Chapter 3 #2
The math happens on its own. Six weeks from Thursday, October 15, is Tuesday, November 24, near enough.
The pitch competition is Sunday, November 29.
That’s five days after a chain coffee shop opens its doors directly across the street from the one I haven’t told a single soul I’m here to think about.
Six weeks of mornings like this, and a Sunday waiting at the back of it.
I don’t say any of that out loud. The towel goes back to the rinse station. A man in a Carhartt comes in for a drip, and the carafe is in my hand before he reaches the wood.
When the line’s gone, Harsk is at the espresso machine, wiping the grouphead. He’s wiped it that way for fifteen years. My own coffee, the small black one with one sugar I poured because I was going to drink it before the rush, is sitting cold at the end of the bar next to the receipts.
There’s a fresh cup at my elbow. Hot, in the same small cup, black with one sugar.
I didn’t see him pour it. He’s at the grouphead, and he isn’t looking at me. The cup is hot under my palm, and the strip of his shoulder I can see under the brown-canvas apron doesn’t move while I figure out what to do with that. Coffee, black, one sugar.
The thank you stays in.
The rush is gone for good and there are two women at the window bar trading news about somebody’s grandson and a man at the corner table with a paperback, and the door hasn’t rung in three minutes.
My hand is on the wood. Through the front window the billboard is up, six weeks of orange tape along the bottom, COMING SOON in clean white.
The cup at my elbow is still warm. The door opens.
The rush is a story the room hasn’t quite finished telling itself, and the door rings in single beats now with whole minutes of quiet in between, the kind of quiet that lets you hear the cooler cycling and the cars going past on Main without stopping.
I’m wiping the bar where the syrup ring used to be.
Harsk is sleeving receipts in his block letters, which is also the handwriting on the chalkboard behind him, which is also the handwriting in the order book, and I see it like the agency trained me to and then have to make myself stop.
He pours a cortado for a woman in a wool coat who pays cash. He counts her change without looking at his hand. The cup crosses the counter with nothing attached to it. She says thank you and he says, “Alright,” in the voice of a man whose word for you’re welcome is alright, and she goes.
I’m on the floor and he’s on the counter, and the geometry of it has locked in across the morning without either of us saying a word about it. He pours, I wipe, he hands off, I run the carafe. Between customers the room shuffles its small weather around, and we work inside it.
My first cup, the one he poured when the line broke, is empty on the bar by the receipts.
There’s a fresh one at my elbow.
I didn’t see him pour it. He’s at the till.
The cup is small. The coffee in it is black with one sugar, the same as the first one, the same as the cup I poured myself before the rush.
It’s hot under the heel of my hand, and the thank you forms behind my teeth and parks there. I drink the coffee instead.
The bell rings. Two college kids in flannel come in for drips and a brownie to split. Harsk takes the order. Through the front glass the billboard across Main Street is exactly where it was, green and white, the orange tape still even along the bottom.
When the kids leave, Harsk goes through to the back for a bag of beans, and the door stays open behind him just long enough to lift it.
There’s a shelf built into the door frame, and on the shelf sits a small unlabeled glass carafe with coffee in it the color of cherry wood.
That’s not a menu item, is it. The thought shows up shaped like a question and leaves shaped like nothing, because the bell rings and a man in a Carhartt I’ve seen before comes in for a drip, and I have the carafe in my hand before he reaches me.
Harsk shuts the back room door on his way out with the bag tucked under his elbow.
The framed photo behind the espresso machine is two people.
A short gray woman with the exact set to her jaw that he has, and Harsk, younger, in front of a Finley’s whose awning is a different color but whose sign is the same.
My eye has gone to it three times today without my permission, and it goes there again.
I don’t ask. If I were doing the job, the interior murmurs, that photograph would be slide four.
But I’m not doing the job. The binder is at the motel. I let the photo be a photo.
By a quarter to 3:00 the trade has thinned to nothing. Harsk is wiping the steamer wand. He’s been wiping it since before I learned anything that’s been useful to me. My hand is on the wood. The cup at my elbow is still warm.
He turns the deadbolt on the front door and flips the sign, and the room settles into the smaller, quieter shape a café takes after the last bell. I’ve got the tip share counted into the ceramic bowl on the back of the till, and I carry it through to the back office for the first time.
The doorway is narrow and the room past it is small and warm and ordered, a desk against the right wall and a chair behind it that’s plainly been Harsk’s chair for fifteen years, and on the shelf in the doorway to my left the little unlabeled glass carafe sits exactly where it sat at noon, cherry-wood dark, still saying nothing about itself.
I set the bowl on the desk.
The inventory sheet is open under the lamp with his pencil laid in the crease.
Block letters down the left, quantities in the middle, dates in the right margin, all in the handwriting that’s the chalkboard and the order book and the receipts.
About a third of the way down there’s a single line in my cursive: hazelnut, swapped 7:42, MR. I look at it.
He read every order I called and wrote one of them down in my shorthand, which means he was paying attention to me the whole morning he spent working not to look at me.
The empty cup from this morning is on the corner of the desk, where he must have carried it back at some point, the small one I drank out of and didn’t thank him for.
I hang the apron on the back hook beside his, and the hook takes it.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
“Friday.”
“Three days.”
Behind me the inventory sheet is still open under the lamp, both our handwritings on it. The cup sits on the corner of the desk. The back room door closes on the small ordered shape of all of it as I cross the floor to the front.