Chapter 2
Harsk
Green coffee in burlap smells like hay in a paper bag at the end of a season, grass at the top and a fine dust underneath.
I put my nose to the sewn lip of the sack on the floor of the roaster room and let it tell me what it is.
Sumatra today, wet leaves arriving a step ahead of the coffee.
The good ones always announce themselves before they mean to.
I scoop the green by the kilo into the loader, eight pounds for the morning, and the beans tip into the drum.
The drum turns, and the burner cycles down as the cool mass hits the steel.
I have stood next to this drum for fifteen years, and it still settles me like the ocean settles some men.
I sit on the stool by the cooling tray and let my hand rest on the chamber latch without opening it yet.
At minute four I crack the door at sixty degrees and pull the trier.
The beans have yellowed at the cheek and stayed pale at the seam, right where they should be, so I slide the trier home and leave the drum to its work.
“Morning, you,” I tell it, because no one is here to hear me say it and the machine has never once told me to stop.
At minute six the smell turns toward toast, and around seven and a half it turns toward bread.
At minute eight the timer beeps, and a heartbeat later first crack starts, which is the proper order of things.
I lean back on the stool. My grandmother’s voice comes in without being invited, like it always does over a roast. Two scoops, boy.
Not three. Naskha has been saying it to me across forty-five years of mornings, and I have never once told her she stopped needing to.
I learned a long time ago not to argue with the dead about their advice.
The notebook lies open on the desk by my left elbow, page seventy-one, yesterday’s receipt total at the top in pencil.
Under it, two weeks old in the same hand: Thumb latch Diedrich, call Saul.
I am going to call Saul today. I tell that page the same thing every morning, and the page has learned not to believe me.
I pick up the pencil, the stub worn to the pad of my thumb, and I do not write anything down. I set it back in the seam.
There is a page I have not turned to in six years. The thumb knows where it lives by a small flex of the spine, and I do not test it. I set that one down on purpose. I leave it where it lives.
At minute eleven I pull the lever. The green tumbles into the cooling bowl as brown, and the fan engages.
It is 4:33 on a Wednesday in mid-October, and the bowl smells like every kitchen Naskha ever stood in, all the way back to the one she gave up.
I won’t be sentimental about it. Choosing that is its own kind of sentiment.
I know. I do it anyway. I stir the tray with the rake, the handle worn to the shape of my right hand after eight thousand mornings of this exact motion.
Presso is asleep on the back counter. Her ear flicks once at the air and resettles.
I bag the roast into six small brown paper sacks and letter each one in pencil, SUMATRAN.
OCT., small even letters that lean forward like they are in a hurry I am not.
The Yemeni lives in the little burlap in the cabinet under the desk, dried apricot and old book at the lip, and I tip nine ounces into the hand grinder beside the carafe.
The wrist remembers the gear without being asked.
I pour. Bloom, then the count to twenty, then pour again to forty, then two slow pulls for the rest. The bloom holds a beat longer than the gauge says it ought to, and I let it, because the gauge has never tasted anything.
I cap the carafe and set it on the small shelf inside the back-room doorway, where the unlabeled glass has lived for fifteen years.
The shelf can be seen from the front of the house when the door stands open. No one has ever asked what the carafe is for, and I have never offered, and that arrangement suits both of us.
I go through to the front. The espresso machine is awake before I am, which is the order I prefer.
The grouphead is warm against the back of my wrist, and the gauge sits at nine bars where I left it last night.
I run a blank shot to clean the line, twenty-five seconds, crema the color of brown butter, and I dump it.
“Don’t start,” I tell the burr grinder, which has been making a sound I do not love since Tuesday.
I give the collar a small turn. “Yeah, I know.”
The chalk lives in the tin to the left of the till. I take a piece, lift the board onto the counter, and write in block letters that always come out too tall for the board no matter how I plan them.
TODAY: VANILLA CARDAMOM. DECAF AVAILABLE.
