Saviors 101

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Dana faced the Seattle morning light. Last night’s cold and wet had turned into a warm and sunny fall morning, the air so fresh it tasted as if it had just been washed by Heaven itself. She rubbed at her weary eyes and considered. The unending volume of information from Henrietta had pretty much convinced Dana there was a Heaven and that it was a bright and sunny place. Maybe, if she’d had any sleep, she could appreciate it a little more rather than wishing the gray and drizzle were back to rest her aching vision.

She wandered up Ravenna, staying as much as possible in the shade of the trees. The DVDs that she’d flattened into the pavement a handful of years before, glistened with the morning dew. The man they’d belonged to was long since divorced and gone, hopefully hadn’t had a girlfriend since, for the girlfriend’s sake.

She crossed Brooklyn Ave. and the morning traffic stopped to let her pass. It wasn’t until she stumbled on the opposite curb that she noticed the walk sign was a red hand, not a green man from a misogynistic society designed by the forty-eight-percent minority gender. Thank God for Seattle drivers’ politeness or she’d have been flattened. And she might not have noticed. A Mac truck would seem minor when compared with the volume of information that had poured out of the tiny angel last night.

One block north, the sunlight had concentrated and focused until Uncle Joshua’s deli was wrapped in a blazon of golds and reds that made his shop the most painfully bright yet homey place she’d ever seen. It was always like that, on the darkest days, his deli remained warm and bright.

The front door still had a closed sign out, and would for another half hour or so, but she knew her Uncle would be there. Not that he was really her uncle, but she’d called him that from before she could remember and it had stuck. He’d be sitting at the first table, his banged up old pottery mug sending infrared coffee-flavored heat waves up into the morning’s first light which flowed through the deli’s front window.

The bell tinkled merrily as she crawled in. From the shadows of the unlit shop, kosher pickles, deli salami, fresh lox, and toasted bagels with cream cheese assaulted her nostrils inviting her to remain here for the rest of her life.

The long, glass-fronted deli case was filled with the wonders of an older culinary age. A dozen different salamis, cheeses, prosciutto, vats of flavored cream cheese, four different types of lox among a wide variety of smoked fish. She had left more than her fair share of toddler fingerprints and nose prints on that glass.

She melted into a chair at his small, two-person window table that had seen better days, a long, long, long time ago. The chips and nicks in the old wooden surface were worn to a smooth patina. The table, like her uncle, was round, soft, ageless, and comforting.

Without her asking, a large mug appeared in her foggy field of vision. Heat-seeking fingers finally located the ceramic container and wrapped around the conductive warmth. A quick sip scorched her tongue.

“Ow! s**t, Uncle, did you have to make it so damned hot?”

“Woke you up, didn’t it?” His voice rumbled as if there were a laugh just below the surface, which there actually was. A great booming laugh that usually disguised itself as a merry chuckle, rising up into a very surprising high giggle, especially when he was laughing at his own jokes.

He slipped an ice cube into her coffee just as he’d done with her cocoa when she was a little girl. It crackled and pinged as the thermal masses equalized with a rapidity that shattered the inside of the cube into a crazy star pattern. Her next tentative sip was more tolerable, though it stung her burned tongue.

“You look as if you didn’t sleep last night. I thought you’d learned to sleep through anything in your family.”

“Let’s just say, it was a less than normal evening.”

“Tell an old man, I love a good story. Annie won’t be along for a bit. Your Aunt doesn’t leap to the day quite the way I do.”

She laughed dutifully at the old joke so wrapped in his love for his wife. Dana knew he’d roll out of bed, pulled on the first clothes that came to hand, as often inside out as right way on, and rambled down to the deli for his morning cup in the pale sunlight. Anne would have been up an hour before, done the overnight books, called in the bread order, and gotten dressed in a casual way that made her the envy of every other woman on the planet because she always looked so elegant. And still she would join Joshua by the time he’d started in on his second cup.

“At least he’s almost human by now,” Anne said, as she did every morning. She pecked him on the cheek before heading off to get her own coffee.

Dana squinted her eyes and tried to imagine what Anne saw in her frumpy husband. Not that Dana didn’t adore him, rumples, salt-and-pepper hair without much pepper left, or much hair at all for that matter, and all the rest. But it never worked. She saw her rotund uncle, and Anne saw the love of her life.

The next sip of her coffee slid down her throat and her insides began to wake up in pleased little fits and starts. The last remains of the ice cube tickled her upper lip.

“You wouldn’t believe what happened to me last night if I told you.” She hid her embarrassment in another sip of her coffee. She never had secrets from him, well, not many, but even he would believe that she’d taken hallucinogens when she told about the foot-tall angel with a talking disorder. The damn thing had never shut up.

The reds were fading from the sky, the pinks were gone, and the golds were giving way to the clear light of day beyond the window. But here, at Uncle’s little round table, it was as if they were in a land that was forever lit by the twilight of a day well spent.

Maybe Sam had slipped her a hallucinogen when she wasn’t paying attention…Nope, she’d been paying close attention. Very close. That meant the angel was her problem.

“I tried to spend a night lost in heavenly s*x, instead I spent it with a heavenly spirit.”