then closed it again. She brought her hands toward her face as though she meant to hide behind them, but froze when she saw the beads on her wrists. Her mouth opened again, and this time words came tumbling forth. "All I used to want was to heal people. But I wasn't cut out for it. I screwed up, and I can't ever undo what I did to those patients. After that, I figured nothing I could do would make me any worse than what I already was. I was wrong. I shouldn't have done it, even if he did deserve it."
"Mine didn't." Mimi looked up at him. He looked down at his coffee. "He was just some dumb cop. Just a guy. He was out on a walk with his cop girlfriend. They were nice people. Nice and dumb. And here I come, with my first-class mind and my great ideas, and what do I do when I see a cop's got my phone? I panic, like an animal." He took another long drink of his coffee, this time without making any faces. "A lot of good my brilliance did me then. A lot of good it's been doing society at large these last two decades. I could have done great things, but somewhere along the line, I lost that potential. It doesn't really matter anymore whose fault it was. In the end, that dumb cop was worth ten of me."
"You don't know that," Mimi told him. "It isn't the end just yet."
"Well there isn't an awful lot we can do at this point, is there?" he snapped. "So we're sorry. So what? What are we supposed to do about it, eschew all our earthly possessions and retire to a monastery?"
"Whatever. That's, like… totally unnecessary. Maybe we could just, like… try to be nicer. Not like… more polite. Just, like… random acts of kindness and stuff. You know?"
Wellington looked at her critically. "That's Ini's voice, isn't it?" She didn't answer. "Ms. Miney?" Still no answer, and her gaze seemed to be penetrating further and further through the walls of the shop. "Ms. Miney, are you all right?"
"She knew," Mimi said quietly.
"What?"
"Ini knew. I never told this to anyone before, but…" Just briefly, her eyes met his. "She saw something was wrong, and she asked me to let her drive for a while. She could have done it, even with only a permit; I had a license, and I was there with her. I said no. I didn't want her touching my new car. And I didn't pull over and rest for a while because I was afraid she would take the wheel while I was asleep. She coveted that car. I don't blame her. It was beautiful, all cardinal red and as light on the road as though it had wings. And oh, if only you had heard the way it hummed! I could have played it in an orchestra!" The ghost of a smile stretched her lips. "I trusted that car. That must sound ridiculous, but I did. It was like an extension of my being, so I was positive I could handle it better than anyone else. I just kept drinking the Coke to stay awake, but of course the more I drank the worse it got, until…" Her voice caught, and she buried her face in her hands. "By the time I woke up, Ini was already… I couldn't see anything through the smoke, but if she weren't she would have been screaming. I was screaming. The pain was enough to cut through whatever he'd put in my drink, so it was… bad. I stumbled out and rolled down the road until I got the fire out, and then I just sat and stared. I couldn't even think of her at first. It hurt too much. I thought about my car, and my skin, and how much pain I was in. But by the time the ambulance came, it was all her. The doctors asked me my name, and I just kept saying, 'Ini… Ini… Ini…" I didn't even come up with my plan until later, when they showed me her picture and asked if it was me. But it was my fault, almost as much as it was the old man's. It should have been me instead of her. That would have made everything so wonderfully simple." When she looked up there were tears clinging to her lashes, though none of them had spilled onto her face. "I tried so hard to block it all out, but that damn lawyer made me remember, and now I can't ever forget. But that's why I kept the hair and the bracelets. Actually living as Ini made me miserable, but I didn't want to force her out completely. She isn't really gone if she can pop in and out like that at any time to speak through me, right?" She wiped the tears away and forced a smile. "Well, there it is. Now you probably think I'm a lunatic."
But Wellington had something else on his mind. "Do you have a car now?" he asked.
"Huh?" Mimi blinked. "Why?"
"You like cars. Do you have one?"
"Unfortunately, I don't have the money right now."
"Then the café will have to start making some." He got to his feet and began pacing around the shop, examining every corner of it. "Publicity, that's what you need! It doesn't have to be expensive. Just put up some fliers around the neighborhood, maybe host an open mic. Of course, you'll need to clean up in here, first of all. Make the place more appealing."
Mimi shook her head. "That's just the problem. I can't do all that on my own. I'm already handling the inventory, the finances, the customers… Well, what customers there are. And I'm not making enough to hire anyone."
"I'll do it." He shot her his most winning smile. "Just pay me whatever you can afford, even if that's only the occasional free cup. I'm used to getting by on not much money. Next to intellect, frugality is my chief virtue."
"Why would you do that?"
"You said it yourself: we need something to work toward. Cars make you happy. Let's work toward getting you a car."
She smiled back at him, a genuine smile this time. "All right, Mr. Wellington," she said, getting up and walking over to join him. "We'll get me a car. And then, once we've saved up a little, we'll take a break from the shop and take it on a cross-country road trip."
"Why?"
"That's what you like, isn't it? Going new places? Seeing new things?"
He looked surprised. "I… do. Yeah. Let's do that too!"
"Perfect!" Mimi picked up their cups and carried them back toward the counter. "I'm so glad we had this talk, Mr. Wellington! You can start tomorrow."
But Wellington stopped her, took his cup back, and downed the last bit of black coffee. "If you don't mind, Ms. Miney, I'd like to start right now."