***STILL NEEDS A TITLE***

Callie Daniels settled down into a chair at one of the few remaining tables in the crowded café. She set her steaming coffee cup down on the marble tabletop and dropped her bag into the empty seat next to her. Shrugging out of her red pea coat, she pushed her dishwater-blonde hair out of her eyes and pulled a notebook from her bag. The notebook was nondescript: a blue leather journal about the size of a wallet. She glanced around at all of the people around her, chatting over lattes, loudly gossiping about the newest celebrity scandal, scurrying in from the snow falling delicately to the earth.

Her gaze landed on a man in the corner of the café. The man was older but she could still see the remnants of a handsome face in the laugh lines around his mouth and the way his eyes shone as he quietly read his paper, pausing every so often to drink from a dark green coffee mug. He wore an old black blazer, worn threadbare at the elbows but still elegant. Callie could tell right away that this man was intriguing, like a James Bond in the role of grandpa.

She sipped her peppermint cappuccino, a drink her own father called ‘a lame frou-frou drink’, and began to describe the whole scene in her journal: the bustling cluster of well-dressed ladies at a large table in the front, shopping bags creating a sea of color around their feet; the young couple by the windows, their fingers twined together; the middle-aged man grading papers with a harried look on his scruffy face. Callie described the teal blue walls and the smell of fresh brewed coffee and newly baked muffins wafting through the room.

Her gaze drifted again to the man in the corner who would occasionally glance up at someone entering the café through the revolving door, always with a look of disappointment scrawled across his features. His eyes turned to look out the window for a long moment then he pulled a pack of playing cards from a briefcase on the floor next to him. Carefully, he shuffled the deck then arranged the cards for a game of solitaire. He finished the game and drank the rest of his coffee, all the while looking as if he were waiting on someone to come in the door with the cold breeze.
Without being noticed, Callie watched the man. She noticed that he bit his lip when he looked up at people entering. She watched him tap out a nervous rhythm with his feet between games of solitaire.

Callie noticed the tiny details. She was a writer at heart and had need of an interesting person for a new story. She had finally found the man of her story.

~*~*~

The next Thursday afternoon shone bright, but cold and Callie stepped into the café with a feeling of excitement. The man sat at the same table, the green mug in front of him. Callie planned to maybe introduce herself. She found that the people you least expected to be interesting were the ones with the wealth of secrets stockpiled in their minds. Callie took her place at the same table that she had occupied the week before, pen in hand and blue journal on the tabletop.

The man again looked as if he were waiting on someone to breeze through the door from the cold. He kept glancing at his watch and shaking his head in obvious frustration. Callie sat for half an hour, observing, before she got up and made her way to his table.

“Hello.” She murmured happily. “Is this seat taken?”

The man looked up at her in a startled manner, wrinkling the newspaper in his hands.

“Oh, yes. I mean, no. Please, sit.” He stood and moved to pull the chair out for her.

“Why, thank you!” Callie was impressed. Off the movie screen she had never seen an actual man pull a chair out for a woman. She immediately liked the man.

“Well. Whatever made a pretty girl like you decide to sit with an old geezer like me?” The man’s eyes were a slate grey color that matched the snowy sky of the December day.

“Good question. My name is Callie and I like to think of myself as a writer. I was wondering if you would like to contribute to a story, Mr…?”

“Taylor. Quinten Taylor.”

Callie smiled. Even his name sounded like one out of a James Bond film.

“Are you going to change my name for your little story?” He stared at her intently. There was no trace of him needing contacts or glasses. His gaze pierced her like an arrow and she found that she wouldn’t be able to lie to such a gaze.

“Not unless you want me to.”

“Nah. My name is cool. Keep it.” He said with a smile.

Callie scribbled in her notebook.

“So. I saw you here last week. It seemed as though you were waiting for somebody.” She probed.

“I was. But I know he isn’t going to show up. He never was good with keeping appointments.”

“Who? A friend? A sibling?”

“Both, I suppose you could say.”

“What is his name?”

“Frankie Marks.”

“How did you meet him?”

Quinten settled back into his chair, taking a sip of his steaming coffee.
“We met…Oh, you wouldn’t believe me.”

Callie pursed her lips. She thought to herself that this guy was going to be harder to get a story out of than she had anticipated. Her fingers twisted the pretty silver ring on her right hand.

“Try me.” Callie said, determination glinting in her blue eyes.
Quinten shuffled his deck of cards and began to speak in his deep, refined brogue.

“I met Frankie Marks by accident. Frankie lived in the same neighborhood that I did, growing up. We knew each other only at school. I was the brown-nosed cookie-cutter preppie and Frankie was the stereotypical bad boy. We had never spoken two words to each other until the day that he got arrested.”

“For what?” Callie studied the old man’s features, trying to read the lines in his face like a street map.

“I had just walked out of the museum downtown and was headed home. I had a job as a curator there. Frankie barreled toward me down the sidewalk, not stopping or looking up from the concrete. I had my nose in an art book and didn’t notice a thing. He ran straight into me and knocked me to the ground. He yanked me up by the arm and didn’t let go. He pulled me all the way down the street and we ducked behind a dumpster in a deserted alley, though this move was unnecessary. Apparently he had stolen some jewelry and the cops were chasing him. Eventually, they caught up to him, after he made me swear that I wouldn’t rat him out.” Quinten chuckled to himself as Callie frantically tried to get the whole story down.

“We have been best friends ever since.”

Callie smiled. It was a nice story, but there was more to it than he was telling her. “And then what?”

“And happily ever after. Are you really that unlearned?” He grinned like a mischievous child.

