A Most Original Story
(A Breen Family Member Introduction)
By Lisa Shiroff
Copyright 2014 Lisa Shiroff
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This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Books by Lisa Shiroff:
Hitting the Sauce
Revenge Café
Short Stories by Lisa Shiroff:
What You Tell Yourself
What Others Tell You
Introduction
Rumor has it the Breen family can trace their ancestry to the eighteenth century, back to the audacious and beautiful, red-headed pirate Anne Bonny. Whether or not it’s true, no one knows. Though all agree her DNA would explain some of the more eccentric traits commonly shared by Bob’s relatives. Various members of the Breen family will be prominently featured in upcoming novels. But, before we go on to them, let’s meet Bob and his (future) wife, Gigi.
Charmaine Gillette was a woman with a plan. Determined to leave her provincial Canadian life behind, one where she pretended to like hockey and tolerate the cold, she intended to move to a warmer climate and live what she called an original life. She would change her name to Gigi, as her birth name always reminded her of toiletries, and move to Hollywood. Hollywood, Florida, that is, because most other small-town girls did the unoriginal thing and went to Hollywood, California.
It was a typical Canadian winter morning when her flight took off from Montreal: cold and gray. The clouds were low and so thick, they prevented her from seeing the snow-covered world shrink beneath the plane as she ascended into the sky. But the weather was sunny and bright in south Florida when she was told to put her tray table up and her seatback in its upright and locked position. And she did watch as the vivid world grew larger and larger outside her tiny window. She felt quite small when the plane touched down on the runway.
Once safely ensconced in a taxi she gripped her smallest paisley suitcase, the one loaded with false eyelashes and crystal earrings, and took stock of her adventure so far. She had given the cabbie the address of a restaurant where a friend of her aunt’s hair-dresser’s cousin had secured a job for her. Her new, original, life had begun.
The bigness of the moment expanded within her and she sat straighter in the back seat of the taxi.
Gazing out the side window she eagerly took in the details of her new environment, which at first was rather anti-climatic: colossal Interstate Ninety-five had no unique style or distinct characteristics. It was as unoriginal as the highways back home. But her optimism remained undampened. The road was undergoing a massive construction project. It looked to Gigi that improvements were being made and upgrades were being installed. She took it as a good omen for her own life and smiled at the barricades segregating the through traffic from the construction trucks. Their stenciled label, Bob’s Barricades, repeatedly flashed by her window. The name’s perpetual flickering in her mind seemed to suggest to Gigi that she needed to get a new hair cut.
Meanwhile, Officer Bob Breen was trying to get some sleep after spending another restless night street sweeping. He was feeling a little off balance, as if another bout of vertigo was imminent. His doctor had told him the vertigo was a result of stress and that he needed a hobby. Bob didn’t understand. Not that he was in denial about being stressed. The whole world was out of balance, he thought. Shouldn’t everybody be stressed? How could a hobby could set anything right? Although the sweeping helped.
He couldn’t remember exactly when he’d started sweeping the streets at night. Like many of his fellow police officers, he used to bounce at a club from midnight until four in the morning. But at some point he felt he was out of proportion for the place: either he was too poor for the skinny dancing girls or they were too young for him. Instead of figuring it out, he started sweeping at the corner of Hayes Street and Surf Road, less than a block away from the beach.
That corner haunted him in a bad way. It was the corner when he first realized the world’s ledger was out of balance. He’d been called to the sight of an accident one morning. A delivery truck driver had fallen asleep at the wheel and crashed into a doughnut-shop waitress’s rusted VW Bug. The waitress’s six-year-old daughter was in the back seat. The daughter was fine, but her mother had been killed.
Bob had stood beside an EMT as she examined the girl. He needed to know the child was as okay as she could possibly be.
“It don’t make sense,” the girl had said not to the EMT but to him. Her dark brown eyes penetrated his soul. “Mommy waited until the light went green. That wasn’t ‘posed to happen! Why did it happen?”
Bob looked up at the sky to find an answer. There wasn’t one.
Who was keeping track of all this anyway, he’d wonder as he swept. The pencil pushers back at headquarters counted the bullets at the end of each day and demanded accounts to explain mileage on the cars. They had the details of police chaos accounted for in line-item precision, with each cent balanced by a specific action, and each decision backed up by a particular reason. Except for that little girl. No one could balance out her loss.
She had been right that morning. It didn’t make sense. He had tried speaking to a priest. He then called a rabbi. When neither of them were able to help, he reached out to his aunt who made a living as a psychic medium. No one understood his question, therefore none of them were able to provide a satisfactory answer. Could anyone explain why the Universe was so very out of balance? Could someone help him set it right?
The more he thought about it, the more compelled Bob felt to sweep the streets at that corner. When one of his fellow officers discovered him in the act, he’d been ordered to visit a counselor for an evaluation. It was determined he was stable and possibly entering his mid-life crisis a decade early. The shrink also suggested that maybe Bob was trying to sweep the memory away, which almost made sense to Bob. Perhaps he was trying to erase all evidence of an unrightable wrong.
