Nico went out, looked in, it was a Passat.
We had theorized a range of possibilities. Drugs was the most common, meth, something speedy. Something you would do in a Tim Horton’s bathroom on a weekday afternoon. Owen had predicted a weapon, a stray hair, a note, a claw mark, or something in some way similarly violent. Sonya never concerned because, I think, she had grown up with people like this, claimed we would find nothing. By nothing she meant not nothing but some normal things. Napkins, a coffee cup, maybe some gloves, a book. A receipt or two. Car seat adornments. But it was almost nothing, nothing but a Zune, nothing and a Zune, and so, expectations thwarted, nobody went back out.
As usual, I was on bake. It was the most independent station. My task consisted primarily of grabbing frozen donuts from the walk-in freezer; putting them in the oven; pressing the appropriate button (example: “Crueler: Half Batch” or: “Yeast: Full Batch”); waiting or collecting dishes while waiting; opening the oven when it beeped; removing the tray with the mitt; and, finally, decorating: fondants spread, glazes drizzled, sprinkles sprinkled, or frostings squeezed on top; creams or puddings injected inside.
The injection machine, in particular, was a thrill: a donut in each hand, hot and plumped, stab with the metal tubes. Press a lever and fill them. The trick was to start the injection at the far side, as far as possible without poking through, and pull the donut toward yourself, away from the machine, at the same speed as the filling left the tube. Too slow and the filling is uneven. Too fast and the filling falls to the floor. If the donut was abnormally shaped or for some other reason larger than usual–and this was rare–you could fill it twice. Make someone’s day.
There was more to the job than that. There were the breads, the bagels, the muffins. On a morning shift the baker was even responsible for the eggs and sausages. And there was strategy, and tactics. A 9:30am rush would deplete your Tim Tims, but those didn’t need replenishing until much later, for the daily gaggle of mid-afternoon elderly. Biscuits, on the other hand, were worth staying ahead of. A biscuit shortage would cause a hold up at the drive thru. Upselling a bagel from a biscuit isn’t easy. A biscuit from a bagel, though, is usually not a problem. So don’t short biscuits. Then at night count it all, write down stock, and throw it away.
That summer I had learned in Foundations of Management and Entrepreneurship that employees prefer novelty of experience to mindless repetition. “People generally don’t want to repeat the same task every day of their lives.” But it wasn’t true. If Shane put me on register or, worse, drinks, I would complain and request to be moved back to bake. We all had our preferences. Owen, who stole yogurt from the fridge his last week and also hit golf balls from the roof, did stock and drinks. Stefanie, the daughter and niece of brother proctologists, was on register, either storefront or drive-thru. One time Shane said she had the face for it. Mick was my only baking competition. He talked about marginal utility and libertarianism. Dean, the one-time morning supervisor who was deaf in one ear and also worked at a comic bookstore or else spent so much time there that I thought he was employed, only worked soup and sandwiches. Mick and Dean were best friends, and Mick mocked him playfully. Over the drive thru intercom: “And can we interest you in a bowl of Dean’s Famous Chili?”
And there was supervisor Jeri. The typical morning shift was 6-2. Jeri would arrive on time and start strong, fade with the metabolizing of the weed, take an early lunch, go outside, hotbox, and come back machinelike. She told me the drugs helped give the work meaning, and that weed specifically helped her time management.
She once offered me $30 to mow her lawn, only after explaining that it had been a while. I needed the money and also wanted to stay in the good graces of the supervisor, so one summer weekday we agreed on a time and I drove to her. She lived down a couple of dirt roads behind a body of water that was something between a lake and a pond. The roads were named for the water; “Highland Lake Road” and so on. Bumping down the final stretch, imagining her early morning commute, I realized that I wasn’t sure if she, her boyfriend, or anyone, dog or kid, were home. My TomTom told me I had arrived, I got out, looked around, saw a driveway a couple hundred feet away, got back in the car, drove a few seconds down, and parked again. Got out and opened the trunk. Putting the mower in was easier than taking it out, and I could have used some help. I thought about knocking on the door, but I didn’t want to begin with a hassle, and I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to see or speak to anyone, especially the boyfriend or kids or dog, none of whom I had ever met.
I hopped into the trunk next to the mower, pushed the handle down to lift the front wheels, pivoted the machine so that the front wheels were out of the trunk, then tilted the front end down, over the edge and out of the car. A slight push. I had hoped that the wheels would reach the ground, but the distance between trunk and ground was longer than the distance between wheel axles, and so for a brief moment the whole thing was in the air. I didn’t want it to fall, so I held on and was dragged to my knees, which scraped. I looked at the house windows and found relief that nobody had seen.
