Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
YOU’RE PROPOSING, WHAT?
LOUISA
Sundays at the Double Shot belong to a different species of person entirely, they are not the Monday-through-Friday crowd with their cortados and their laptop bags.
They have somewhere to be in eleven minutes and despise every one of them.
Sunday is for the leisure caffeinators. The ones coming from yoga smelling of Palo Santo, or a meetup of two old friends trading dog-eared paperback books.
It’s for the slow crowd. The jazz-listeners and the newspaper readers.
And it is for at least one person too hungover to realize I’ve given them whole milk instead of skim. (Oops.)
Normally, Sundays are my favorite shift.
The pace of it, the way the shop sounds different when it isn't running at full tilt, running less like a machine and more like a living room. I pretend Ross, Monica, Joey, and the whole gang are tucked away on the sofa, and this is Central Perk. I’d like to be Rachel but I’ve been told I’m more Phoebe.
(I’m probably Gunther.) I take a kind of sustained joy from this job that I have never been entirely able to explain and have long since stopped trying to justify to people (my parents) who think it should be temporary.
Sundays are also days without Angry Neighbor? and his four-word, always rude coffee order.
As if tipping well cancels out that he never once said hello.
I’m not sure what to call him now. I could just drop the ‘angry’, but it might have been a fluke because the shock of me turning up the way I did was so jarring he became the only thing left when the surprise drained him of all other emotions.
He became decent. Kind, even. I don’t know what to call it yet.
I also don’t know what the motivating force was that had me believing he was someone I could turn to.
(Desperation.) He put on The Greatest Showman and didn’t rush me out the door.
Whatever marble of empathy he keeps tucked away in his pocket, he let me hold last night.
I’m not even sure I should be working. I think that’s what the letter said.
But I’ve been working all this time and no one has noticed.
I do need the money, especially if I need a lawyer.
(And not the neighborly kind.) So today, I am hiding in the back, cross-legged on the floor with my spine against a massive bag of roasting beans, which gives new meaning to the concept of a bean bag chair.
(Less comfortable but smells incredible.)
The events of last night have left me feeling like less of a person and more of a live wire, stripped of insulation, exposed to air, vibrating with a current I don’t know what to do with.
“Drink this.” Chandler appears from somewhere and deposits a cup of tea in front of me, dropping down beside me on the floor, back against the bean bag, the apples of her cheeks flushed pink from the slow Sunday morning ‘rush’ that has just petered out.
Her auburn hair is up in braids today, which showcases her bone structure.
She is, even on a Sunday morning behind a commercial espresso machine, unreasonably beautiful.
“Toby’s got the front,” she says. “It’s the lazy-latte crowd. You hide as long as you need.” I stare at the surface of the tea she handed me, like the tea leaves might have something useful to tell me. (They don’t.)
“I don’t know how I could have been so stupid,” I say. It is the thought that keeps surfacing, the one I keep trying to release and keep finding at the top again when I look.
“Stop,” she says, firmly and without heat. “We are not doing that today.”
“It’s true. There’s no magic wand that makes this all go away...”
“It’s also completely useless information that serves no purpose other than making you feel worse, which you don’t need any help doing.
” She turns to look at me with the same expression she has since I’ve known her.
The ‘we’ve got this’ face. If I’m considered type B, she’s type A and a half .
She’s not disorganized, she doesn’t hide from her mailbox, but she also does not plan her life beyond necessity.
She showed up at my door first thing this morning because my late night missed call ‘gave her a bad feeling.’ (She was right.) I didn’t get into all the details.
I just said my paperwork is all a mess, that I don’t understand what’s going on, and that I need a lawyer to help me figure it out.
I think I blocked out the reality of the situation, the actual expiration of a life.
And after talking to Angry Neigh— Hudson, I understand even less.
So she just got a bulleted, nonsense version where I showed up at his door (true) and he made me a cup of tea (also true) while he looks into whatever legal documents I need.
She bumps my shoulder with hers. “Tell me again what he said.”