Gigi secured an apartment a block away from where she waited tables at the Seaside Grille. For her first domestic undertaking, she bought two sets of curtains for each window as well as for the sliding glass doors that led to her balcony. She needed the two sets in order to double hang them. It was a shame, after all, to keep those cheerful flowered panels all to herself. By double hanging the curtains, regardless of which side of the window you were on, you’d be able to see the orange hibiscus flowers and big green leaves on the sky blue background. She lived confident, knowing that she was brightening the day of anyone looking up toward the second floor as they walked to or from the beach on Hays Street.
She quickly developed a reputation for being the best waitress on the boardwalk—and the most recognizable. With her crystal earrings dangling below her hair line, her skinny legs and her very big blue eyes, Gigi was an original woman. There was something about her that Bob couldn’t name. Some quality, some brightness, some . . . thing. He’d think long and hard about it after his shift each day when she’d bring him a rum and Coke and ask how he was doing.
His sentiments were shared by many of the male diners at the Grille. The flirting ran rampant on the restaurant’s floor, albeit often one-sided: Gigi would flirt back only enough to secure a good tip. She wasn’t going to settle on just any man. She was looking for an original one. And while she had no idea wha
t she meant, she was a very patient woman with unwavering faith that she’d recognize an original man when she met him.
She proved herself right. One day a man showed up who was so original that he scared her. He was Latino and introduced himself as “Primo, as in the best.” But Gigi wasn’t that good yet at interpreting English with Spanish accents. She thought his bravado was a façade for covert intentions. And she swore his name sounded Arabic, something akin to Primo Azzi Zaba. So after seeing him meet with another swarthy-skinned male in the alley behind the Grille, she phoned the terrorist hotline to report him.
As it turned out, his full name was Primivito Rodriquez and he hailed from Bogota. She hadn’t found the leader of a terrorist cell after all. But she did get a reward for assisting in the capture of one of south Florida’s most wanted cocaine distributors.
Officer Bob made the follow-up call to Gigi’s apartment to thank her, on behalf of the department, for her quick thinking and shrewdness. It was then that he discovered she was the one who hung the bright hibiscus print on the windows, something he’d admired many times while resting on his broom handle at sunrise. He thought it was an ingenious attempt to balance out the world.
And for her, that was the moment when she learned that the kind, rum-and-Coke officer’s first name was Bob. The name on the barricades she saw on the highway, the namesake of her hair cut. A name that suggested strength, style, durability and an intimate knowledge of boundaries.
A name, she felt, that had an original meaning.
When spring arrived in south Florida only people looking at a calendar noticed. Gigi wasn’t one of them. She loved how uniformly bright and warm the Hollywood mornings were. Loved them so much that she refused to look at a calendar for fear she’d discover it was simply another summer day.
As was her habit on that fine March morning, she took a brisk walk before her breakfast shift at the Seaside Grille. She was hoping to come up with a more original name for the restaurant and pondered the possibilities as she walked. The sun was barely above the horizon line, streaming over the ocean at such an intensity that the big quartz crystals swinging below Gigi’s ears cast prism rainbow sparkles on the cement and brick boardwalk around her. She stopped to stand in the middle of the refracted light.
So entranced was she by the dazzling show that she didn’t hear the shouted: “STOP!” She did, however, feel the slamming of a body into hers and then the crashing of the boardwalk into her backside.
The next thing she knew Officer Bob had run over and slapped handcuffs on the man on top of her.
Later in the day, when Officer Bob’s shift ended, he took his seat at the bar of the restaurant and thanked Gigi, again, for her assistance. Apparently, the thief had been running away from Bob and the sunlight glinting through her earrings momentarily blinded him. When the man smashed into her, she, in essence, halted his flee. The police had been searching for him for weeks. He was the suspected perpetrator of recent ocean-front burglaries.
Gigi was glad to help.
She smiled into Bob's face, beaming her big, heavily lashed blue eyes at him. And he finally realized what that quality was about her that haunted him, haunted him in a good way. She was perfectly balanced with the way her big eyes made up for her tiny body. What, at first seemed out of proportion to him, now made sense: things don’t always have to be even. In fact, the bigness in the world balances out the tininess.
“So maybe you’ll be my wife,” he said, not meaning to say it out loud.
But Gigi thought it was the most original way of proposing.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lisa Shiroff is the author of the romantic-comedy-suspense novel, Hitting The Sauce, and two humorous mysteries Revenge Café (featuring Bob’s cousin, Mandy) and Show Up Dead. She writes because she’s not sure what else she can do with herself. Oh sure, she’s a wife, mom of two kids, and manages to walk her dog every day, but as far as careers go, the only thing she knows how to do is write, cook and mix a drink. Chefs and bartenders have to work weekends, though, so she’s sticking to the writing gig. She lives in south Jersey and, ever sporting rose colored glasses, she really does think Atlantic City is a bright and hopeful place.
You can learn more about her books on her website at (where else?): www.lisashiroff.com.
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Friend her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lisa.shiroff.9
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