She was right that the yard was overgrown, but the scattered rocks, sticks, and children’s toys presented the bigger problem. Twice my mom had broken the riding mower by running over particularly strong debris, so I knew to avoid this and began by searching for, collecting, and moving the litter. There was a trash can, but it looked unused, so I just left the stuff on the patio by the grill. The yard cleared, I plugged in my headphones, opened my iPod to the new Eminem album, “Recovery,” the one with the Rhianna song and the line about window panes/pain, checked the battery and saw it was full enough, and spent the afternoon clearing and pushing. During a water break I texted Jeri that I was there and mowing, and she replied, “good.” At the beginning I thought I would be there until night, but I learned to cut the lawn into four sections, and to cut those sections in horizontal rows, and to push down the length of a section one way and to pull back on the adjacent line. The pushing and pulling method gave my arms and legs little alternating breaks, and also left a pattern that looked like a baseball field. It was hard, I had sweat through my shirt, but I finished midafternoon and the hourly rate ended higher than a normal shift at Tim Hortons.
I worked with Jeri the next day and she asked for the money back. She said her boyfriend was unhappy with my work, because I hadn’t mowed the far back corner.
“I thought it was a garden.”
“We don’t have a garden.”
“There were plant boxes though.”
“It used to be a garden.”
“Yeah, I just didn’t want to mow it in case there were plants.”
“He wanted you to mow it so we could use it again.”
“I thought I did a good job besides that?”
“Yeah, but he said you didn’t finish so he wants the money back.”
“He wants the money back?”
“He wants the money back.”
“Okay he wants the money back. Okay. But I don’t have it with me. And was he home? Why didn’t he tell me?”
“He was home but he was sleeping.”
Later I told Nico that Jeri had asked for a refund on behalf of her boyfriend, and I explained the garden situation. Nico said if he were me, he wouldn’t give back the money, and that not mowing a section with plant boxes is a good decision, not a bad one. It was an impossible situation: to mow a lawn without instructions and to infer whether or not an overgrown patch was merely a former garden or also a future garden. I respected Nico, he was smart and had overcome a rough childhood with a single mother. He said he had been “a literal crack baby,” but had managed his way into law school. I took his advice and, during a slow moment, I told Jeri that I couldn’t give the money back, but that I was happy to return and finish the garden patch next week. She told me it was okay, not to worry about it. She thought I had done a good job, and there wasn’t any problem. She only had asked because her boyfriend wanted her to.
When Ronan came back from his walk down the road it was Jeri who confronted him.
“Hey, you can’t come back here again.”
“What?”
“You can’t come back here again. You can finish your coffee but you have to go. I can put it in a cup for you.”
“I have to go?”
“You’re making some of my employees uncomfortable.”
“What?”
“You’re making them uncomfortable. Because you stare at them. So you have to go. And if you come back, we’re gonna call the police.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Jeri came to the back and shook her hands and shivered, letting out the tension. She asked how she did and if it was obvious that she was nervous. No, we said, you did great, you were in control, he definitely got the message.
I have never known why he was taken with me, but it might be because I was the first employee to welcome him. I was serving an odd shift at register, and he walked in mid-afternoon, when the place was empty. He took a few steps through the door and then completely stopped, standing erect, arms dangling freely at his side, halfway between the registers and the entrance, and looked at me. Without head movement, his mouth crept into a smile. The smile seemed to respond not to me, but to the coming of some idea. And he stood there and kept looking at me, until the smile passed and his face relaxed. Completely relaxed, as if dead. He was wearing jeans and a zip-up Northface with a polyester shell. Short hair. He stood there like that and he looked at me, and breathed, deeply, from his abdomen, a couple of times.
It was my first experience with a look that scared me. I thought maybe he was going to rob us. The overnight crew had reported a robbery a couple of weeks earlier. Most of us thought that the so-called robbery had been a fake. Eric was working and had placed the report. He had previously reported that a man had come in and stolen money from the Tim’s Foundation charity donation box. He was a 30-something with lots of flannel and had decided to work the overnight shift because it paid an extra dollar per hour. He was dating Sierra, a part time employee who was still in high school and had a single mother, and they would do sexual things in the employee bathroom when she visited him at night. He once accused me of tampering with his timesheet, which I didn’t know how to do.
But now I wasn’t sure. Maybe this guy with this look was the robber after all. When he finally approached the register I had prepared myself to hand over the money. I would not be a hero for Tim Horton’s. I would open the register, hand him the entire drawer, put my hands up, and walk away.
