II - When Jesse Didn't Kill Himself (and Got Free Coffee)

A Story for Anxious Times

Chapter 2

Jesse’s father’s name was Bruce.

It was a good name for a man like him. He was a thick man, gnarled and hard and immoveable like a tree stump. He raised three boys and a girl on his own, because their mother had died of cancer when Jesse was only six. They spent a good deal of time at their mother’s mother’s house, old and filled with nicknacks and smelling of cigarette smoke (Jesse had a strange blend of disgust and warm nostalgia at the sight and smell of cigarettes) while their father worked first as a forklift operator and then as a supervisor at a large consumer products warehouse about twenty minutes from their house.

Bruce was a difficult man to read, but not a difficult man to understand, if that makes sense. The language was unknown, but the font and punctuation were easy enough to inerpret: Serious, hard-working, duty-bound. He had spent seven years in the army before Jesse had been born, and Jesse had always assumed that had a part in his father’s tree-stump-ness. But Bruce never talked about the army (Jesse didn’t even know his rank or where he served), so he couldn’t say for sure.

When Jesse was a teenager he began to realize how much older his father looked than the other boys’ fathers. His hair had turned white early, though it didn’t thin until well after Jesse gradutated high school. His eyeglasses and slow gait seemed to speak that his body was failing him. Jesse was ashamed of him, and the guilt he felt over that was one of the defining features of his heart. It was a rock he’d never lifted to find out what was underneath, but then his mind had been on other things. Graduating with a 3.97 had been difficult; he wasn’t brilliant and he was too mechanical and shy to be a teacher’s pet. Once he’d been off at college not enjoying (too busy trying to prove himself to be happy) the fruits of his labor, he only saw his dad a handful of times a year. His brothers and sister, still living at home, were there to be family to him, and even though they were confused and a little resentful after Jesse’s virtual disappearance, there was still a happy enough family vibe to keep Jesse’s heart from asking any uncomfortable questions.

What Jesse associated most with his father were his hands. They seemed to be him, in the part of Jesse’s memory that cared about such things. They were large and sturdy, rough as new sandpaper, cracked by thousands of hours of hard work. But what he’d never be able to articulate is that for all that was good about them, their toughness and durability and usefulness, what they most seemed to image of his father’s soul, such as his oldest son could make of it, was a complete lack of hope. They were resigned hands, scarred by the tangled thorns of a life they didn’t seem to want.

Jesse had walked north on the street for about ten minutes, and now he was at the intersection where the industrial park met Johnstown Road, a street that cut through the city from east to west. Without thinking about it, he made the second most important choice of his life and turned left, rather than right. Which says something about the most important choices we make, but I won’t linger on it now. Jesse only had about a hundred steps to make before he got to a strip mall that had a dry cleaner, a Chinese food buffet, an insurance agent, and a coffee shop in it. Stopping only for a second, he numbly walked up to the coffee shop’s door and read the hours. He wasn’t sure why, since it was the middle of weekday and unlikely to be outside the normal hours of any coffee shop, but he did. And even though the little lettering on the door revealed that the unlikely was actually the case, and that “Bo’s Coffee” was closed at 1:00 PM on Wednesdays, Jesse still pulled on the door and found that it was locked. Since he had been in a very desperate, suicidal state, and since he had really wanted coffee, he’d pulled hard, and thus the bells at the top of the doorframe actually shook a little and jangled even though the door didn’t open. And at this Jesse inexplicably laughed, a real belly laugh, and then doubled over, and then quite suddenly started crying.

The familiar male instinct kicked in at this point, and Jesse covered his eyes with his arm, even though no one else was on the sidewalk in front of the strip mall’s storefront doors or out in the parking lot, and anyone driving by on Johnstown would have been going too fast to notice. He sat down on the edge of the sidewalk, not caring in the slightest if his suit got dirty, and sobbed into his arm.

