Chapter Text
Lydia had gotten a lot of things out of her first two years of college and one of them was a sense of scale. Growing up in Manhattan had felt like being at the centre of everything. Even as a teen and past the natural myopia of childhood she’d bought into the city’s sense of itself as the place the rest of the world came to, not one you left to see the rest of the world. Then the big move to the big nowhere of a small Connecticut town had happened and somehow that town became enough. Even when she’d left for college bolder and happier than the fifteen year old who’d moved there could ever have imagined herself being the town’s few places had seemed to Lydia a whole and satisfying world.
Now it felt small as balls.
Coming home always went the same way. It was exciting to see her dad and Delia again then to go up to the converted attic floor and hang out with the Maitlands who officially were employed to take care of the house and its grounds but whose true purpose, Lydia was sure, was to be wholesome cuties. Then after she’d unpacked and had that first family dinner she’d go back up to her room and wonder just what the actual fuck she was going to do for weeks and weeks in such a tiny place.
College had exposed her to people from everywhere and the vastness and variety of the world and of lived experience had blown her mind. At fifteen she'd thought she knew everything. At twenty she was confident that she didn't know shit and was okay with it because it turned out that asking questions was much more interesting than pretending you had all the answers. A downside to college was the holidays in that with them came the gut punch of the 24/7 hectic of undergrad life being temporarily turned off and the friends she loved so much getting scattered all over. College was spending a lot of the year with people living in your pocket and the rest of it aching because they were mostly so far out of reach they might as well be in Narnia or something.
Towards the end of dinner on Lydia’s first night home Delia said:
‘And now for the big news, we’ve got a new coffee shop and it’s an independent!’
That was big news. Most of the stores in town, and there weren’t many, had been there forever. They might change owners but the hardware place was always the hardware place, the bookstore always the bookstore and so on. Something completely new was against the natural order of things.
‘I don’t like it,’ said Charles. ‘It’s not the right business for here.’
‘Dad, you’re like the physical embodiment of capitalism,’ Lydia teased. ‘I thought you people wanted businesses everywhere and good little drones toiling away every minute of every day.’
‘While I like to think there’s a little more nuance to my economic philosophy than that,’ Charles began, his smile letting Lydia know how much he missed her snarkiness. ‘This community needs real jobs and sustainability. Not some green-haired hipster encouraging people to sit around all day and all night drinking coffee.’
‘Sometimes you sound like you’re a thousand years old,’ Delia said to him. ‘I don’t know why it makes me tingle.’
They shared a flirty look and Lydia awarded them points for still being sparky despite their advancing years.
After dinner she went to her room to, phone in hand, exchange reports of back home jitters with friends. The best conversation she couldn’t have yet because her stupid girlfriend was still in the stupid sky having decided to be from stupid Christchurch in stupid New Zealand and would be on stupid planes for stupid hours. Lydia smiled. Lauren was the best and she knew that she loved her grouch act.
By nine pm the walls were closing in. It was so quiet. The windows were open on this warm night and all Lydia could hear from outside was a light breeze as it carried soft summer scents into her room. No music, no traffic, no sounds of early-adult life being hurtled through at full speed. An owl hooted and that was the last straw. Remembering that her dad had said "all day and all night" when he was talking about the coffee place she decided to take a chance on it being a late-closer and go and see what it was like.
A short drive later and she was stood in the town's endearingly small main street facing what had been a real estate office last time she was there. Now it was all new. She glanced at the chalkboard outside and read "Brew of the Day: Cool Beanz" underneath which was a drawing of two coffee beans wearing shades and backwards baseball caps. She was thinking about what sort of person would make such a corny joke as she walked in and saw the guy behind the counter.
‘Hey!’ he shouted. Then noticing Lydia’s slight reaction to the volume added ‘Begging your pardon’ before amping back up, throwing his arms out wide and yelling, ‘Welcome to the Winter Garden!’
He looked beyond thrilled to have a new customer and so endearingly proud of his empire that she couldn’t help but match him grin for grin.
‘Take a seat, I’ll be right over.’
She went to a table against a wall avoiding the massive windows. No point in looking out when it was dark and all the people watching action was inside. The second she sat down the shouting guy bounded up to her.
‘What’ll it be?’ he rasped, tilting his head to one side. ‘Need some help? I'll be your guide! Brew of the day is a solid choice especially if you take it with no milk and no sugar but it’s hardcore if you’re planning on sleeping tonight. I’m about to have a huuuge mug of it!’ His voice was broken. Not as in gone from a boy’s to a man’s but fundamentally off. It wasn't heavy-smoker rough it was something else, something Lydia had never heard before. It wasn’t unpleasant but it was certainly different.