He finally approached the register, and did so without breaking eye contact. Sonya saw all of this and was standing behind me, by the coffee. He looked at me and inhaled so slowly and with such noise from his nose, his entire chest lifting, his head bent slightly forward, that I was sure he was trying to smell me.
“Hello.”
“What do you want?”
“Coffee, please.”
Sonya gave him one without asking the size, the milk, the sugar, or anything. She poured it and capped it and put it on the counter. He grabbed his wallet from his jacket, took out a $20 bill, and handed it to me. I took the money, and he picked up the coffee, turned around, and sat at a table. I opened the register, counted his change, took it out, put it on top of the display case, and followed Sonya to the back.
“What the fuck is wrong with that guy?”
“Oh my God. I thought he was going to rob us.”
“Me too. Have you seen him before?”
“No, definitely not.”
He eventually finished his coffee and left. The remainder of the shift was spent telling the others, who had missed the original exchange, what happened. Repeating the tale felt good, and my imitation of his deep breaths became more comic with time. A weird man, an upsetting afternoon, but not a robber, and so less dangerous than we had first feared.
But he kept coming back. Nobody wanted to interact with him, and so when we saw him approach–either by car or by bike, he used both–somebody would prepare his coffee ahead of time. He developed a habit. Come in, pause, hover to the register, pickup his coffee, hand over some money, collect his change (I forget when he started to do this), sit for a bit, walk into the bathroom, come out 10-40 minutes later, walk down the road, come back six minutes later, finish his coffee, leave. Usually once a day, but sometimes twice. Usually afternoon, but sometimes morning, and a few times in the middle of the night. He missed a day or two, and we grew hopeful that he was gone for good. But he kept coming back.
After a few weeks I called Shane. As a rule, I avoided interacting with him, because he would attempt jokes, and I wouldn’t know how to respond. But nobody else wanted to call, and anyway Ronan was more clearly my problem than theirs. Plus, I think Shane trusted my judgment. Sure, I made mistakes, once filling the sugar tub with salt, for example. But I was one of the few employees in college and he had me counting and clearing registers, which was usually reserved for supervisors, after working for only a couple of weeks.
“Hey, Shane.”
“Hey, everything good down there? You guys set the place on fire?”
“Ha ha, good one, no. But we do have a problem. With a customer.”
“The soup lady? Just heat up her spoon, Jeri will show you.”
“No no, not her. This other guy. He’s really weird, and we want to kick him out.”
“For what?”
“Really, trust me, he’s just a freak. He goes into the bathroom forever. And he stares at us.”
“I must be missing something here. Talk to Jeri about it.”
“Jeri knows and also wants to kick him out. Not even Sonya will talk with the guy. We don’t talk with him. We just give him his order and he acts weird and stares at me.”
“You don’t talk to him? You need to welcome the guests, that’s not right. I’ll talk to Jeri and we’ll talk on Friday.”
“Okay, but really, Shane, there’s something wrong with him.”’
“Okay, well if he starts following you home let me know,” he laughed.
During Friday’s staff meeting, I brought up the situation. It was the only time of the week that most of the employees, from all of the shifts, got together. Natasha, who worked 2-10pm, and had recently moved with her daughter from Arizona to live with her mom, and who had asked me once for weight loss tips because she couldn’t get any online dating matches, told us that the weird guy had asked where “the boy in white” was. Me, I was the boy in white, because I had the all-white baking uniform, not the usual gray/green collared shirt.
I looked at Shane and felt Owen and Stefanie look at me.
“I told you; I don’t like him.”
After a few more reports–he once sat in the dining room from 1 am to 5 am, for example, apparently waiting for me to arrive–Shane agreed that we could ban him. Next time he came in, if he took the mug out of the cafe, Jeri could tell him to not come back. We had to wait for him to leave with a mug, because corporate was more likely to approve that as grounds for banishing a customer than mere staring and weird behavior. The situation was unlikely to escalate to the corporate level, but Shane didn’t want to take the chance. Fine, I thought, at least he’ll be gone.
So we had a plan. We were prepared. The next day he came, and Nico looked into his car, and Jeri told him he couldn’t come back. And he had said “okay.”