I price the cup in pencil in the bottom corner, because chalk is too soft for small numerals and I have stopped fighting it.
There is chalk dust on the side of my thumb, and I leave it there.
The framed photo is at my left shoulder when I straighten: Naskha at seventy in the brown sweater, the awning of the older Finley’s a burgundy I have not seen in twenty-three years.
I carry the board to the easel inside the door and prop it.
The burr grinder cycles half a turn on its own and stops.
“Don’t,” I say, under my breath, to no one in particular.
Presso opens both eyes. Her head doesn’t lift, but her ear flicks twice.
The grinder stays quiet. I keep a theory I do not have a strong opinion on, that the machine has been answering something that is not yet in the room.
Boy, Naskha says.
“I am working,” I tell the photo through the doorway, in English, because she does not get to manage my morning from inside a frame.
Korren will be at the front door. He will nod.
I will nod back and have his cup poured before he reaches the counter.
He’ll set a five on the wood. I’ll pretend not to see it, and he’ll pretend not to leave it.
We have been pretending at each other like this for fifteen years, and I would not know how to take the money to his face now if I tried.
I wipe the steam wand. The brass buckle of my apron clinks once against the edge of the counter when I lean.
Through the front window the marine layer is in low against the harbor.
The paper taped to the inside of the lower right pane has gone yellow at the edges.
HELP WANTED. SEE INSIDE. The woman in the navy fleece read it off the sidewalk yesterday afternoon before she came in.
She read it again on her way out. When she drank the flat white, the sound she made was oh.
I have not taken the sign down. I leave it where it is.
I unlock the front door and flip the sign so OPEN faces the street.
The bell rings once on the latch and resettles, and Presso’s ear flicks at it, and then the bell goes quiet.
I check the till float and count the cups on the rack.
The float is two hundred and forty in tens and fives and ones, like it has been on a Wednesday since 2011, and I count it twice, once for the day and once for myself.
The cups come to nineteen, so I add one from the warming drawer, which makes twenty, which is what a Wednesday wants.
Bex is off today, so the pastry case is short its second tray, and Garza’s crullers come in at six.
I owe myself a half cruller against that order, and I keep the tab in the back of my head where I keep most things I am too proud to write down.
The steam wand and the carafe trade smells through the back doorway.
There is still chalk dust dry on the side of my thumb, and I wipe it on the inside of the apron at the hip.
Through the glass the chalkboard out front reads backward from in here, the block letters every bit as too-tall in reverse as they are the right way around.
Light has started behind the harbor side of the marine layer, though the fog has not lifted, and the burr of the grinder settling is the loudest thing in the room.
Naskha is at my left shoulder in the photo where she has been at my left shoulder for twenty-three years, watching me run her shop with two scoops and not three.
I run a second blank shot, crema the color of brown butter again, and I dump that too.
I check the syrup pumps: vanilla full, cardamom half, hazelnut down to the dregs.
I bring the spare bottle up from the shelf below the till and stand it next to the cardamom.
Hazelnut, reorder Friday. I write nothing down. The pencil already knows.
Presso has not moved her tail in three minutes.
My head has turned toward the door without my having asked it to.
I straighten my head back where it belongs.
The portafilter handle is in my right hand where it has been since I locked the door behind me last night, and the grouphead is at nine bars where I left it, and there is nothing about the morning that requires me to watch the door.
I watch it anyway. The fog holds. Main Street is empty on a Wednesday in mid-October.
The bell hasn’t rung. I’m a grown man being managed by a sound that hasn’t happened yet.
Presso’s ear flicks once at the air.
The bell rings. The door swings in on the hinge that has wanted oil since August, and the fog comes a step into the room ahead of her and slips back out at her shoulder.
For the two seconds the door stands open the reversed chalkboard reads forward through the glass at her back, and then the door closes and she is in the room.
She stops on the threshold.