When Mortimer arrived at the coffee house, he looked a the tinted panes spanning the front of it, and noticed the wind had lifted all the hair on the right side of his head into a sort-of hands-up position. His hair was like that, surrendering to the elements at the drop of a raindrop or a barometric pressure drop. He saw his face in the brown mirror and started working on his hair- palms, saliva, smashing, taming. They wouldn’t lay down easily.

It was time for him to go in, so he had to give up. The hair bowed over his visible scalp like a kneeling monk, or a down-dog yogi, and he was frustrated. But what do you do. It’s always been like that.

He went on down the pane on the sidewalk to the clear glass door bisecting the building in the front, and he went in.

To his left, sitting on stools at the thin table against the tinted facade were two large, muscly men who drank the house swill staring at him. Their faces were question marks and he looked away quickly. He got that look a lot from the type. He was tall and underweight, except his head was round and long like a watermelon that had been left out in the yard long after harvest season. And his hair was thin and spirited.

He looked toward the full length counter at the back of the building where the cashier talked to a short man in a gray jacket at the front of the line. The barista played with a machine like an airline pilot going through flight pre-check, reaching for levers and flipping switches with professional inattention.

In the back of the shop to his right sat a person hunched over a small two-person table. It appeared to have long gray hair running down its bowed back, and he saw it lifting its arms to bring a mug of dark-roasted happiness to its head. He smiled, and then started walking around the two tables two his right to walk don the aisle to the hunching drinker.

“Are you my mother?” he asked when he passed the long-haired figure, rounding the table to pull out the chair across from it.

“I hope not”, the cafe patron barked in a baritone voice.

He looked over and saw a green-eyed, hairy-handed man in a Jethro Tull t-shirt who had been scanning a People magazine look up at him with a hazy stare, and the bottom of his soul fell out.

“Oh, sorry. I thought you were my friend Ana Reese!”

“Do I look like a woman to you?”

“Uhh, well, uhh, no, uhh…”

“Get the hell away from me.”

“Yeah- uhh sorry.” One of the meatheads across the room by the front window still stared at him.

Backing away from the Tull dude, he scanned the rest of the tables around him, but saw no Ana Reese.

Why are you staring at me, meathead guy, he thought, and then the meathead guy turned to his right and lifted his mug and swigged a mouthful of coffee. His gaze returned on him.

No Ana Reese. Not in here.

“Dude”, the meathead across the shop lobbed.

“Dude.” He tried to not look over there,

“Dude!”

And then the meathead in all black with the shiny dome got up from his stool and started walking toward him.

“Dude.” Distance closing.

And then he was in his face.

“Uhh- uhh- wha yeah?” Mortimer of the Fanning Head said, heart-racing.

“Dude” he said, mouth in a crooked smile, his left eye tooth one, and then his right arm raised and pointed towards the shop door.

“Dude- your car door. You left it open across the street.”

He followed the man’s muscly arm under the long sleeve tee down to the tip of his pointing index finger, to the shop door, which filled with glow as it opened, and in walked Ana Reese with her long silver-dyed hair and young red lips.

A vision of beauty and familiarity and the next person who told him he left his door open across the street, but she shut it for him- “it’s gonna cost you.”