“Turn that thing off!”
Startled, Marni looked up. The voice was so loud she could hear it through her earbuds. She leaned back in her chair and looked around. Nobody in the coffee shop was staring at her. The music swelled in her ears. The soprano was just about to hit the high note …
Did she have her music turned up too loud? Sighing at the interruption, Marni yanked the earbuds out and held them in her hand. She couldn’t hear the music at all. How could somebody at the next table think it was too loud?
“You never listen when I’m talking to you.” The voice was angry. Marni squirmed in her seat and took a sip of coffee. She peered carefully over the rim of her cup. A woman who looked to be in her forties sat in a booth to the right of Marni’s table. She was wearing a gray pin-striped business suit with a cream-colored silk blouse. Everything about her said efficiency, from her carefully applied makeup to her Manolo pumps.
Across from her sat a sullen teenage girl in black. Spiked black hair, black lipstick and nails, black leggings, black leather jacket, and so many chains and piercings she looked like she’d rolled around in a tackle box. The girl had a lightning bolt tattoo that swept from the base of her ear to her collarbone. She had white earbuds and held an iPod in her hand. There was a tall glass with a straw on the table in front of her.
She was nodding her head to the music. And she wasn’t saying anything.
They must be mother and daughter, Marni thought. Or aunt and niece. The older woman continued her rant while the girl slid lower in her seat, never once looking up as she arranged her headphones.
“Drew, take those damn things off, ” the woman shouted. Her anger spilled out into the coffee shop, causing a few startled heads to turn. Drew brushed her jacket absently as if to remove the bitterness that hung in the air.
Marni shook her head in amazement. Didn’t the woman realize people could hear every word of her diatribe? In the growing silence, her anger had exploded into everybody’s face.
“What is your problem?” the woman hissed. She had turned and was staring right at Marni.
“What? My problem? What do you mean? I don’t have a problem.” Marni stammered, then looked away from the eyes that bored into her.
“Your problem is you stick your nose where it doesn’t belong.”
Marni’s face flushed. “Are you kidding me?” she asked. Wait. Was she even going to go there? Actually argue with someone who, despite her carefully arranged appearance, had totally lost control?
“I saw you take your earphones out so you could listen in on our conversation,” the woman continued, narrowing her eyes.
Marni took a deep breath. “I took out my earbuds because I heard you say something about turning the music off, and I thought you were talking to me.”
The woman’s expression turned steely. She gripped her coffee cup until her fingers turned white. “Why would I talk to you? I don’t know you or your kind. I was talking to my daughter.”
The daughter was oblivious to the conversation. She had turned her music up so loud Marni could hear it from six feet away. She was in her own world. From the looks of things, she probably spent most of her time there.
Something inside Marni snapped, and the color rose in her cheeks. “You might have been talking to your daughter, ma’am, but it sure looked like a one-way conversation to me.”
The woman actually rose from her seat and started toward Marni. A small arm draped in silver chains reached out and gently pushed the older woman back into the booth. She took off her headphones.
“Mom, you need to get a grip,” Drew said, patting her mother’s arm. “You remember what Dr. Rollins told you about counting to ten.”
Words by Heart 