‘I’ll go on that journey,’ she said. ‘One for me too, please.’
'Yeah!’
He sped off and she settled back and got her phone out but instead of looking at it Lydia looked around. The first word that came to her mind was ease. Maybe this was the night-time vibe and during the day it would be bright and hectic however right now the lighting was subtle and cast a warm glow over the outsize armchairs and marble topped tables hitting the perfect and perfectly mellow spot between glaring and gloom. The counter had a chalk-boarded menu above it and strings of coloured lights looped below the countertop. With the counter taking up most of one side the rest of the place formed an L-shape around it. At one end tables and chairs gave way to much lower tables and beanbags while at Lydia’s it was hammocks. Two were low and open. Stuffed with cushions waiting for several people at once to lounge against them and each other with their feet on the floor. The last two hammocks had very high sides. It would be impossible to lie in one and see anything but the ceiling. The purple one had "I can’t even…" stitched into it in large green cursive letters while the grey one simply had "Shhhh..." in the same curling style. Lydia got it immediately. She felt more relaxed just thinking about how it would be to lie safe in a hammock unseen and undisturbed and listen to all the coffee place noises without any pressure to do anything else. Part of the world and not part of it. Bliss.
‘This place is great,’ she said to the coffee guy when he ceremoniously placed a steaming black-and-white mug in front of her.
‘Thanks. You sound surprised.’
‘No, I mean,’ she hoped she wasn't coming across as rude, ‘this is a small town we don’t normally have things this…’ she faded out, not sure what the word was. Soulful had been on the tip of her tongue but she didn’t say it in case he asked her to explain because she wasn’t sure that she could. ‘So, Winter Garden?’
‘When it's freezing out and at first glance all the trees and plants seem dead and maybe they are, some of 'em. But then the whole being dead thing can make stuff look so beautiful.’ he said. ‘Then you go inside and getting warm is just the sweetest pleasure. That’s a winter garden and this place. Anyone, everyone, can come here and be warm.’ He’d been talking quietly and seemed sincere then it was as if an internal alarm went off and he got loud again. ‘And it’s the best coffee place in the world!’ Eyes wide he flashed her a grin that exposed far too many teeth - ‘Enjoy your drink' - then he tore off.
Lydia did enjoy it. Rich and dark it was a pleasure just to hold the mug in both hands and savour the aroma. She wasn’t the only customer in the place. She watched a woman pretending to feed the foam off her cappuccino to her laptop screen and giggle at the reaction of whoever she was Zooming with. Definitely a long distance date, Lydia decided, taking in the eager leaning towards the screen and the way the woman kept wrapping stands of hair around her fingers.
Sat on stools at the end of the counter were two high school senior age looking boys who were on a close-up date. She wondered if either of them knew that that was what it was as they laughed and scuffed at each other holding eye contact for way too long. It was adorable and Lydia, who was three years older than them at the very most, felt like their doting great aunt as she watched them stumble towards whatever epiphany about each other and themselves these kids were on the brink of having. Not everyone was coupled up. There was also a dapper older guy frowning over a newspaper crossword and three women in sky blue scrubs who because they were a little loud she concluded were getting caffeined up before a night shift caring for other people’s somebodies.
Mostly she watched the coffee guy who was either near-terminally overdosed on Cool Beanz or had done, like, a ton of coke. He seemed incapable of being still even though there didn’t appear to be much for him to do. He kept jumping up from his perch behind the counter to polish well-polished tables and sweep a floor that didn't have a speck of dirt on it. He was light on his feet for someone so solidly built and dashed around as if were the walls not there to contain him he'd just keep running and running more or less forever. When he finally sat down again Lydia watched him unstack a load of paper cups and then stack them up before pausing for a second and repeating the whole process twice more. Then an uptempo song echoed out of the speakers that were set high on the wall in every corner and he grabbed a couple of straws and used them as drumsticks to bang out the rhythm. He was just busy. And projected so much nervous energy that if wired up it seemed like he could power several blocks at least.
