6. Cal
CAL
The coffee shop’s on the far side of town, past the car wash, one of those places with plants hanging in the window and a chalkboard out front that says something encouraging. Sunrise Perk. Nobody from the club comes out here.
I tell myself I picked it because it’s near the funeral home, which is true, which is the kind of true that comes with a second layer I don’t lift up to check.
I told Tessa I was hitting the climbing gym. That happened fast, this morning, faster than a lie should be able to happen—gear bag over my shoulder, kiss at the door, gym, back by one, and I was down the driveway before the taste of it caught up with me.
It’s not even a lie with a job to do. Coffee with a grieving woman about her dad’s funeral—I could’ve said that. Fifteen words.
I didn’t say it, and now I’m a guy with a gear bag full of climbing shit riding across town in the wrong direction, and every mile of it my chest sits a little heavier, like the bike’s pulling weight it can’t feel.
I spend the ride rehearsing what this is. It’s logistics. Flowers, the obituary, whether her brother’s going to show or whether she’s burying her old man alone. It’s a favor for somebody whose dad used to leave the porch light on for me. It’s one hour.
It’s got nothing to do with Tessa—it’s so far from having anything to do with Tessa that telling her would just make it into a thing, and it isn’t a thing, so.
That’s the reasoning. I run it three times like checking torque on a bolt, and it holds every time, and something about it still won’t sit level.
I park anyway. Sit on the bike a second with my helmet in my hands, heart doing a little more than idle for no reason a parking lot deserves. Then I go in.
Whitney’s already there, back corner, hands around a mug she isn’t drinking. First look at her is a gut-punch of a weird kind—she looks younger. Grief does that to her.
I forgot I knew that, and there it is anyway, filed away with everything else: it strips something off her face and leaves her looking like the twenty-five-year-old I used to bring home to Frank’s porch light. Hair’s different, shorter. Doesn’t matter.
Three years gone and I could still draw her from memory, which isn’t a feeling, it’s just mileage. You don’t unlearn a person.
“You came.” She says it like she’d genuinely prepared for me not to.
“Said I would.”
“People say things.” She wraps both hands tighter around the mug. Her knuckles are white on it. “Sit down. God, sit down, you’re looming.”
I sit. Order a drip coffee from the kid who wanders over. Whitney watches me do it with something moving behind her face I don’t look at too hard.
The first twenty minutes are actually fine. Actually what I told myself it’d be. Practical, and I’m good at practical.
The funeral home wants a deposit she doesn’t have till the estate clears, so I tell her how to ask them for net-thirty—they always say yes, nobody stiffs a funeral home. She didn’t know you could just ask. Most people don’t.
Flowers: I tell her nobody remembers the flowers, spend it on the food after.
The obituary—she’s got it drafted on her phone, and her hands shake handing it over.
Actual shake, the phone rattling once against the sugar shaker, and I take it careful, like taking a part off somebody whose hands are done for the day.
It’s good. It’s Frank. The firewood’s in there—he split and stacked four cords the week before he passed, because winter doesn’t care how old you are—and something goes tight in my throat reading it, right there in a coffee shop with plants in the window.
“The firewood line’s the whole thing,” I tell her, handing it back. “Cut half the rest if you have to. Keep that.”
She does a laugh that breaks in the middle. “He liked you, you know. He never liked anybody.”
“He liked telling me what I was doing wrong.”
“That was his whole love language. You should’ve seen him after you fixed the—what was it, the thing with the truck?—”
“Ball joints.”
“Ball joints. He told everyone at the VFW some kid did his ball joints in the driveway in two hours. ‘Some kid.’ You were twenty-six.” She wipes under one eye with the heel of her hand. “God. Sorry. It comes in waves. It’s fine and then it’s—waves.”
“Your brother,” I say, to give her somewhere else to stand. “Still nothing?”
“Eleven calls. I counted.” She turns her mug in a slow circle. “Voicemail’s not even set up. Who doesn’t set up their voicemail.”
“He’ll come to the funeral.”
“You don’t know that.”
