piece #1
Even from a distance I could see the pain on his face, and it struck me like a molten sword. I nearly lost my balance. After a few moments, he caught me peering at him and began walking over.

“Hey Sophie,” he yelled up the hill, offering an odd smile. It suddenly reminded me of a time when we were kids and we had to take our dying cat, snowball, to the vet. Snowball sat on the examination table purring, but his face was tense and we could tell he was incredibly uncomfortable; he kept looking around the room at us while desperately pleading with his eyes to be taken home. I asked the vet why he was purring when he was obviously so scared and miserable, and she said a cat’s purr is a lot like a human’s smile– we don’t always do it just when we’re happy.

Maybe Ivan’s smile looked strange because it’d been nearly a year and half since I’d last seen him and he was starting to show the strain of life. He was tall, about six-two with thick, highly disorganized brown hair and piercing blue eyes. Unless he was really laughing hard, he had this funky little halfway smile that most people would probably classify as a smirk. Sometimes I think he looks a bit like a young Harrison Ford, but if I ever told him that he’d probably say he didn’t look like anyone but himself. Over the past ten or fifteen years that he’d been running his own business he’d grown more serious and calculating, but I still retain this mental image of the goofy, teenage Ivan who was going to join a rock band and be the next Jimmy Page.

“Hello!” I tried to sound cheerful, but my voice sounded tinny and hollow, far away from me like it didn’t belong. As a cluster of clouds rolled by, temporarily obscuring the sun’s end of summer rays, the cemetery was very suddenly colder. But by the time Ivan finally reached me, the clouds had passed and all was well again.

“Sorry I . . . didn’t make it for the whole thing; I was kind of, you know, running late,” he said. Seeing Ivan again after so long and everything that had happened was wonderful, but seeing him like this was horrible. I had no idea what to do or say so I just stood there, like an idiot. There was so much pain in his face I thought my heart was going to rip itself out of my chest right there, but just as suddenly as the clouds had left the cemetery his face changed. He smiled his weird half-smile and said, “let’s get out of here. There’s a new cafe I want to take you to.”

The standard protocol for dealing with unspeakable tragedies in my family is to pour relentlessly into work talk. Almost immediately Ivan was absorbed in the telling of work stories, and I was glad for it. He owned a small web design firm in San Jose, and while he never mentioned money I knew he was probably well off. We usually had Thanksgiving dinner at Ivan’s four bedroom Sunnyvale home as a family . . . but with mom gone things would be different this year. The farther we drove from that place of death the more the darkness seemed to lift from him, until everything seemed nearly ok.

We were headed to a place situated rather inconveniently in the industrial district of Sand City. Though I’d lived in this area all my life, it was an entire section of town I’d almost never been to. In the midst of this industrial wasteland lay the Blue Dragon Cafe.