After breakfast, fried slices of Spam and scrambled eggs, Spyder’s so runny they were hardly cooked at all, Niki’s like India-rubber nuggets. Blueberry Pop-Tarts and Coke. Niki busy with the dirty dishes and Spyder reading a comic at the table.
“Do you want to live here?” Spyder asked, and Niki stopped drying the dish, one of Spyder’s multitude of mismatched china plates. Plate back into the sudsy water sink, and she laid the dish towel aside, stood with her back still turned to Spyder.
“I haven’t really thought about it,” she lied. “I didn’t think you should be alone right now, that’s all.”
“That’s all?” Spyder asked, and Niki stared out the dirty kitchen window, steamed over and the tangled backyard soft-filtered, tall grass winter brown and untended shrubs blurred together between the trees.
“No,” she said, “that’s not all.”
“Oh. Yeah. I didn’t think so,” and Niki had no idea what came next, what her line was, how to say what she thought she wanted to say. Terrified of the words themselves, of saying something she might want to take back or have no choice but to deny further along, time-release lie. She’d been going somewhere, a long time ago now it seemed, that wild flight west, and maybe she could have lost herself and the sorrow somewhere uncluttered, deserts or prairies, all sky and clean wind; someplace with a Spanish name, Los Angeles or San Francisco, maybe, and now she was here, instead, with Spyder Baxter. Birmingham, Alafuckingbama, and she hadn’t even made it as far west as New Orleans.
What’cha gonna do, Niki?
“I’m not an easy person to live with, bein’ crazy and all,” Spyder said. “That’s why Robin never moved in with me, you know?” and that was the first time she’d said the dead girl’s name since they’d kneeled together in the pelting snow and Spyder had screamed it over and over again at the falling sky while Niki held onto her.
Gonna keep running?
“But if you want to, you know, if you want to, I’d like that, Niki. I just want you to know I’d like that a lot. And it ain’t ’cause I need nobody to take care of me, or just because I don’t want to be alone.”
Grab this brass ring, Niki, because there might not be another. Or. Let this distract you and you may never know… More than that, though. Irony like an evil joke she was playing on herself, that she’d run from Danny partly because she hadn’t been able to imagine herself with a woman, knee-jerk repulsion. Other reasons, but that one so damning huge. And now Spyder, vicious edification, the fairy-tale punch line too brutal not to be real.
“I’m not afraid of being alone,” Spyder said almost whispering.
“I am,” Niki said, not turning around, had to say this fast before she chickened out. “I would very much like to stay with you for a while, Spyder,” and the sex they’d had the night before, furious and gentle, and the doubt like hungry maggots. But it was out. She’d said it, had decided, and behind her Spyder breathed in loudly.
“That’s good,” she said. “I was gonna miss you.”
The new bedroom would be the room that had been Spyder’s parents’ and then just her mother’s, the room where Trisha Baxter had died. It had been Niki’s idea, and she didn’t know, like Robin and the basement, and Spyder had surprised and frightened herself by saying yes, yes Niki, that’s a good idea. It was much bigger than her old room, crammed full of boxes and crap, most of which she could just set out on the curb for the garbage-men. Old newspapers and clothes, magazine bundles and broken furniture, an old television that didn’t work. They could get a bed from the Salvation Army or the thrift stores and import stuff from other parts of the crowded house.
And then Spyder had Niki drive her downtown, and she made a sign from poster board and a squeaky purple Magic Marker, taped it to the window of Weird Trappings-“Closed Until Further Notice”-had shown Niki around the shop, picking out a few things to take back to Cullom Street with her.
It was Niki’s idea to go to the Fidgety Bean afterwards, wanting to keep Spyder out a little longer, wanting to see Daria and be out herself. Spyder shrugged and nodded yes.
“I don’t drink coffee,” she said.
“Not ever?” Niki asked, incredulous, and suddenly she was thinking about Danny for the first time in days, Danny whose love of coffee had bordered on the religious. She pushed his ghost away, reached out and held Spyder’s warm hand as they squeezed down an incredibly narrow alley to Morris.
“It always makes my stomach hurt. Makes me nauseous, sometimes. Big-time handicap for a member of the caffeine generation, I guess.”
And then the alley opened, released them to the cobblestone street, and they were under the dreary sky again. Three doors down to the Bean, and Niki changed the subject, talked about going thrifting for a bed, tomorrow perhaps, and maybe a new lamp, too.
Early afternoon and the coffeehouse was almost empty, nobody but a rumpled wad of slackers in the back smoking and talking too loud. Niki sat down at the bar before she saw Daria, bleary-eyed and a big coffee stain down the front of her little red apron. She smiled, a genuine glad-to-see-you smile, and put down the tray of glasses she’d been carrying. Spyder took the stool next to Niki and stared out through her dreads.
“Hi there, stranger,” Daria said and hugged Niki across the bar and a cautious “How you doin’, Spyder?”
“Okay,” Spyder said, and turned her attention to a jar of chocolate biscotti. “I want one of those,” she said.
“Sure,” and Daria reached beneath the counter for metal tongs, the lid off the jar and then a big piece of the biscotti on a napkin sitting in front of Spyder. “You gonna want some coffee with that, right?”
“I never drink coffee,” Spyder said again.
“Makes her barf,” Niki added.
“How about some hot chocolate or tea?” But Spyder shook her head, and then she took a loud, crunchy bite.
“Christ, Spyder,” Daria said. “You’re gonna break a tooth or something.”
Spyder smiled, and there were cocoa-colored crumbs on her lips.
“And you want a Cubano, right?” she asked Niki, who was examining the long list of exotic coffee drinks chalked up behind Daria, neon chalk rainbow on dusty slate.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sure, and I want you to make Spyder an almond milk.”
When Spyder started to protest, Daria held one finger to her lips, shhhhh, “I promise, it won’t make you barf. Just steamed milk and a shot of almond syrup. Unless you’d rather have hazelnut or caramel, or vanilla.” And Daria pointed to a row of tall bottles behind her, lurid shades of Torani syrups, and Spyder looked at Niki.
“Almond’s fine,” she said, mumbling around her second noisy mouthful of biscotti.
“Coming right up, ladies,” Daria said and turned her back, went to work with coffee grounds and sugar, almond syrup and the shiny silver Lavazza machine.
“So,” and Niki wasn’t looking at Spyder, speaking to her but watching the kids at the back table. “How’d you get the shop going, anyway?”
Spyder wiped her mouth with the napkin, picked up stray crumbs from the polished countertop, each one pressed down until it stuck to her fingertip and then transferred them to her tongue.
“A friend helped me,” she said.
“But didn’t you have to get a loan from a bank or something?”
“No,” Spyder said. “I tried, to start with, but nobody’s gonna give me a loan, Niki. I had a friend.”
And Niki was looking at her now, a soft smile on her Asian lips, and now she was holding Spyder’s hand again.
“A friend who loaned you the money?”
“No, a friend that died and gave me the money,” she said, and Niki’s smile faded a little.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That your friend died, I mean.”
“Yeah. He could look just like Siouxsie Sioux, except you never called him a drag queen. You had to call him a ‘performance artist’ or a ‘female illusionist’ or he’d get pissed off at you. Andy hated to be called a drag queen.”