“Lies and deceit. Tell.”

“Frankie and I were both very good at keeping secrets. That was why we were recruited for jobs under Joseph McCarthy. We were both basically spies for the United States in our own country. Every couple months we would pack up and relocate to another small town, trying to find Communist sympathizers to turn in. In the time we worked with McCarthy, Frankie took a bullet for me and I had helped him find the girl of his dreams. We got paid a LOT of money for ratting people out, enough to pay for a whole life twice over. But it wasn’t a life. The only thing both of us craved was to settle down. He had his dreams of owning his own bookstore. I wanted to write for a local paper. We both wanted to plant roots somewhere, with wives to cook for us when we came home from work and kids to play in the yard with. The ridiculous ‘American dream’ was what the whole country wanted.”

Quinten sat back in his chair, remnants of the past darkening his eyes.
“Did you get your ‘American dream’?” Callie whispered.

“Eventually. I did start writing for a paper in Orlando, Florida, covering the police beat. At the office I met a woman. Her name was Sophie. We got married in the fall, on a rainy day on the beach. She loved the rain. Still does actually.” His eyes filled with a love that words could not express and he lovingly caressed the band of gold on his left hand.
“We had three kids: Mark, Christopher, and Jane. I loved my life. I had everything that any man could ever want: healthy kids, a wife I loved with every fiber of my being, a roof over my family’s heads and food on the table. I had a job that I loved, faith in my Creator that no one could ever take from me, and a best friend that I am not sure I could have gone a day without. I am utterly positive that I was the luckiest man in the whole universe.”

A waitress stepped up to the table and politely asked if they needed anything. Both of them declined, waiting for the waitress to depart and bother other customers.

The odd pair sat in comfortable silence for a long moment, both contemplating what was said and what was yet to come.

“When were you born?” Quinten suddenly asked.

“September of 1990.” Callie answered.

Quinten tapped his finger against his chin. “Frankie was diagnosed with lung cancer in November of 1990.”

Callie’s lips turned into a frown. She had seen the effects of cancer in her own family and instantly felt sympathy for anyone who had witnessed it firsthand. “I’m so sorry,” she murmured and reached out to cover his hand with hers. She had spent a whole hour with this man and already she felt as though she had known him for years.

The man before her didn’t cry, didn’t even blink his eyes. He was silent, stoic, strong, for the man who wasn’t there right now, stronger than he ought to have been.

“Frankie was stronger than me. I broke down when he told me the news. I had seen people waste away, fold in on themselves from cancer, a disease that no one knew how to treat. To say that I was simply afraid for my best friend would have been the worst understatement in the cosmos. Petrified, terrified, distressed, and panic-stricken: I was all of them at once. Frankie had always been the absolute epitome of strength. It was unfathomable that a tiny speck inside his lung could lay him so low. The cancer set in fast. He started to shrink. It broke my heart to know that I could only sit back and watch as my best friend grew so weak that he couldn’t breathe without the aid of a machine. He couldn’t go for his daily run, which he was so rigorous about. It physically pained me to go and visit him and Carina, his wife. Sometimes, when I allowed myself a weak moment, I cried in front of him.” Quinten stopped his reverie to take a small swig from a miniscule flask he inconspicuously slid from his blazer pocket. Callie caught the sharp scent of alcohol as it wafted across the tabletop.

She didn’t know what to say, though she knew the intense feeling of helplessness. Her own grandfather had contracted a tumor at the base of his brain and he had slowly folded in on himself, losing his memories as he shrank away into nothingness. All she could offer the now crumpled man in the now sad blazer was her silence, her understanding, the knowledge that he was not alone with his feelings.

“He’s the one I’m waiting for, actually.”

“He conquered his cancer?” Callie took the risk and hoped that this man’s story had a happy ending.

“No.” Quinten sat stoically again, not allowing himself to show such weakness as tears for a man who was long dead and had been stronger than he. “Frankie died less than six months after he was diagnosed. I was there when they turned the oxygen machine off. I watched his chest stop moving.” The secret government official that he had been years ago showed now in the hard steel of the set of his eyes. “I still wait for him. We used to come here and have coffee and discuss the news. Call me crazy, but I feel like if I keep coming back, he will show up, that I will have dreamed this whole terrible scenario up, that none of it will have been true and we can return to our lives.”

Callie sat in calm silence. She could grasp why he did it, why he waited every Thursday afternoon for his dead best friend to come see him. Molly Shay had been Callie’s best friend for six years and not a day passed that they didn’t speak. It was easy to imagine that when she was older and if Molly wasn’t around, she would keep on hoping for a miracle.

Quinten turned his wrist over to take a glimpse at the simple black watch there. “Miss Daniels, I am afraid that I must request a leave of absence.” Here his gray eyes took on such a delightful look that it infected Callie and she smiled back at him. “I have a date with a very good looking girl tonight.”

“Oh, well, I mustn’t detain you any further, Mr. Taylor. Thank you so much for talking with me today.”

The man studied his hands on the tabletop. “I haven’t told anyone that story. Nobody except my family knows how much Frankie meant to me.”
Callie stood and moved around the table to hug the man. “I am glad you told me.” He hugged her back before she sat down in her seat again. Her notebook sat in front of her, untouched since she had recorded the events that lead up to Quinten and Frankie meeting for the first time.

Quinten stood and picked up his briefcase. “Maybe I will see you here again sometime soon.”

“I’m sure you will.” Callie smiled, genuinely happy to have met this man.
Callie watched the figure she described as James Bond as a grandpa move fluidly out the door and into the cold gray day.