She worked as a cashier at the British Petroleum station east of Twin Lake, Michigan. When a severe car accident had blocked the state road between Twin Lake and Holton, she counted seven ambulances racing by, making all full, prudent speed to Mercy Hospital in Muskegon. Her hair had turned gray just within the last year. Her smile brightened when you looked at her for a while longer than necessary.
She's the stalwart that keeps the Koffee Kuppe staffed year after year, bridging gaps occuring when the younger barristas move on to better arrangements, marriages or colleges away from Fremont. She doesn't wear a colorful headscarf.
She's a mother who visits the Fremont Public Library with her daughter, a high-school girl who loves to read book after book of the same romance series. She has three of them stacked before her on the table. The Koffee Kuppe has wireless, so she can social network online while her daughter sits across from her in a newly built booth. The booth table is a vitrine, containing memorabilia from the Gerber Baby Food factory, under glass for easy viewing.
She's a former librarian, now raising three lovely children, writing her chapters before the three wake up and after they go to sleep. She is read from the manuscript of her third novel, newly published online, eReader format only at first. She signed many hardcovers for the twenty people who sat through her nervous presentation. She's working on a novel about a character named Minnie, an unmarried woman in her seventh decade, still willing to run a bed and breakfast, trying to document the presence of haunting spirits. She wrote a romance story as her husband courted her, faithfully recording dates and conversations, and when he proposed, she permitted him to write the final chapter. At the time, she vowed she would never write another romance novel.
She's a librarian. She worked for the romance novelist when the novelist served the Fremont Public Library as a reference librarian. The current librarian is single and she introduced her former supervisor, expressing a kindly envy towards the novelists perfect life and repertoire of skills, literary and practical. One Christmas, the romance novelist stitched a quilt for her to hang on her wall.
When the romance novelist began coughing a minute into her speech, a woman in a red sweater lept out of her seat and ran a bottle of water to the podium. The novelist held up a glass of water and the woman smiled and returned to her seat. The woman in the red sweater reads and critiques the novelist's weekly chapter. The usual criticism for the novelist is three words: "More Feeling Here". The novelist critiques a weekly chapter for our woman in the red sweater. "Less Action" is the usual remark.
The River Stop Saloon is open again after many years closed, opening in the middle of summer, when kayakers and tubers throng the Muskegon River, below its final hydroelectric dam. The owner's wife greets the newcomer at the door and offers him a drink. All of her guests are waiting until she returns to the game of Wii Golf. The house actually carries BadAss beer and that's what the newcomer orders, and she calls him by name, having learned it. The regulars ask him where he's from and why would he wind up in a Newaygo bar, a guy from Muskegon. Lucinda slips up behind and gives the Muskegon guy a basket of popcorn and returns to Wii Golf. A fellow comes round selling bouquets and roses by the stem. He gets no takers.
The lights go out in a small office, a hole-in-the-wall space behind the River Stop Saloon with a big picture window. Three men, all of them unshaven, sporting long salt-and-pepper beards once seen in pictures of Odd Fellows, before the day of the BIC razor. A woman with long auburn red hair, wearing a long down-filled over coat locks the door and a pedestrian looking in the window asks, "What is the Sanctuary of the Stones"? She describes the charitable works, stocking food pantries and assisting the homeless. One of the men drops a ring of keys, and a rainbow flag fob plops on the slushy sidewalk. "Well, if I'm ever homeless in Newaygo, I'll look up the Sanctuary of the Stones", and he wishes her a good night. Looking in the window, he sees stones and rock gargoyles on a shelves and a hand-lettered sign in the window. "Never be Afraid".
She's leaning against corner of the bar at the Sportsman's Lounge, the second bar in downtown Newaygo. Standing so close to the bartender, Dawn, in conversation, she appears to be a member of staff. A man walks in and she feels a different vibe in the room, hugs her friend, and departs. The man offers her a Jagermeister as she marches by and she turns it down without slowing her walk doorward. She does turn her head around to look at him before the back door closes behind her.
A man shows up in Sportsman's Lounge with a plastic bucket, filled with bouquets and long stem roses. He offers his wares to a man sitting in midway along the bar's length, slicing up a sizzler, who asks him questions about his business. The flower salesperson is driving out next to Latitudes, a stagecoach hotel now serving up great food and home of the Steelhead Lounge, where plenty of guys might buy local women a stem. In the kitchen, cookie is wearing a Billabong tee shirt, but B and G are out of view. She walks through double doors and comes on over. She only wants one stem, and there's only yellow roses, and she picks one and pays two dollars for it. The man looks up from his steak and tells her that a yellow rose means friendship. She replies, "He knows what it means". The man sees her give it to the dishwasher.
Heather explained that all the pool leagues cancelled tonight because of the snow and ice storm. That's why she was wiping down tables and taking out trash early. But she sat down in a bar stool beside a man and explained, she wasn't punching out early. She didn't want to leave her friend, the bartender, alone in the huge and rambling interior of the Half-Moon Saloon, a roadhouse on Michigan 37, near Bailey, Michigan. Later, the two walked out to their cars together, parked behind the roadhouse, alert.
The man pretended to read Sandy's mind. "I bet you love to shoot Jager", he guessed. She wondered aloud how he knew. He pointed out the clues. She wore a black hat with Jagermeister in orange Gothic script. She wore a black jersey with Jagermeister emblazoned in that orange script across the front. She stood close to a machine that rapidly chills shots of Jager to 33 degrees Fahrenheit, two bottles turned upside down in the top. Heather turned down a shot and so did Sandy. The owner had banned drinking on the job.
Joselyn Vaughn is a nom de plume for a woman who lives near Fremont, Michigan and writes romance novels.
http://joselynvaughn.com/
http://joselynvaughn.com/
Koffee Kuppe
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