Sitting well placed at the center of the café Sheryl plucks away at her cranberry scone while deftly skimming today's editorial page. In her mid fifties now, with a milky foam colored coif, this morning she blow dried and curling ironed her hair into a perfectly rounded bob at her ears the exact same way she has every morning since she was fifteen and living in the overly quiet and self conscience 1940's neighborhood of Land Park.
With four grown children and two ex-husbands Sheryl usually entertains herself away from her current husband Charles and his less refined interests of scuba diving and charity work, though they do share an agreed upon love of golf.
She opens her not so recently 'done' lips, posturing a real opinion, and begins letting highbrow over-classed non-thoughts spill out over her false chin.
"Hillary is worthless. I will not waste a breath discussing her." Sheryl began her announcement.
She had the false chin put in when she had her eyebrows stretched, nose slimmed, neck tucked and lips injected. The plastic mount in front of her jaw originally took some getting used to. Especially for Bradley who meets Sheryl, Timothy and Timothy's wife Ann, every Saturday morning from nine to eleven o'clock at the Weatherstone Café in the far northwest corner of Sacramento's Midtown neighborhood.
An old brick garage reformed into a coffee house the Weatherstone was once upon a time an independent cafe but is now run by one of the largest local roasters, Java City.
A mish-mash of business types in a rush to work and twenty something's, pierced and inked, crowd up the small sterile foyer where Sheryl and the others typically hold court.
Most hours of the day, puffs of cigarette smoke and banter waft in from the gated patio, ferns and golden-red Japanese maple trees stretch through the rod iron fence line towards the pergola covered with canvas in counter rythem to the sound of the slow running fountain. Outdoor tables strewn with off- duty cab drivers playing chess, Goth types smoking cloves and recovering addicts talking to themselves (or each other) usually fill up by noon, encouraging people like Sheryl to clutch her purse tightly upon exit as she would inevitable leave before "they" got too large in number.
Bradley, who was portly and kind looking with beaver-like overtones, had gotten heavier and heavier each successive year of his midlife for he did not pick away at his scone. His well-groomed beard and mustache had silvered in the fifteen years of their salon like gathering, his inconspicuous rectangular glasses turning to large bifocal squares.
This physical deterioration was probably Bradley's biggest pet peeve as it made taking photographs (his most enjoyable hobby) much more difficult. He would attempt to take his spectacles off and peer through the cloudy lens but could never quite pin point his target so he would put them back on clump his face up and hover awkwardly against the viewfinder, exhaling with a sigh after the shot went off uneventfully, muttering "Shoot".
He would surely give up taking pictures altogether in the next few years.
He sat this Saturday morning in August, eyes magnified, observing Sheryl as if he had been tightly tucked into his chair like a stuffed toy chipmunk. Dressed in gray wool slacks and a baby blue cashmere vest Bradley steadily balanced his latte on his thigh with his left hand and cupped his tidily folded newspaper with his right.
"So it must be something else", she finished with insistence.
Sheryl made her smug statement, while tapping her manicured index finger filled nail on the circular wooden bistro table like a raptor with a "wrap-wrap-wrap" noise. Her counterparts, who were in the midst of various mandible chews and swallows grumbled and shifted in their black plastic chairs.
Bradley gazed past Sheryl out the floor to ceiling windows onto the sunlit morning sidewalk. Uninterested in her volley's he thought to himself that he had enjoyed those early years so much more. Back when Sheryl actually looked like Sheryl instead of like one of the river-road scarecrow's lining the Sacramento Valley's fruit tree farms. The frozen, wide-eyed grimace and straw like hair was cute yet frightening at the same time.
He had had a crush on her for a time many years ago. Fancying her petite ballet dancer calves and tanned bosom before the varicose veins and liver spots arrived. Just the thought of her pretty feet in his hands was enough to make his belly flutter with hummingbirds.
"Bradley, your thoughts?" Timothy inquired from beneath his conductor's moustache.
Invisibly embarrassed under his furry face for his old secret Bradley stretched towards the table to put his cup down, readjusted and spoke.
"What about Chelsea?"
"Chelsea who?" Sheryl pursed with bits of undetected mocha froth trapped at the left crease of her lips.
"Chelsea Clinton?" Ann guessed.
"Ugh. Like mother, like daughter! She has done the smartest thing she could do by staying out of her mother's campaign's and distancing herself from her father's pathetic philandering." Sheryl finished.
"Actually… I hear she's been out on the campaign trail. Read a New York Times piece about her with some video clips a week or so ago and she gave a more than decent speech in her mother's favor. We could have a future Miss Clinton two times over." Timothy rebuffed looking around the group.
"Isn't your daughter about Chelsea's age Sheryl?" Bradley questioned.
"Yes. Well, no. Samantha is a few years older but they are near in age..." Sheryl paused
"and far from alike!" She added with disdain.
That was something else, Bradley remembered, that he didn't understand about Sheryl. She didn't really appear to like her youngest daughter, who happened to be a regular at Weatherstone in the evenings and sometimes came in early on Saturday mornings as well. Sam ordered latte's like him and was always weighted down by some odd assortment of art supplies and books.
He'd always been curious about her but Sheryl never did more than introductions when her daughter crossed paths with the Saturday morning grouping. It seemed like maybe it was territorial. Sheryl's daughter was too much like the riff-raff that sat outside and Sheryl steered clear of those types.
Bradley was quietly intrigued though. He liked to sit outside on occasion while reading his book and listen to people's conversations full of non-sense, self-aggrandizement and therapy. From Burning Man to AA there was always some sort of wild tear to be picked up on.
