The Afterlife #5
His apartment was dark, but smelled clean. To say he lived there was a bit of a stretch. He didn’t like the place and instead spent most of his time in his car, or at the cafe where Melanie worked. He flicked on the light to the front hall. He walked into the kitchen and set the case on the table there.
He stripped off his soaking blazer and shirt and sat half naked at the kitchen table. After he arrived at home after talking to Maggie he had tried to sleep through the depression, to no avail. The next day, yesterday, he had gone back to the cafe.
He spent all day there. Just sitting and being miserable. He watched the waitresses change shifts over the course of the afternoon, knowing he’d be there a few more hours as he waited for Melanie to show up for work. That one thought was the only thing keeping him from climbing to the top of his apartment and throwing himself off of it.
He sat at his table, ordering the occasional cup of coffee, or bite to eat to avoid getting kicked out. The waitresses were avoidant. He assumed they were picking up on his bad mood and chose not to talk to him.
Just before the night time shift change something odd happened. A man walked into the cafe and sat at his table. He was an older man that Richard had never seen before. Or had he? The man seemed familiar.
The waitress approached and took the man’s order. “One cup of plain, black coffee, my dear,” he said with a smile. The look on his face made Richard feel worse. The knowledge that his happy gentleman was now going to talk to him made him feel even worse than that.
“Who are you?” Richard asked.
“Hm? Oh, no body important. Just wanted to get a cup of coffee and share a piece of advice to someone in need.”
Richard gave him an incredulous look. He felt a surge of anger. Who was this guy? Richard though, how does he know me?
“Well, let’s hear it,” Richard was impatient at this point. He took a sip of his own cold cup of coffee as the waitress returned with his companion’s beverage.
“Thank you,” he said to the waitress. Before replying to Richard he sipped the steaming cup of coffee. “Ah, nice an rich. Now, you look like you’re having a bad day.”
“Bad couple of days,” Richard corrected.
“Right,” the man said, not seeming to be annoyed by the interruption. “Well I’m here to tell you it’s just a stroke of bad luck. If you go on home and get some rest, you’ll wake up tomorrow to find it’s a fresh new day. You just need to recover from the bad things that have happened before more bad things happen.”
“That’s what I did yesterday. It didn’t work,” Richard was done talking to this guy.
“So be it,” said the man before leaving the table with his cup of coffee.
Richard didn’t even watch him go. It was a strange occurrence, sure, but he didn’t care what anyone had to say to him at that point. With one exception, he remembered as Melanie approached his table.
