Someone Who Cares

Earnest rolls out of the left side of his bed. The right side has been blocked off with emotional red tape. He sits hunched over the left edge, digging the drying eye goo deeper into his eye crevices. Snap, crackle, pop and he’s up. He shoves his smartphone into his basketball short’s pocket, before heading over to the kitchen where he will pop the K-cup into the Keurig. The machine whirs to life and Earnest mentally berates himself for contributing to the global environmental crisis.

While Mother Earth audibly groans in response to his single serving of coffee, Earnest peruses his emails. The only emails Earnest gets on a Saturday morning are promotional emails for the latest Bundt cake flavor, the DNC just saying “hi”, and a reminder from a dreaded dating app that someone out there likes you!

But this Saturday dating apps aren’t the only ones who think Earnest is special. A ding announces the arrival of another email. The subject line boldly demands Earnest to “Read me”. The sender is labeled as “Someone who cares”, their accompanying email reads “[email protected]”.

The gods of Google have failed Earnest. They have allowed this obvious spam entrance into his regular inbox. Another ding fills the kitchen-sphere, interrupting Earnest’s scoff-sigh hybrid. Subject line: “No really. I’m not spam.”, same sender, same email address.

That’s exactly what spam would say.

Another ding. Another subject line: “Alice ate the cookies and sipped the potion.”

Earnest reads this email with another scoff, hold the sigh. Skepticism and the knowledge that the universe has a disturbing sense of humor may both be reasons as to why nothing whimsical ever happens anymore. Earnest has the sudden urge to be the protagonist. The worst outcome is some Anglo-French prince begs him for five thousand dollars to save his country that borders Genovia.

He opens the digital envelope of the initial email, titled “Read me”. The Arial font requests he do the one thing he would find himself typically doing on a Sunday. However, today is, of course, a Saturday and thus the request is instantly categorized as “beyond the comfort zone”. Earnest turns to his Kuerig, now beeping for his attention. All he can hear is: “Coffee’s ready! By the way every eco-system hates you.”

Earnest ignores the beeping and heads for the shower. In between gasps for air, as he drowns himself in shampoo and boiling hot water, Earnest begins to fantasize about the mysterious email. At first, he convinces himself it’s a friend pulling his leg. What friends?

His sister, perhaps! He hasn’t answered her calls in a week. I could call her, but I can’t hear another complaint about wooden plate holders, why do plates need holders?

Or a secret admirer? Do those even exist anymore? Very Fitzwilliam Darcy of her or him? At this point, Earnest gets conditioner in his eye.

Earnest follows the email’s instructions and walks the one mile and a bit to the front of the large yellow house converted into a hipster’s paradise. This coffee shop has a special place in his heart because of its resemblance to something out of the “Amelia Bedelia” books. They even serve lemon-meringue pie.

The fact that it is Saturday makes Earnest nervous. He navigates around the bicyclists in their highlighter helmets and neon spandex. He slides past the unmasked book clubs and blind dates before finding his destination.

Earnest must and will sit at the table in between two oversized white patio chairs in front of the coffee shop’s entrance. He finds this spot empty, next to a young girl with a hat big enough to be a relic bird bath and her boyfriend who has undoubtably worked at “Abercrombie” at some point in his life. Earnest sits at the table and checks the email again.

Earnest stands, he hurriedly takes his flannel off and places it on the chair. He appraises his placement. Unsatisfied, he quickly folds the shirt, and places it back on the chair. Earnest looks up at the silence emitting from the table next to him. The SoCal-poster couple judge him freely. He offers them a consoling nod. He grabs his phone and heads into the coffee shop. Inside, he greets the brunette barista he went to high school with. Maybe she sent the email? No, she has a boyfriend. She smiles with her eyes and her teeth underneath the giraffe-printed face mask.

“Is it Sunday?”

“No.”

She knows what day it is; she’s working. Earnest forgot to laugh at her joke. She knows what day it is; she’s working. She asks his order. He holds up the phone and reads off the email. A cinnamon roll with a black coffee. He has finished all of the email’s tasks. Alice would be proud.

The barista hands him the warmed cinnamon roll. She pours the black drip coffee. She takes his ten-dollar bill.

Earnest returns to his table. The flannel is there, perfectly folded. There is also a black journal sitting on the table.

Earnest sits gently and takes his face mask off slowly with eyes trained on the black journal. He opens the journal; the front and back covers feel clean and unused. The spine cracks as only brand-new books do. The journal gives every impression of a new-born book with untouched paper-white intestines.

But the journal is an imposter. The journal’s introduction with “In case of loss, please return to:” typed out has an answer penned in. In his own scrawling, fake cursive “Earnest” is written with a large “E”. Earnest involuntarily recites his own name out loud in a way that makes the Coachella-dream-catcher couple leave their own table.

