Chapter 29: Sunrise Coffee Palace
Two days went by and I didn’t see Just. Then a week passed. Then two weeks. August 17 had come and I didn’t even realize it.
Just and I had lived separate lives during that span of time apart. I kept to myself. He kept to himself. That was the life of single men, distant and protected from each other by time and space.
Exactly twenty-four days after my last conversation with him I saw him inside The Sunrise Coffee Palace. It was a little after two in the afternoon and he sat alone in a corner at a walnut table in a high back chair. A Wayne Mansfield paperback was in front of his face. He was distant, perhaps lost in his own little world, and seemed to be enjoying his fiction. A large cup of coffee sat on the table in front of him, which was untouched an