“No,” I say, because I never lied to her when we were together, and it feels important—suddenly, weirdly—not to start now. “I don’t.”
She laughs again, wet, and that’s when it happens. Nothing happens, is the thing. Nothing happens except a half hour goes by.
She tells the story about Frank teaching her to drive stick in the church parking lot, stalling it forty times while he sat there with his coffee saying clutch is a conversation, not a fight.
I tell the one about the copper joint, and she comes up out of her grief for a second, actually lights up—“He TOLD me about that. He called you the sweat-fitting kid for a YEAR. To everyone”—and something in my chest that used to be responsible for this woman’s bad days clicks back on like a shop light.
Hums right along like it never got shut off. Nobody asked it to.
That’s the part that should scare me more than it does, sitting there with my coffee going cold: how little asking it took.
It’s the easiest hour I’ve spent in weeks. That lands somewhere I don’t look at. Not easier than Tessa—nothing’s easier than Tessa on a good day.
But there’s no vote in this coffee shop. No party I’m not supposed to know about that I’m scared I’ll wreck by being a guy nobody ever taught how to be celebrated. No two years of good thing to be careful with, careful, careful, always careful.
Whitney doesn’t need me to be anything except a guy who knew her dad. Low stakes. That’s all this is, I tell myself, and stir coffee I’m not drinking. Grief plus low stakes.
When we’re wrapping up she reaches across the table and squeezes my forearm.
“Thank you. Seriously, Cal. I don’t know what I’d do.”
Her hand on my arm, warm, familiar as an old jacket you find in a closet and put on without thinking. A friend’s hand sits there one second. A stranger’s, half of one.
I let hers sit there—two seconds, three, four—and my skin doesn’t crawl and my arm doesn’t move, and when I finally do move it, I don’t even move it honest.
I dress it up as reaching for my coffee, so nobody has to acknowledge anything, so the moment never officially happened.
Smooth. Practiced-feeling. Where the fuck did that come from?
“Anything you need,” I hear myself say at the door, and she nods, and I’m on the bike before my head catches up with my mouth.
I put the rest of the day in at the shop—bay work until close, hands busy, head anywhere but—and then the ride home is twenty-five minutes and I spend every one of them wrong.
There’s a dinner question waiting on my phone—Tessa texted around four, thoughts on tacos, with the little bull emoji, because there’s no taco emoji she likes—and that text deserves a guy thinking about tacos.
Instead I’m sitting at the light by the car wash replaying the weight of a hand on my forearm. Not wanting it back. That’s not—it’s not that. It’s that my head went there on its own, easy, like a front tire finding a rut in a dirt road, and I had to steer it out.
The light goes green. I steer it out again by the feed store. Again coming down our street. Three times in twenty-five minutes, and each time the steering takes a beat longer, and by the time I’m rolling up the driveway my jaw aches from being set and I don’t know how long it’s been set.
I sit in the driveway a minute after I kill the engine. Helmet in my hands. Gear bag on my back like a costume.
There’s a version of tonight where I walk in and say it plain: ran into some old business today. Whitney—you never met her, before your time. Her dad died and I’ve been helping with funeral stuff. Twenty words, tops.
Tessa would blink. She’d ask if I was okay, ask if Whitney’s okay, probably send food. That’s the whole story of that version.
It costs nothing. I know it costs nothing, sitting right here on this bike, the same way I know a torque spec.
I walk in and she’s at the stove with music on and her hair up, and she says “there he is—tell me you’re hungry,” and I say “starving,” and I kiss the back of her neck where it’s bare below the bun and get down plates like a man with nothing in his pockets.
Twenty words. I had them. I had them at the door, had them setting the table, had them when she asked how the gym was and I said “fine”—one more little coat of paint over the thing, so quick I barely felt the brush.
I don’t know what I do with them instead.
Swallow them, I guess. They go down and sit where the swallowed-wrong feeling’s been sitting for three days, heavier now, and I eat tacos with the woman I love—funny, warm, half a foot away, no idea she’s sharing the table with a rut in a dirt road my head already knows the way back to.