He biked back the following evening around 7. Natasha and Dori were working. I had secretly hoped that he would return when Dori was working, because Dori was the most unpredictable person I had ever met. She was in her early sixties and looked no younger than 80. She had convinced Eric to dig a grave for her recently deceased dog, whose name was Girly, and who died in Dori’s arms one night. Dori held her body in bed all night, called the store early in the morning before the overnight shift had left, and told Eric that she needed some help. He showed up to Dori’s apartment and found her holding Girly. He asked what she needed, and she said a grave. She also had a bumper sticker that said “Eat My Grits,” but was not from and had never been to the south. Either because she didn’t understand the situation or because she understood it better than anyone, she wasn’t afraid of Ronan. When he came back, she called me.
“The guy’s here. What you want me to do?”
“Shane said to just call the police.”
“I’m not calling the cops.”
“Okay, Dori, fine, have Natasha do it. Just don’t say anything to the guy.”
Natasha called and explained the situation, and dispatch sent two officers. They arrived within ten minutes and parked their cruiser outside. Got out of their car, looked in, made eye contact with Natasha, looked at Ronan, she nodded to affirm that it was the right guy.
Then he ran. Ronan jumped from the table and left through the far door, which, conveniently for him, was close to the bike rack and far from the police. He hopped onto his bike, got the first few hard peddles out of the way while standing, and made a line through the parking lot for the road.
The cops, who had been halfway into the store when Ronan fled, turned around and started running after him, realized they couldn’t catch a bicycled man, and barked orders.
“Hey! Stop it! Hey you! Off the bike! Freeze! Freeze!”
He didn’t stop or freeze. He left the parking lot and turned left across the street as the officers scuttled back into the cruiser, backed up at an angle, skid their tires, flicked on their blue lights and sirens, and pursued.
A car is faster than a bike, and they closed the gap that Ronan had earned. He was biking down the road, they pulled up behind him, and through the loudspeaker system the cops again told him to stop it, freeze, and so on. He ignored them.
He biked for three quarters of a mile, first excited and fast then tired and slow, with the police sirens and lights, bright blue in the lavender hour air, persisting, until he reached a CVS parking lot. He turned in, stopped, got off the bike, put down the kickstand, and strolled inside without looking back. The officers parked and yelled, again with the hey stop it and freeze, and followed him into the store before grabbing his arm.
“What are you doing?”
“Shopping.”
“We just chased you.”
“I’m at the store.”
They pulled him outside, put his hands behind his head, fingers interlocked, and patted him down. No weapons, just a wallet with some cash and a license, which listed his name as Ronan.
Cuffed, put in the backseat of the cruiser.
“Ronan, can you confirm that’s your name?”
“Yes.”
“Ronan, have you taken anything we should know about tonight? Any drugs? Any drinking?”
“Just some coffee.”
“What were you doing there? Why did you run from us?”
“I was just waiting for someone.”
“Who were you waiting for?”
“A boy.”
“Which boy?”
“The boy in white. I wanted to talk with him.”
“He doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“I think he does.”
“He doesn’t, and they told you not to come back. It’s a private business. Their property. Their determination of who has right of entrance. If you go back you’re going to jail.”
The officers confirmed that the address on Ronan’s license was up to date, informed him that they were going to hold his bike overnight until a background check had cleared, but that they would return it the next day, and drove him home.
Ronan was a scientist, part-time. He lived a couple of miles from Tim Hortons, in a predominantly Somali neighborhood, although he was Russian, close to the lab where he spent three days a week looking for tick-borne disease antibodies in cerebrospinal fluid from patients with equivocal blood serum results. He lived with no other people, had no local relatives, owned his home, a car, and a bike, and had moved to town six months earlier. He told the police that he wanted to see me every day, and that I wanted to see him, too, but didn’t know it yet. He was charged with nothing, got his bike back, and never returned to the cafe.
The day after the chase to CVS, the police returned to Tim Hortons. They told us the story, gave us their personal phone numbers, and told us to call if we saw him again, even if he was just nearby.
Before leaving, one of the officers pulled me aside, and gave me Ronan’s address.
“Listen, Derek, stay away from that guy. He probably knows your car. Just avoid the neighborhood, it’s easier.”
“I never go there.”
“Good, and really, if you ever need anything, just call, it’s okay.”
“Alright, I will.”
“He’s a weird guy.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“No, really weird.”
“I know.”
“I don’t think you do.”
“I do. His look.”
“He lives with pigeons.”
“What?”
“His house is full of pigeons.”
“Pigeons?”
“Dozens. Cages, free. Everywhere.”
“Why?”
“He said he likes them.”
*****
Derek Brown is an instructor of writing at Koc University, in Istanbul. He lives there with his wife, Deniz, and their dog, Bernadette. They like to look at the Bosphorus.
