The Cafe Story continued

She looked into those beloved, rolling flames a moment longer, before taking a breath, and beginning...

“Well, despite my bent toward all things romantical and dramatic, I’ve actually always been fairly level-headed and pragmatic when it comes to men and relationships.  I mean, in high school I was simply too busy with school and choir and such to give guys much attention, but I also knew I would not find one whom my soul loved among that barrel of monkeys,”  she shook her head, rolling her eyes with a smile.  I smiled back in understanding.

“I started a few courses part-time at Corpus Christi,” she continued, “because I needed to work and save up money to continue in school.  That’s when I first found this place and applied for a job.  The cozy, quiet atmosphere suited me and I made some good friends.  That was probably the closest I first got to being in a relationship.”

“Oh?”  I asked.

“Yes,” she smiled, “Not Jean, though.  He didn’t start here until after I left.  No, this was a guy named Noel, and I shouldn’t have been interested in him.”   She knit her eyebrows together, trying to remember that time.  “It was mostly just that we got along so well.  We were both greatly affected by the weather.  When it was excessively grey, we would take turns cheering the other up with a novel concoction of espresso and various flavours.  We shared poems back and forth, our own and others’, to read on breaks and quoted random lines at opportune times to unsuspecting customers.  It was… just delightful and easy all-around.”

“And why shouldn’t you have been interested in him?” I queried.

“We had a lot in common, it seemed, but disagreed on things that were much too foundational to our very lives and hearts.  We talked about these things through and through but in the end, he didn’t take them seriously enough, got frustrated that I wouldn’t budge at all, and then decided to assume a rather laissez-faire attitude about everything.  We continued to work together, just not with the same level of close camaraderie.

“So I continued with my courses and working, into second year, still part-time.  It was one of those gross, wet days – like today really – that I met Jack,” Crystal paused here and took in a breath.  “I was hurriedly trudging from the library toward the bus stop, keeping my head down hanging over my books, in attempt to keep them somewhat dry.  The rain was coming down in a very wet way – I mean, big, sopping drops.  Then suddenly, the sound of their falling became louder and muffled.  Confused, I looked up to see that a big, black umbrella had come out of nowhere and was surrounding me.  The person that was holding this umbrella caught up with it and me and was shaking his head in a very flummoxed fashion.  He said, ‘What – no umbrella?  No jacket?  On a day such as today?  Madness!  Don’t they teach you anything in these schools?’”  Crystal chuckled to herself.  “I explained to him that it hadn’t been raining in the morning when I’d left.  He asked if I’d lived in Vancouver long.  I said, ‘All my life’.  He shook his head and told me I should’ve known, then, and been prepared.  All this was in such a pompous, patronizingly baffled tone, I was much shocked.  My days to and from and around school have always been rather quiet affairs.  I read on the bus, attend classes, study in the library.  It’s all very quiet, you see.  So to have this stranger bombard me, with rebuking no less, ruffled my coiffed feathers not a little, or so I described it in my journal later.  He accompanied me to my bus stop and seemed in no rush to leave.  The bus wasn’t there yet and there was no other undercover place to take refuge from the terrible rain.  I told him thank you and he needn’t feel bad about going if he must.  ‘Agh,’ he gruffed, ‘but what would become of you?  I’d give you five minutes before you turned into the soggiest, most miserable drowned rat there was ever seen.  It would be too much a shame, with your lovely soft-curling hair.  Besides, I couldn’t go on calling myself a gentleman if I left you now, could I?’”

“Oh Crystal!” I laughed merrily, “He didn’t really say that!  Come on.  You made this up.  ‘Soft-curling hair’?”

“Abby, believe me, I know.  It’s… true – what can I say?  He’s not like most men…”

“Well, what happened from there?” I asked.