“Well, I collapsed myself into a total puddle on the doorstep like an absolute maniac. Turned up in my pajamas, had a complete breakdown in his foyer, and forced him to let me sing along to The Greatest Showman.” She always liked him, but is also kind of known for liking terrible men.
Then again, she says that’s how she knows he is actually just a ‘complicated soul’ underneath all that tailoring and terror; if he was actually a bad guy, she would be in love with him.
“He was…” I search for the right word and find it is not one I have previously associated with him. “Calm, very calm. It was disorienting.” He wasn’t just calm, he was calming. (Maybe that’s what was disorienting.)
“So, his magic wand,” Chandler says, holding her hands in front of us, stretching them out to indicate size. “How big, say when.”
“It wasn’t like that,” I say as I slide down the bean bag. Her hands continue to distance further and further from each other. “I’m not above covering you in this tea.”
“You would never waste tea, that’s why you folks were so upset when we dumped it all in the harbor.”
I elbow her and when she laughs I feel something loosen in my chest that has been clenched since the minute I woke up.
That’s her magic wand. Always able to get you to smile no matter the scattered pieces of your life or devastation of the day.
Which is not a small thing. And that sound can drown out anything for at least a little while.
“But he said he doesn’t deal with this kind of thing,” I tell her. “He said he’d make some calls but…” I shake my head. “It felt like niceties, not a plan.”
The back door swings open, Toby’s glasses slightly askew.
“You should probably come out here.” Chandler hops to her feet, brushing down her apron, ready to man the register.
He shakes his head, the glasses wobbling on his nose “Not you. Lou.” A pause.
“I’m pretty sure Angry Neighbor? is here for you,” Toby says to me.
I pin the paper cup between my teeth to hold it as they each offer me a hand to pull me to my feet.
The three of us are at the porthole window in the kitchen door, faces stacked, peering through the small circle of glass into the shop. And sure enough, there he is.
“That asshole Beetlejuiced us, we said his name too many times and voilà,” Chandler says.
“He’s here. On a Sunday,” Toby specifies.
“For… me?”
It’s not the crisp four-days-a-week Monday-through-Thursday of his utterly predictable routine. Sunday, he has never once been here on a Sunday. He has taken a seat, collected his americano, and he is looking at the porthole because he knows exactly where I am.
There’s no way he could have ‘magic-wanded’ this away, definitely not in the twelve hours since I saw him last. If anything, he’s here to tell me off, like he should have last night.
To tell me not to expect anything from him.
That it was some kind of weakness, remind me that the only thing we share is insulation and irritation, not friendship.
Which would be fair. We’ve existed with this rage reciprocity for long enough to know what it is and what it isn’t.
And just because someone shows you a little bit of kindness in a moment of desperation, and just because he is currently the person I’m conjuring when telling stories to the microphone to dial up the passion that is lacking from my actual life, well, all of that has nothing to do with our actual relationship.
That’s just because of proximity, and well, the fact that his face looks like that.
“He knows we're watching,” Chandler whispers.
“He always knows,” I say.
“He’s not in a suit,” Toby observes. “I didn’t know he had other clothes, I don’t know what to think about this.”
“I bet Louisa knows what to think about this…” Chandler smirks something wicked as her eyebrows shoot up on her forehead.
We all look again, Toby is right. (Always.) He’s in a navy sweater, dark jeans, the Sunday version of a man who still manages to look like he has somewhere to be even when he demonstrably doesn’t.
If he did, he wouldn’t be sitting there and staring at me.
Absent of the suit but still clothed may be the most dangerous persona he possesses.
Without the suit, he’s just the person underneath it, which is larger and appears warmer, which makes it considerably harder to be furious with him for reasons that feel like the memory of the grievance, rather than any real issue.
(Even though he is undoubtedly here to be furious at me.)
He picks up his coffee and takes a sip without looking away from the door. Then, unhurried, he raises one finger and does a slow, deliberate beckoning motion. We all drop from the porthole to the ground like he didn’t just call me to him. As if we can pretend we weren’t seen.
“The audacity,” Chandler dramatically breathes. But she says it with profound admiration.