The Perks
Rick gets burned at the coffee shop.
In the third installment of Dying To Live, Rick’s life takes another unexpected turn.
September 2010
Providence Perks offered the best espresso in Portland with some of the city’s best people-watching. Sure, this was Rick’s opinion, and if he was honest with himself, Rick has to admit that it’s impossible to make this type of claim without having tasted every espresso from every one of the Rose City’s roughly 2,500 coffee shops. He’d visited two hundred and thirty-six in the past year since his release from prison. For damn near five months, Rick gave the title of “Best Espresso in Portland” to Fehrenbacher Hof, probably the most chill coffee shop in the city. They have a killer breakfast sandwich, too.
Barista bumped the Hof out of the top spot for a couple of months until Rick got around to Providence Perks based on his fifteen year-old-nephew’s recommendation.
“I went there once before a Timbers game with my friend and his dad, and I just know it’s your vibe.” Jimmy made the recommendation without having tried the coffee, but it turned out that the kid was right about the shop being his vibe. If Rick was being honest with himself again, the Perks doesn’t actually have a better espresso than the other coffee shops, but it’s where he met Alice.
That’s who he was waiting to see on another gray Pacific Northwest morning. She was running uncharacteristically late, but Rick wasn’t in a rush. He sipped his espresso and people-watched as pedestrians and cyclists passed each other by out on Morrison Street.
The coffee shop was quiet except for some lo-fi that was softly bumping through the speakers tucked somewhere up in the open ceiling. The track lulled Rick into a daydream about Alice. He met her in the summer, early July around his birthday, and things moved quickly between them. Julia, his older sister, wasn’t a fan of the idea.
“Rick, you’ve barely begun to settle in to your new life, and now you complicate things with a woman like her,” she said to him after he introduced her to Alice.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean, Julia?” he snapped at her and didn’t have the good sense in him to feel bad about it. In Rick’s daydream, he doesn’t mention Julia’s obvious mental struggles after her husband was killed in Mosul. Instead, Rick apologizes to Julia for snapping at her and admits that he understands that she’s only looking out for him. She’s had a tough road since Steve’s death, raising Jimmy alone with the ghost of her high school sweetheart haunting their home. In Rick’s daydream, this one and all of the ones he’s had since he had the blowout with Julia, he’s got the good sense in him to be kind to one of the few people left in this world who truly cares about him.
In real life, this conversation took a turn for the worse when Rick told his sister she was “the last person who should be calling another woman ‘messy’” after Julia did just that. In real life, Rick fucked it up and made his sister cry, something that hadn’t happened since his day in court thirteen years ago. The thought of that made up want to puke up his espresso, but a timely distraction pulled Rick out of his own head.
“Hi, Rick,” a familiar female voice called to him. She was standing in front of him, but he was so involved with his thoughts that he hadn’t noticed her walk in.
“Mei,” he said, surprised. “Sorry, I was—I didn’t even see you walk in.”
She chuckled and gave him a slight wave. “I said ‘hi’ and waved, but you looked like you were somewhere else.”
This time Rick chuckled. His face sold him out as it flushed red. Mei seemed to notice, Rick could see it in her eyes, and she smiled.
“Wake and bake?” she asked Rick as she took the chair across the table from him.
“Nah. Just thinking about Alice,” he lied, and they both laughed.
Mei settled into her chair and wasted no time getting to why she was here, and it wasn’t for the espresso. “Speaking of Alice, she asked me to meet you here today in her place,” Mei said. Her smile was gone, and there was no suggestion of a joke embedded anywhere in her expression.
All Rick could offer up was a limp “what” in response.
Mei nodded her head slowly and held her gaze with Rick’s eyes. “I know. It’s weird because it’s not like her to pull something like this, and—”
“Why wouldn’t she just call me?” Rick interrupted.
“Exactly,” she said, and she let Rick dwell in his mind a bit, his gaze drifting behind her for a moment. She could see he was staring at nothing in particular while calculating the weight of this specific social interaction.
“Why?” was about as far as Rick got.
For this, Mei took in a deep breath and closed her eyes before she spoke, like she was making a deal with herself. “I’m going to do the best I can to not sound like I’m crazy and to not make Alice look crazy. Okay?”
Rick was still trying to answer his own question in his head, so he didn’t answer Mei’s. She went on without waiting for him to give her the green light.
“As you know, Alice has been out of town the last couple of weeks.”
Rick immediately jumped in. “Yeah, visiting her sister, right?” He intended on sounding accusatory.
“Yes, Rick, and that’s kind of true, but it’s not the entire story.” She ignored Rick’s glare, which felt like one of those 1000-Watt heating lamps they use to keep the roast warm at a buffet, and she produced a thick envelope from her bag. She set the envelope on the table between them and said, “This is from Alice, for you to read. She said it will explain where she’s been and what she’s been up to. She doesn’t have her phone with her, or else she would have called you.”
With that, Mei stood up and pushed her chair back under the table while Rick held the envelope in his hands.
“I suggest you have a look at it sooner rather than later because Alice isn’t going to wait for you,” she said before she started to head for the exit. She took a few steps and stopped, turning back to Rick. “Do you know that we’ve met before?” she asked him. Rick looked at her, again confused.
“Before when?” It was a fair question because Rick had met Mei through Alice, and that was only four months ago.
Mei smiled and said, “It was in another life.” Then, she walked out of Providence Perks.
Rick was trying to run back what Mei said about Alice and make sense of her cryptic words, but he gave up because it made more sense to just read the letter Alice wrote him. He tore the envelope open from the flap, and pulled out three folded pieces of paper from it. They were tri-folded into each other, and the first piece—the one that formed the outer layer—was a Map Quest printout of a location around fifty-miles east of Portland, in the Columbia River Gorge. The other two sheets of paper were the two pages of Alice’s letter, neatly written on college-ruled notebook paper, torn out with equal attention.
Rick read the letter twice in the coffee shop before he walked out onto Morrison Street and walked back to the bus stop. He needed to get home and pack a bag before he headed off into the Gorge to find Alice.