As someone with a strong sense of individual fashion Lydia respected his look. While she wasn’t the full-on goth she’d once been, she still heavily favoured vintage dresses and black whereas coffee guy was more colourful thanks to his hair. It was green, as her dad had said. A dull green straying into brown at the roots high at the front, short at the sides and a mess all over. Charles had called him a hipster but Lydia was confident that he didn’t actually know what that meant. Coffee guy wasn’t a hipster, he was wholly himself in a grey shirt with thin black stripes, green-and-grey tie, suspenders, and black-and-white striped pants. At first Lydia had thought he was wearing makeup because he was so unnaturally pale but when he’d gotten closer she realised he wasn’t and besides if you were going to wear makeup wouldn't you use it to cover up the very dark and very noticable long smudges of what was presumably exhaustion under your eyes? She also realised that he was older than she’d first thought. Initially she’d pegged him for mid-twenties but now she was fairly sure he was closer to thirty-five than twenty-five. She could see the creases when he smiled and he smiled a lot. In a big city no one would look at him twice but here, here he was strange and unusual. Accordingly Lydia found herself feeling protective towards someone she’d only known for half an hour.
A man carrying a crash helmet whose jacket had a pizza and phone number on the back of it walked in and up to the counter. Coffee guy launched into another hyped up greeting and this time he also signed. His efforts were halting compared to the man who signed back to him and Lydia noticed how coffee guy was careful not to turn away so his lips could also be read. He abandoned one laborious attempt at signing individual letters with ‘...and Jesus, I can’t spell’ and they both laughed. When Mr Pizza Delivery left with his to go order it acted like an unofficial signal. Within minutes Lydia was the only customer left.
‘Er...Beach?’ she called out to coffee guy as he cleared tables. ‘Are you closing up?’
‘My name’s not Beach.’
It had sounded like that was what the others had called him when they’d said goodnight.
‘It’s Beej. B-e-e-j. And no, you’re good. The night’s still young. Refill?’
Lydia nodded. ‘Thanks, Beej.’
‘Now you’ve said my name,’ he said as he fixed her drink. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Lydia.’
‘Lydia Deetz, right?’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Delia’s the reason vegan matcha latte is on the menu. She was all excited this morning because you were coming home.’
Delia did still drive Lydia mad sometimes but honestly she could be such a sweetie and it was nice to hear that she’d been excited about their being reunited.
‘AndyoulivewiththeMaitlandstheycomeinheresometimes.’
That sentence came out as a crazily fast blur which took Lydia a moment to parse.
‘You know Adam and Barbara too?’
‘Yeah,’ Beej said dreamily. ‘They’re both lovely. I mean good. I mean I really like them.’
And you’ve just made that super obvious, Lydia thought. She’d noted the ‘both’ and filed that one away under interesting.
Once he gave her her coffee Beej wandered off a little slower this time. Lovestruck, she thought, smirking at the idea of Adam, Barbara and this chaotic good sharing anything other than coffee guy and customers space.
Her phone buzzed.
‘Airports, just kill me.’ she read.
‘Nut up, wombat.’ she typed back.
‘For the twelvty hundredth time Australasia ≠ Australia. NZ sans wombats.’
‘Whatever, bilby.’
Lydia had looked it up. She had a million Aussie critters locked and loaded ready to go. She and Lauren fired stupid insults at each other because it was the time to do it. Without it being said, without even needing to be on the same damn continent let alone in the same room, they both knew that this was not a truthful moment. The pain of ‘why are you so far away from me?’ could wait for now. As Lydia typed and read revelling in every moment of Lauren’s stopover time that she got to spend with her even if it was just as words on a screen the weather changed. When she reluctantly put her phone down the temperature had dropped and it was raining hard which made the cosy Winter Garden feel in itself as much of a cocoon as its hammocks. As the rain bounced off the windows she tuned into the music a little more. It was a piano and drums and strings and then:
“Jules, he was fucked up
And Jessie, she was peerless
So of course they fell in love…”
That got Lydia’s attention, she loved songs that told stories and liked the voice she was hearing. She didn’t recognise it but whoever the singer was he had range and sang with a mixture of loss and yearning that started to get her right in the feels. The story the song was telling was a sad one and the singer sounded like he’d truly lived every second of it and that doing so had broken his heart.
“...where you go I will go too,
I lost my life when I lost you…”
She suddenly felt terribly alone.
“...warming your hands in mine fills me with terror
That I will lose you, today, or tomorrow,
In two years, or seventy…”
I want Mom to meet Lauren. The thought sprang up from nowhere and as it did the longing for something that could never happen and the grief over why it couldn’t was overwhelming. Even after five years without her sometimes Lydia still just wanted her mom. Tears started and she couldn't stop them.
