The clink of a fork against a dessert plate. The dull thud of a mug on the wooden tabletop. Maja’s too-late, too-sweet dinner landed decisively in front of her. Her dad always made sure she ate healthily. He let her have sweets (probably more often than other kids' parents), but never as a meal and definitely never at night. He crouched down across from her, dragging the chair closer with both hands.
"You stay here. I’ll be back soon."
"Is everything okay?" she asked.
"It's okay," he replied with a small smile. Then came a quick kiss on the forehead, a ruffle of her hair, and swoosh—he gave the Barista one of those fast, quiet head jerks dads do when they’re trusting someone without saying it. The Barista jerked his head back, just a tiny bit, like I’ve got her. Don’t worry. That seemed to be enough. Dad disappeared, leaving only the metallic chime of the café doorbell. And Maja.
She knew it wasn’t true. Just like when she used to ask, "Show me how much you love me, Daddy!" He pretended to measure an itty-bitty distance between thumb and forefinger. Barely enough to fit a Lego man—definitely not her, so big now, almost grown. She'd overheard him telling Grandpa that by her birthday he’d be “a third of the way to not screwing up her childhood.” A third was a lot. Eating a third of a cake? That’s nearly too much at once. He hadn’t screwed up that much yet, she thought, slicing into her caramel tart. And anyway, the Lego thing wasn’t true. Her dad loved her more than all the Lego bricks in the world could ever show. She didn’t know how she knew. But she did. Just like she knew now that things were not okay.
Forkful by forkful, the tart was disappearing. The milk had grown a skin, so Maja pushed the mug to the edge of the table. Yuck.
"Don't enjoy it?" asked the Barista from behind the counter. His mop of hair made him look like young Kovu from The Lion King II. Of course, she only said that to herself. She learned to recognize things you only ever live by yourself. For instance, sometimes she saw different animals in the clouds, but when she tried to point them out to her classmates, they laughed and called her a dumb baby or a "wacko." A loony like her mom. Her classmates didn’t care about rabbits, lions or old cartoons. This guy probably didn’t either. Or maybe?
"Do you know The Lion King?"
"Not personally," he winks. "But lions are just bigger cats. I bet they drink milk."
She made a face. "Even with the skin on top?"
He nodded to himself, as if Maja had just given him exactly what he wanted to know. Then he spun into a blur of barista-only dance: squat to open the fridge, reach up for a clean mug, pour-pour from a carton into a silver pitcher, steam it under the hissing wand. Bubbling. One spoonful of honey and eight moves later, a new, hot milk stood in front of her. No skin. She took the first sip and felt the warmth move through her, from throat to belly. Heaven.
"Bottoms up while it’s warm," Kovu smiled. A small star tattoo sat just by his eye. Tiny, but not so tiny it couldn’t be empty inside. Min-i-ma-lis-tic, she said in her head, slowly, savoring each syllable of a word her dad used for tattoos like that. Maja knew a lot about tattoos. She knew a lot about art in general. She knew a lot of artists too. The biggest one, of course, was her dad, Marek "Aslan" Halber.
A telly lady once told wild stories about him, then gave this look Maja's grandfather called "those damned goo-goo eyes," and said something Maja never forgot: "When the artist's beloved wife fell into schizophrenia, Halber put his painting career on hold to raise their daughter." Sometimes, after a safari game, her dad helped her clean up toys, groaning with every giraffe or elephant he bent to pick up. Maja figured that must be the sacrifice the lady meant. And when the receptionist lady put them on hold, every Sunday afternoon when they called The Place to talk with Mom, she wondered if maybe Daddy's career was waiting on hold somewhere too. She just hoped it wasn't him calling, because the bill for that call would be longer than a toilet paper roll. Well! Wherever the career was put, her dad's painter’s brush was replaced by a tattooist’s needle. Close enough, Maja figured, but grown-ups seemed to think there was a big difference.
So these days, he made tattoos. Sometimes like the ones young Kovu had. He was smiling at her now from across the table. He’d sat down, since the cafe was nearly empty. His shirt—probably white in the morning, now the color of coffee—was rolled up to the elbows, revealing more ink on his tanned arms. Maja took her time studying them, and Kovu looked like he had all the time just for that. Like he’s paused the world so she could watch unhurriedly. When he breathed, his belly rose, but otherwise he didn’t move. No jittery leg. No sighing. None of the things grown-ups did around kids. Kovu was like her dad and grandfather, only more so.
"I think things aren’t okay. And something bad happened to my mom," she said, once she'd memorized the tattoos and the last sip of milk had warmed her belly.
Maybe tonight her words lived in her belly instead of her head. Maybe that’s why she could finally let the heaviest ones come out—they needed the milky way to find their way out into the open. Or maybe Kovu, by just breathing and nothing else, had left so much empty space that the words floated up on their own. It’s hard to know.
"I think you might be right," he said, nodding slowly, his head as heavy as her belly-full words. "I think something really bad might have happened, and no adult is going to want to tell you exactly what."
"Are you allowed to say things like that to me?"
"Like what?"
"True things."
Kovu—who in her mind wasn’t the Barista at all anymore—looked at her for one, two, three blinks. When nothing else happened, he made a face like Grandpa did when he ate licorice. A sort of smile that turned sour at the end. Then he looked away, toward the shelf of books, and when he finally spoke, Maja wasn’t sure if he was talking to her or to the spines of The Chronicles of Narnia.
"No. Probably not."
In that moment, Maja felt a sudden, quiet thankfulness for something that squeezed her—tightly but gently, like when dad clicks her seatbelt snugly and then double-checks to make sure it’s secure. She couldn’t quite name what it was.
Kovu, however, understood perfectly. He’d lived long enough to know that keeping kids in the dark doesn’t stop the pain. It just takes away the reasons why and leaves them wondering what hurts so much.
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