Earnest reads the next line with the printed text “As a reward: $” and then the amount, again, in his scrawling, fake cursive: “20,000”. Earnest doesn’t have twenty-thousand dollars in his combined checking and savings accounts. He’s not even sure if his entire life could be valued at twenty-thousand dollars. He doesn’t have life insurance, someone worth twenty-thousand dollars would have life insurance. Right?

Earnest contorts his body into odd shapes, seeking out an impatient Ashton Kutcher lurking in the corners, ready to yell “You’ve been Punk’d!”. His eyes return, empty-handed, to the journal. He pats the back cover and the front, flips through the first twenty pages, and then turns the journal into a flapping bird until a clue emerges.

The clue comes in the form of a check. A folded check tucked into the middle of the journal just like his aunt used to do with the handfuls of dollar bills she gifted him every year on his birthday. The amount of dollar bills always correlated with the age he was turning, and the book always related to her latest adventure, like having a kid or studying French cooking.

The fallen check sits upside down, tented, on Earnest’s lap. A voice in the left part of his brain tells him the check’s value before he flips the check over to reveal its twenty-thousand-dollar worth. There is no name on the check and the signature is illegible except for the large “E” that begins the name. Earnest inspects the check and then sniffs the check as if the smell will prove its artificiality.

When Ashton Kutcher is nowhere to be found and the check smells like- well, a check, there is only sequence of actions Earnest feels he can commit to: eat the cinnamon roll, sip the black coffee, come to accept he is a twenty-thousand-aire and the owner of black journal that already thought it belonged to you.

Earnest does all of this minus the acceptance. Leaving the coffee shop to be in the comfort of his own home, he rereads the three emails. The two emails following the first are empty and only consist of the subject line. He responds to “Someone who cares” and is granted a delivery failure notice. The gods of Google disappoint yet again.

After running both hands through his hair, throwing the journal against a wall, and then staring at the check, hoping it catches on fire from his intense gaze, Earnest goes to the bank.

The drive takes eight minutes.

An older bank teller, who has been sitting in this exact seat and chewing this exact piece of gum for her entire adult life, verifies that the check is real.

“Would you like me to cash it?”

“No, thank you.”

The bank teller will tell her husband about Earnest over chili tonight.

Back at home, Earnest stares from the couch at the journal and the check sitting on his kitchen island. His hands are clasped together, elbows resting on his thighs. His left knee shakes.

Earnest puffs up his chest and bullies over to the journal. He yanks it from its place as if the journal has personally offended him. He leaves the check. He grabs a beer from the fridge. He snaps the cap off of the beer.

Earnest chugs the entire beer until only backwash remains. Disgusted with himself, but now with a stationary left leg, Earnest opens the black journal and spreads it wide with one hand and clicks a blue point pen with the other.

Three hand-written pages later, Earnest’s soul returns to his living room. He doesn’t read what he wrote and tosses the journal onto his coffee table.

The next morning, before heading to the Keurig, Earnest writes. He forgets it is Sunday and what he is supposed to do on Sunday’s.

Monday. Before he sits at his at-home desk and oversized monitors, Earnest writes in the black journal. After a lengthy anti-love letter to the Kuerig, he drafts a contract with himself, signs it with a large “E” and squiggles, and online orders a French Press.

For a month, Earnest writes every morning before French Pressing his coffee. He writes about his fear of the right side of his bed and how he misses his childhood cat. On the edges of pages, he doodles the cat. He imagines the fat tuxedo blossoming into a furry hot air balloon or an obese dragon. Earnest’s illustrations grow from the bottom of the page, to an entire page, to off the page onto a proper sketch book.

It is a Saturday when Earnest sprawls his body out fully on his queen-sized bed after affirming he is being “direction-ist” in his morning journaling. The right side of the bed is suddenly no longer the Antarctica he knew it to be.

It is a Saturday when Earnest holds a mason jar full of butterflies for the entirety of his sister’s wedding ceremony. He had already got all of his teasing and bad jokes out in the journal before getting dressed. He bites his tongue when the butterflies die before the exchange of the rings and makes a mental note to describe their death in tomorrow’s writing session.

It is a Saturday when Earnest eyes the check again, three months after its mysterious appearance. By then his paintings of an overweight, mystical cat hang all over his apartment. Earnest holds the check in a shaking right hand and takes a picture of the front and the back with his own signature that has grown to look a lot like the one on the front. He remotely deposits the twenty-thousand dollars. At this moment, Earnest is sure a hole will surface in his apartment floor and he will fall to his death or be trapped in the depths of Hell. But this does not happen.

Instead, Earnest self-publishes a series of children’s books about the fantastical adventures of his childhood cat with the very real twenty-thousand dollars. At his first signing he credits his success to the little black book and whoever left it on a coffee shop table. He has long since stopped questioning whose hand placed it there. All Earnest remembers is the large “E” on the check and the scrawling, half-cursive writing that could belong to no one but himself.