“I asked him if it was his habit to rescue silly jacket-less girls from downpours.  He said of course, how could he let pass such brilliant opportunities to meet pretty girls?  I laughed and said he was a charmer then.  He looked at me seriously from the corner of his eye and nodded in the affirmative.  ‘But not an insincere charmer, no,’ he said, ‘I have the most honorable of intentions’.  His conscience wouldn’t cease to prick him painfully, he explained, if he hadn’t had the most honorable of intentions.  Then he asked me what I was, if he was a charmer.  I told him, ‘Not more than a pile of dust with a bit of soft-curling hair’.  He nodded gravely, agreeing that it may be so, but what else?  At this point, the moan of the approaching bus sounded and I retrieved my bus pass from my purse.  The bus stopped, I moved toward the opened door, looked back, smiled, and told him, ‘Redeemed!’  Then I got on the bus and off I went.”

I wondered at this mystery of a girl before me.  What an odd thing to say.  If I’d been Crystal, surely I would have told him ‘a wistful dreamer’ or ‘an old soul’ or something of the like that suited her equally well.   As for ‘redeemed’, well I’d heard that term before at church surely.  But weren’t we all redeemed?  What difference did that make? 

“And you just left him?” I asked.

“Sure.  My bus was there.”

“But what about his name or anything?  How would you find him again?”

“Why would I need to find him again?”

“Because he was extraordinary!  You never meet men like that!  Weren’t you interested?”

“Of course he caught my interest.  You never meet men like that.  But there was the most peculiar normalness at the same time around the whole experience, not that it wasn’t thrilling, but like we should’ve expected it in some way.  I thought of him the whole bus ride home – didn’t even take out a book.  I thought of the alternatingly playful and serious glint in his rich blue eyes.  I pictured the way his dark hair fell this way and that over a very masculine, jagged hairline.   I marveled at how distinguished and rather formally he dressed and gathered that he must be several years my senior.  But then, later that night, I forced him out of my head and returned to my studies, surmising that I’d likely not see him again.  He didn’t go to Corpus Christi, I knew that, so he was likely in or around UBC somewhere else, doing something, and with what a city it is out there, I’d probably never see him again.”

I smiled knowingly, “But you did, right?”

Crystal smiled, too. “Yes I did, but not for a few weeks.  I carried on as usual, studying, working, taking care of things around the house, spending time with my dad.  Then one day, studying in the library, somebody pulled out the chair across from mine, sat down and asked, ‘So, ‘redeemed’, hm?  Explain yourself.’  I looked up to meet those same piercing eyes across the table from me, engaging in conversation like the weeks of time between hadn’t occurred.  I followed suit and told him what I meant by ‘redeemed’.  I told him of growing up Catholic and my mother passing away, my consequent shift into a quieter, more inquisitive nature.  I’d gotten into biographies at the time, to be taken up with others’ lives and think less of my mother-less one.  It was through stumbling across some missionary biographies that I began to see what truly godly people looked like and realized that I surely didn’t live like them and neither did the people at our church.   I examined more closely what we claimed to believe and what they believed and found myself increasingly drawn to their God-besotted ways of life.  During those hours in the library at my high school, major shifts in my outlook and soul took place and I knew I’d never be the same again.  I emerged from high school determined to one day be a missionary, taking God’s Word to those who needed them in other places in the world.”

“What did your dad say about this?”  I asked, slightly nervous.

“Well, much of this I didn’t share with him at the time, especially my desire to go and do missionary work.  You can probably imagine, with how he is and with my mom gone, that it will not be an easy thing to broach when the time comes,” Crystal explained, leaning back in her chair.

“And you were telling this to the guy?  You said his name was Jack, right?”

“Yes, but I still didn’t know it at the time.  After telling him about my life, he asked all manner of questions about what I’d come to believe.  We talked theology all afternoon, though I didn’t get to hear much of what he thought.  By the questions he asked, I knew he must’ve been a Christian too.  After a few hours, he promptly rose as if to leave, but before he did, he picked up an item he’d had on the floor beside his bookbag.  He came over to my side and propped this thing against my chair, ‘so I could avoid the shame of the ruin of my soft curls in the future’.”

