Under the Umbrella ✓

-07-

It was a long day. An awfully long, repetitive, arduous day that had Aria craving for nothing but sleep.

Her day began with dropping off the twins at their school. It was usually the only errand she willingly handled instead of delegating the task to Kierra or Hailey unless she was wacked that day. The twins were, without doubt, a handful, but it made her day a bit more eventful.

She then left to her part-time at the clothing store, having to deal with an unusual increase in the number of customers and cleaning up after the mess they usually make of leaving clothes in different sections of the store. She had to pick up the twins between her work time – something that Hailey was tasked to do normally since it fit in with her schedule – because Hailey wanted to go to the library to study for her approaching exam and Kierra couldn't leave the house without anyone else to keep an eye on their mother. After taking the twins home, Aria returned to the store where she had twice more work to do. She was comforted by the sole fact that it wasn't the last week of the month where she would have had to visit the tool shop too to manage the accounts.

She had an assignment due in three days and she was supposed to be studying for her exams but she was too busy. Very few days were different from one another to Aria and those days mostly included Sandra, whom she terribly missed. It had been almost a week since she last saw her and when Sandra had finally called her back, she had apologized to Aria numerous times for missing her calls because she had been dealing with her own family issues and of course, Aria couldn't blame her for it. She wasn't even surprised that the timing had been ruthless against her.

Aria worried about what was happening with Sandra and they made plans to meet up on a day both of their schedules fit in with each other, which was, unfortunately, days later.

It had also been three days since she had been visiting Coffee Break during the evenings – because it had been too hectic for her during the mornings and afternoons – in hopes of returning the umbrella to the strange stranger she met earlier. She brought the umbrella with her every day along with her belongings, hoping that she'd be able to make time at some point when the sun was out that whenever her coworkers or her college mates saw it, they looked at her funnily.

It was understandable. Aria herself wondered why the stranger would carry an umbrella around when it was the hottest summer the city had been suffering in the history of summers. Unless he uses the umbrella as a shade...

She wasn't supposed to be spending money on anything else other than a drink, but the cinnamon rolls looked too enticing to miss out on that she bought just one and sat by the window seat again while she thought about purposeless, random things. Like whether or not the stranger was using the umbrella as a cover from the sun rather than the rain. She just hadn't seen people in the city these days use the umbrella for the sun.

Though she came back every day since then, she hadn't seen him even once. Most of all, she wasn't even sure if she'd ever seen him at the café before. He must have been a regular during the afternoons.

After she had relished her cinnamon roll, she felt the familiar guilt plague her. She knew her sisters would love them too, and she was just about to leave the café disturbingly until she just chucked away her miserly approach of saving money. Screw it. I can just make the money again.

She went back to the counter and asked for a takeaway of four cinnamon rolls, but as she was about to pay, the middle-aged woman behind the counter shook her head, refusing it with a smile. "It's on the house. You seem to be coming here often. Just keep coming back."

All it took was the one encounter to change her onerous day to a good day. She left the café with a broad grin. When she peeked into the paper bag as she walked the street, she yelped in ecstasy, seeing that there weren't just four but about ten cinnamon rolls inside.

Aria was so gratified that she made a silent but solemn promise to be Coffee Break's regular customer from now on.