Snafu

Dissonance

The next day, Cole stumbled down the stairs with his hands clutching his forehead, following the rich, tawny aroma of coffee. As he had been the day before, Gideon was already at work. He left a note that morning, written in elegant cursive on a plain yellow sticky note. For your head. An arrow pointed to a bottle of ibuprofen and a tall glass of water. You can pick a book from the library or use my swim trunks again. If you want to go out, the keys for the Audi are hanging in the key box in the garage. I'll be home for dinner tonight.

Cole blinked in shock. His worry about being stuck out here in the suburbs and anxiety over eventually asking Gideon to use a car turned out to be unfounded.

"Home for dinner?" he muttered to himself, stroking a finger down the note, pinning the bottom of it to the countertop. When he took his finger away, it flipped back up in the scandalous way that sticky notes do.

"He was home for dinner last night, too." Andre set a mug of coffee in front of him with a tap. "Mr. Barta does not usually come home between his jobs, but he told me to have dinner prepared last night and all nights in the future. Except weekends. I don't work weekends."

Cole frowned at Andre and tried to parse out the meaning between his words. His lips were pressed together, and his brows raised as if he were urging Cole to understand something. But Cole once again had a hangover pounding against the inside of his skull, so he could not think. He picked up the ibuprofen and took a few. It had been nice of Gideon to make sure he could easily find them.

"There are leftovers from last night if you'd like them for lunch."

"Oh, thank you." Cole smiled. "I'm sorry for missing dinner."

"Just enjoy the leftovers. Do you want any breakfast?"

He honestly did not, so he shook his head. "I'm going to go back to bed."

Andre did not care one way or another. Cole smoothed his fingers over the note again, eyes trailing along the loopy script. Gideon was the type of man to write notes in cursive before he left for work and got upset when Cole came home with bloody hands despite having blood on his own clothes a couple of nights before. Cole squirreled these facts away like they were precious. He did not know much about Gideon yet, but he was learning little by little. He peeled the sticky note from the counter and pinched it gently between two fingers as he wandered back out of the kitchen, coffee in his other hand.

Instead of going upstairs, he got distracted by the books on the shelves that flanked the entrance to the great room. Then he padded past the looming landscapes and austere portraits inside the huge room and went to poke around in the study. He scanned the bookshelves there, too, searching not for any particular title or genre but for the spine that seemed the most cracked. He wanted to find Gideon's most beloved book, which had pages falling out and notes in the margins - his fingerprints all over it. He looked over every single bookshelf, then came back to a thin copy of Catch-22, bookended by Shakespeare and some obscure Encyclopedia. Gideon apparently did not care much for organizing his titles.

The spine was creased, and while no pages fell out, they were marked up with notes and highlights. The inside of the cover was stamped with the name of a high school, perhaps where Gideon had gone, or maybe simply where the book had lived its previous life before he picked it up. Cole held the sticky note next to one of the notes in the margins and saw they were written in the same loopy cursive. He tucked the sticky note between the cover and the first page, then took the book and the coffee out onto the back patio to sit in the chair where Gideon had sat two days ago.

Sitting out here was just as peaceful as it had been that day. The sun warmed the pebbly patio beneath his feet. Chris passed by with a squeaky wheelbarrow and nodded at Cole when Cole waved to him. Birds sang in the woods around the house. Cole hoped the mild weather would continue to hold out. He opened to the first page and sipped his coffee.