It was about one minute later when he heard a metal clack, the sound of the coffee shop’s door unlocking, and then a second later the sound of the bells doing their jangly thing as the door pushed out. Jesse turned around quickly, remembering too late how wet his face was with tears, and saw a big man with a salt-and-pepper head of hair (80% pepper) and thick beard (60%) leaning out over the sidewalk towards him.

“Need some coffee?”

And without the slightest idea why, Jesse nodded.

As he walked out of the bright, early afternoon sunlight and followed the big man into the shop, his eyes took a second to adjust. When they did, he saw it was a clean, open place with many more whites and light greens than a Starbucks. There were four large tables stretching back towards the restrooms, four smaller high tables to their right against the wall, a couch and two loveseats to his right, immediately as you entered, and one very large table to his left in front of a bookshelf. The countertop and coffee paraphenalia were on the back half of the left wall. That’s where the big bearded man was headed. He was wearing a bright red shirt with a list of cities and dates on the back, but before Jesse could read it, the man was behind the counter and flipping a switch.

“What can I get for you?”

Several things registered as strange in Jesse’s mind. One, the man hadn’t brought up (yet) that Jesse’s face was covered in tears and that he looked very distraught. Two, he wasn’t at all acting abnormal about opening the place back up, which Jesse, had he been a coffee shop manager in another life, never would have done because rules are rules (are rules). Three, and this was the one that seemed to crystallize the whole surreal flavor of the setting, the guy did not seem to be the kind of guy who should be working at or even managing a little stripmall coffee shop. He was clearly over fifty, not a twentysomething with two roommates who could live on thirteen bucks an hour. He also had the muscular arms and confident, playful, relaxed walk of a man who’d done manual labor all his life but somehow wasn’t all that tired from it. He looked like a happy, healthy roofer. His voice had the same friendly, buoyant, tough feel to it, and in Jesse’s vast coffee shop experience that sort of cheerful masculinity was about as unlikely to be found in a place like this as an issue of Archie Comics sitting next to the usual mint condition New York Times. The typical coffee shop employee he’d given his order to over the years looked either like a perpetually annoyed graphic design student or a perpetually soaked human-shaped noodle scared of finding out what was on the other side of adulthood. This guy looked and sounded like everybody’s favorite shop teacher.

The man got a towel out of something and wiped his hands (bear paws) with it, and said the same thing with different words.

“What’ll it be?”

Jesse was not prepared with what to say. He was typically in control of situations like this. He went to the places he wanted to go to buy the things he wanted to buy when he wanted to buy them. But he had been sucked into this situation like those drawings he’d seen as a boy of ships being slowly devoured by whirlpools. What could this guy get him? He didn’t know.

He was unsettled by the way he was staring at him, too. And so with none of the standard calibration having been done, his tongue spilled out a product that had not been quality tested: The truth.

“I have no idea.”

Jesse actually cringed after saying it. But the happy roofer didn’t seem to notice, and just said, “Coffee? Black, or do you take cream?” Jesse nodded and said, “Cream,” weakly, like a child, which is not exactly how he felt. He was just painfully aware his face was still wet, and that his nose was now runny, and that this coffee could be the last thing that he ever tasted. So yes, cream would be good.

“Well, I’ll tell you what, pal, that’s on me on one condition. Hang out here and drink it while I finish closing up. I could use the company.” He set the brown styrofoam cup with the black lid in front of Jesse and didn’t make eye contact this time as he wiped his hands on the towel again and then turned around to erase all that was written on the giant chalkboard covering the back wall of the workers’ area. Instinctively, Jesse took a drink as he watched the man erase the words “Chicken Salad Sandwich.”

“You haven’t asked about the fact that I was sitting out there crying,” Jesse said as he put the cup back down.

This was getting out of hand. All his internal systems designed to prevent the unpredictable were failing him. This stress test on all the infrastructure he’d spent an entire adulthood constructing was revealing deep fissures in the building material. Jesse was concussed by something he didn’t understand. And the back of his neck stung as sweat collected in the open slices where his fingernails had broken skin when he’d done the old nervous breakdown routine back at the office. And in the midst of all that the little emergency systems inside him raced to prevent any more undiluted honesty from breaking the dam inside his mouth, fighting for dear life to maintain the control that Jesse couldn’t live (so-called) without. Because one of the last things in the world you can actually control is a man who tells the truth.