“...yeah, you loved someone so much,
That to lose them is to never recover…”
As the song concluded the singer’s performance was so raw it was as if he was going to do what Lydia was and start sobbing without restraint. She wanted to know his name and get this song and listen to it forever. And just as fiercely she never wanted to hear it again. The peak of her emotion storm was passing when a hand with black-painted nails placed a glass of water and a plate on her table then gently nudged the plate towards her.
‘Grilled cheese with pesto and tomato,’ Beej said in a soft, messed-up voice growl. 'On the house.'
‘I don’t want-’ Lydia started to say but then she smelt it and saw how a little of the cheese had bubbled out the sides of the bread to crisp up in the way that she liked and acknowledged that though she’d had dinner she was starving and that this was just about perfect. ‘Thanks.’
Beej had his own plate and sat facing her from a counter stool. Near enough to be companionable but not to invade her space. She glanced at him and it must have been a trick of the light because his hair looked purple not green.
‘Beej, you'll never reach your goal weight because you eat when you're sad,’ he said like he was quoting a personal mantra before gleefully taking a massive bite out of his sandwich.
Lydia smiled and if it was shaky and her next breath ragged and hitched he didn’t draw attention to it and looked anywhere but at her as she dried her eyes and got herself together. They munched in silence for a while.
‘My mom died,’ Lydia said eventually. She knew she didn’t owe him an explanation but felt like she wanted to give one.
‘Yeah?’
His lack of reaction told her that he too was a member of the Dead Mom Club. People who weren’t in it would go in hard with the oh my gods and the I’m so sorrys and the that must be terribles.
‘You miss her?’
Lydia nodded.
‘She was a good mom?’
‘She was the best.’
‘Well alright. Go your dead mom.’
Lydia liked his down to earth attitude, she'd had enough insincere sympathy to last a lifetime.
‘Yours?’ she asked.
He shook his head.
‘You can only have one best of something, kid. Lucky you.’
‘I was,’ she agreed. ‘I was so lucky.’
‘Then you've got your dad. He scares the shit out of me.’
Lydia laughed. How could someone be scared of her dad? It didn’t make any sense. Charles was such a doofus.
‘I mean Delia’s great and the Maitlands,’ there was a pause as Beej briefly went glassy-eyed and, Lydia guessed, to some pleasure place in his mind, ‘um...anyway, there’s them but your dad: don’t get me wrong he’s always polite when he comes in here with Delia but he just looks at me, y'know?’
Lydia did know. They were good now and she wasn’t a child anymore however there’d been a time when she’d pissed Charles off regularly and had seen it in his eyes.
‘He gets confused around people who don’t wear suits and aren’t capitalist pigs.’
‘This is a suit. Maybe I should put the jacket on when he’s in next.’
‘Is it stripy?’
‘Of course. Stripes are the best.’
‘Zebras give them thirteen out of ten, would recommend.’
It felt right talking like this. As if any second now they’d be fully warmed up and bantering away like a couple of champs. Lydia looked at the clock. Maybe next time.
‘I should go home,’ she said and watched Beej’s expression crash. It was flattering to have him dig her company so much or maybe he just didn't want to be on his own. He certainly gave off strong vibes of being someone who needed an audience.
‘It’s late, I’ll walk you to your car or to wherever if you didn’t drive. If that’s okay. You shouldn’t be all alone at this hour. Or I could follow you and keep an eye on you if you prefer. Okay, I’m trying not to sound like a creepy old guy but now I hear it.’ He was being so awkward it was hard not to smile. 'I swear I’m not the thing to be afraid of out there. I’m nice and I'm just trying to look after you.’
‘Still hearing it?’
‘Yes, I definitely sound like a murderer now. I promise I’m not.’
‘Good enough for me. And relax, car’s across the street.’
‘Can I watch from the window in a making sure you’re safe like I would with any customer of any kind and not in any other way at all I swear to God way?’
‘Please do.’
Lydia stood and Beej ran up her bill charging her just for a single small coffee and even then not charging much.
‘Thanks for the sandwich and everything,’ she said. Breaking down in public and sobbing for her mom should've been horribly embarrassing but Beej had reacted like it was no big deal. He was a comfortable person to be around.
‘Drop by anytime.’
‘When do you close?’
‘Like I said, anytime. Night Lydia.’
‘Night Beej.’
When she got to her car Lydia looked back and gave him a wave. He was stood in the window and his hair was the brightest green.