Talking “Breezy Poncho Bliss”

Welcome to the intro video and an excerpt from the fourth post of my weekly serial, “Sketches from the Café Confictura.” If you’d like to share a comment, please use the comment option at the end of this excerpt. To follow the mystery of Applewood, and get recipes from Mrs. Creaverton, writing advice from Roscoe Belesprit, and fashion tips from the Fastionista, please visit www.ClarissaJeanne.com for new posts every Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. EST.

Something’s been bugging Violet for a few days but she keeps denying that anything’s wrong, so I decided yesterday morning that the best thing to do was needle her until she realized that the quickest way to shut me up is to just tell me what’s going on. I came into the café, paid Violet for my caramel latte, and made a quip about her outfit: white slacks, a white turtleneck that made her short black hair look extra dramatic, and a silky white, black, and red plaid scarf knotted in front.

I said, “White after Labor Day, huh? Kind of a fashion faux pas, there, Violet.”

Had she been feeling right, I would have gotten a glare, a snarky comment, or possibly a scone thrown at me. I’d not only questioned Violet’s fashion sense, but I made the equally offensive mistake of being passé. White after Labor Day is apparently fine now, provided you’re wearing a heavier material. I made the mistake last year of doubting Violet on that and was assigned mounds of required reading from Harper’s BAZAAR to Vogue.

Instead of flogging me, however, her moue only deepened into a full-on frown. She patted my hand. “You are a good friend,” she said in the affected French accent that goes beautifully with everything she wears. “You are trying to annoy me so I begin to talk, and who knows what comes out, including what is bothering me.”

“Well, whatever works,” I said.

She came around from the register and sat with me at a table in the front room, but near the far wall. The midmorning frenzy had by then evaporated. This was a normal lull, by the way; we were all happy to see that, throughout the week, there still were frenzies at all the normal frenzy times: early morning coffee fill-up, midmorning coffee break, mid-afternoon coffee refill. Whatever damage Mark Raynid had done with his article about Mrs. Creaverton’s new diet, and whatever damage Nessie was working on with Pastor Sweeney, it hadn’t as yet kept the folks of Applewood from getting their caffeine fixes.

“I have been thinking,” she said, “of Dr. Graham Teek.”

“Oh,” I said, stretching the word out as long as the smitten looks she’d given Graham when she met him last week.

Instantly, her cheeks matched the red in her scarf. “This is not what bothers me, what you are thinking. There is no chance of romance. He wears a baseball cap,” she said as explanation.

I wondered if she was in denial of her own feelings or if she just didn’t want to admit them aloud. I let that drop for now and sipped my latte. “Okay, so then what’s up?”

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