Page 41 - Sweet Embraceable You: Coffee-House Stories

Sweet Embraceable You 29

“Lay off,” Cameron said.
Ada rose from her knees waving the wet red kerchief. “Would
the bull like a surprise?”
“What surprise?”
“She was here today.”
“Cassie?”
“Yeah.”
“What’d she want?” Cameron let the cigarette hang forgotten
in his mouth.
“Same as Curtis I imagine.” Ada folded the wet kerchief de-
liberately into squares. “But you know Cassie. She always says the
opposite of what she means. You have to read her in a mirror.” Ada
never believed in telling anyone everything. She decided not to
lighten up with a joke about Cassie’s chameleons.
“What’d she say?” Cameron rose and crossed to the bottle
tucked away in the bookcase.
“She said she’s leaving San Francisco. She said she stopped over
to say good-bye. She said she’d never call us again. Not even collect.
She said she was a chameleon. Her hints were as broad as her hips.
I think she wants to live with us too. Fuck her!”
“Cut it, Ada,” Cameron said. He was flashing on the night
Cassie had called them long distance, desperate and sick on junk.
“That poor kid,” he had said. He had spent the night in the Grey-
hound Bus Depot waiting for her to get back from Santa Cruz.
Ada had been furious. “You can’t really expect me to go down to
that filthy bus station practically on our honeymoon to meet your
whore,” Ada had said. “What kind of woman do you think I am?”
“I don’t know,” he had said. “I suspect I’ll find out. Sooner or
later.”

*

Even through that long night waiting for Cassiopeia, Cameron
hadn’t blamed Ada. Strangers in the station had surrounded him,
deathly alive at 3:30 AM. They had breathed on him. Everyone

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