“An umbrella?”

“Yes.  A big sky blue umbrella with lovely dashes of white clouds on it.”

“And you still didn’t know his name at that point?”

“The umbrella had a tag on it on which he’d written, ‘No drowned rats allowed!  -Jack’.”

“Huh.  Like, where did he come from?  Was he studying at UBC then?”

“Those details I found out at our next meeting.”

“And that was…”

“Again, a few weeks later.  I was here, working, wiping down the counter.  I looked up only upon hearing. ‘So what would the barista recommend for a gentlemanly Puritan soaked and chilled to the core by this dreadful incessant rain?’  I told him a seat next to the fire and some dry clothes.  He condescended that he meant what should he drink.  I told him to go sit and I’d bring him something.”

“What did you make him?”

“A caramel apple cider.”

“Not coffee?”

“He didn’t seem like a coffee drinker and I was right, he wasn’t.  I asked him then why he came to a coffee shop and he said that picking the brain of soft-haired baristas was a favourite pastime, but I said he wasn’t getting away with that.  It was me who was going to do the picking this time.  I still had about twenty minutes left of my shift so I got back to work and he waited, reading in the meantime.  This was only the third time I’d seen him, over the course of a good many weeks, but I marveled as I restocked items around the counter that there was something so entirely natural and familiar about seeing and talking to him.  However, like I said, I’d never met anyone like him before in my life.

“I finished cleaning, and restocking, hung up my apron, brought my own coffee over, and set in to ask him some questions for once.  Where was he from?  How long had he been in Vancouver?  What did he do?”

“And?” I asked.

“He grew up in Washington, moved to England with his parents late in high school – his dad’s work was transferred there.  He did his undergrad degree there, then went to seminary in the U.S.  Now he is here doing another post-grad degree at UBC.”

“So how old is he?”

“Twenty-eight,” Crystal answered, raising her eyebrows.

“And you really are twenty-”

“Twenty-one, yes.”

“What on earth does your father think of this?” I exclaimed.

“We’ll get to that.  I then asked him about favourite/most influential books, actual favourite pastimes, etc., and found we had much in common, down to exact obscure books and favourite things.”

“Like?”

“Oh where to start… C.S. Lewis, L.M. Montgomery, different bands, specific verses of specific hymns, the smell and feel of a fire, ladybugs, missions, reading cozily on wretched, socked-in days like this, Puritans, other classics, pumpkin cheesecake, chess, sovereignty…”

I nodded, following along.

“It was after this meeting that I flounced home in a rather wind-swept fashion, apparently smiling absently to myself throughout all of supper.  Dad asked what the smile was for.  I smiled more deeply, I suppose, and told him I’d met someone very interesting. Yes, a boy (though definitely a man and not a boy).  Yes, I met him at school.  Yes, he was “religious”… ‘Catholic?’ my dad asked.  I told him he was an evangelical Christian and my dad’s countenance darkened a few notches.  ‘Just a friend?’ he asked.  ‘Of course, daddy,’ I told him and kissed him.  ‘Good.  You know what I think about that,’ he said, patted my leg and rose to take care of the dishes.”

 “Really?” I asked, taking my turn to raise eyebrows, searching Crystal’s face.

“Yes.  He’s French, Abby.  He’s very Catholic - you know that.  I always knew his opinion of the matter, with regard to boys, but it never really affected me before because I’d never thought of being in a relationship.  And I wasn’t thinking of that then, either.  I’d only met Jack on three occasions; I still didn’t know him.”      

“Yeah, but he was special – that’s obvious,” I countered.

“Of course.  Of course Jack is special,” Crystal said quietly, pointedly.  Her furrowed brow took in the glare of the small fire, thinking, pondering. 

Such apparent turmoil wrestled behind Crystal’s dark eyes.  I wondered what had gone on between that third meeting and now and what it was that ate away at her every time she gazed into the fire...