“My dad’s in the hospital.”

No!

“I’m sorry to hear that,” happy roofer man said, turning around, making eye contact again. He focused on Jesse, the way Jesse himself did when crafting long policy emails.

“What happened?”

“He had a hip replacement. It’s gotten infected and I think he might die.” Millions of frightened townspeople inside Jesse evacuated as the dam gave way.

“Man,” the guy said, and exhaled. And he looked like he was hurt now, not the whistling roofer anymore but a father who’d just seen his son miss an open layup in the final seconds of the state championship: All sorrow and longing and the desire to make things better. “What’s his name?”

“Bruce,” Jesse said, but his slowly drying face must have shown the confusion he felt, because the man then said, explaining, “Can I pray for him?”

All kinds of danger signals registered in Jesse, now. He was standing on a fault line a mile wide and ten miles deep. Was this guy pulling his leg? Was he crazy and in a cult? Would he want to get Jesse to drink some supposedly ancient herbal tonic that would actually eat his stomach lining and leave him seeing monkeys crawling out of the walls? Was he a harmless but off-putting Christian like his wife Janie’s old friend who’d moved away, the curly-haired blonde with the cross dangling from her Saturn coupe’s rearview mirror, what was her name, Susan? Stacy? She had a nice smile, but still made him uneasy. What was this?

It must have been a minute or more of silence, because happy roofer said, “I’d do it tonight with our church, but service was just canceled. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just pray the two of us, right now. Would that be okay?”

No, it wouldn’t be okay. It would be insane, actually, like you probably are, and thank you for the free coffee but I will be continuing my walk to God knows where now.

“Yeah.”

Unbelievable. What is happening!

The man just closed his eyes, grabbed Jesse’s left hand in his own catcher’s mitt of a right, and said:

“Father, You made Bruce. And you hear the prayers of your people. In the Name of Your Son, Jesus Christ, I ask You to use whatever tools would please You to make this infection stop, and that You would let Bruce heal and leave that hospital soon. And Father, please let Bruce know You through the blood of that Son, our perfect High Priest and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.”

He opened the catcher’s mitt and closed it immediately again on Jesse’s hand, squeezing it and shaking it comfortingly, like a hug done at a distance.

“I’ve never prayed before,” Jesse said, then hung his head, deflated, not at his lack of piety but at his complete impotence at keeping anything meaningful concealed inside himself where he could control it. Every cage was unlocked, and every thought came rampaging from between his teeth to wreak havoc in ways he couldn’t foresee. His head was down, and his shoulders were limp. He looked like a Jesse dummy that a ventriloquist had just accidentally left behind after a quick lunchtime cup of coffee.

“I doubt that,” the man said, and though Jesse immediately sat back up ready to defend what he’d said, because suicidal or not he was still for the moment an actual living man, he realized after three or four seconds that the man was right. Of course he was. It was a very naked feeling to have a stranger correct your autobiography. He put his hand over his eyes out of some cellular instinct that he could thus hide his thoughts from the telekenetic shop teacher/roofer/evangelist.

“Are you Bo?” he asked from behind his hand, as though he were slipping a note to hostage negotiators trying to end a standoff. The two seconds of silence told him that he needed to provide more information to the negotiator out there, clutching the police radio, so he pointed his finger at the coffee shop’s front door and wagged his hand up and down, not yet coming out from behind his hand with the guns down and the arms up.

“No, I’m Randy. Bo’s brother-in-law,” the man said, and something in the shape of his baritone voice drew Jesse out, hostages and all, and now he wrapped both hands around his free coffee cup. And that is how Jesse Henderson did not kill himself. Which is another way of saying it’s how he began to become a different man.