I Have Always Been Here (Part 1 of 7)

Monday is conceived by drunks around 3:30 AM, when she finishes cleaning the floors and shelves of the store after their parade of blessed jubilance. For reasons of her own, she decides on life. This is when she ritualistically stuffs twelve paper bags with equal amounts of danish, donuts, bagels, and if it was a slow night, a cookie or two for the newspaper couriers, who celebrate the end of their route with a bag of free day-old pastry each. "What are you doing here at this hour?", the gentleman from The Post asks every couple nights. "Are there cars on road?" she replies. "Because as long as there are cars, I am here." "Was that too strange?" She asks herself this when nobody replies. She protects them from Silence, because somebody has to. "Where's Gene and that boy with the Inquirer?" Half of the regulars will be too tired after their shift to stop in, but she prepares a dozen bags anyway. Someone always thinks, "Why does she always fill all those bags, when she knows full well there's never more than six of us here?" When someone has time to think, she waves away the Emptiness, saying something like "I gave you two of the lemon-filled, Bill. I know you just looooove those lemon-filleds..."  She really doesn't really know that, but she is a Guardian now, and Bill was so happy to seem to have a preference that he ate both of them. After the couriers leave, it is one hour and forty-five minutes until the first batch of day laborers passes through on their way pick up the Short Line bus to New York City, and she must be prepared, lest there be another problem. There can be no further incidents of Silence or Emptiness. Seamless transactions only. No more customers can be lost, not even another homeless woman who goes by "Tortoise" and her de facto husband Red Carl. The day laborers set the tone for the day as they drift through to acquire the only breakfast that can maintain a belly that hangs several inches over the waistband on someone who spends all day doing calisthenics with power tools and cinder blocks. "Not all of you can be crane operators", she teases as she fills bags with sugar, fat, and carbs, the guitar, drum, and bass of a mobile diet. The first few Short Line rushes are mostly still in REM sleep, they'll grunt affirmatively at anything she says. Once the consistent crowd starts, so do the personalities and thus the challenges. She gathers ammunition between rushes, studying whatever the radio has to say about the world and writing it down, filing down every sharp edge until everything relates to snack foods, going to work, or dogs, and never cats. When people think of cats they think of cat owners and grow reflective, sympathetic, judgmental. The last time she permitted the unfettered mention of cats, there were three more innocent faces staring back at her in the missing persons poster on the front door who were never anywhere else.

Inevitably a regular will compliment her attire like a child tossing a Freudian cheese fry to a bluebird, unaware of the Freudian pigeons preening themselves behind him. Her daily tolerant smile at one Jimi Hendrix of sexual harassment permits a dozen Billy Squiers, which takes her through most of the morning rush. The Bunn-O-Matic always breaks at around 9:30AM, so she makes coffee in small batches using a maker she brought in from a home she only remembers. The coffee grows more burnt, and apologies grow more necessary as the customer emotional maintenance decreases. That last part is significant, because apologies can actually mean something to people. No apologies at all to frantic people who woke up late or the brittle vacationing families who failed to get that early start, but a distant "sorry" for the numb drunks with finally enough courage to show their face, followed by university students too overwhelmed to take an apology seriously, then finally the homeless, to whom she never apologizes at all because she gives them the coffee for free so they leave before people grow cautiously self-aware.

She is never seen eating, and is accepted as the picture of equanimity. Everybody knows she is never not there, they accept that as well. Some of them hurry because they are glad they are not her but may become her if they linger, others hurry as though if they are fast enough, another less indicting face will greet them when they return for more cigarettes after their shift. Some are outright hostile, hostile the way we are to our mistakes 2 years later, or hostile towards someone who watches bad television, or hostile over their success while they watch her doing the same duties, their years reflected in one daily cycle.