Chapter 4
4
Ruth
Macchiato Man was waiting at the front door again Wednesday morning. I took it as confirmation the coffee had been up to his standard. He looked fresh out of the shower, his hair damp.
He sidled past me. A gentle waft of a subtle—and therefore expensive—cologne drifted in with him.
‘Good morning,’ I said.
He grunted.
I leaned out the front door. Beyond the verandah the footpath was wet, the air choked with moisture. ‘We haven’t had much of a spring, that’s for sure. Farmers are mumbling about too much rain.’
‘Farmers are known for being impossible to please,’ he said and I blinked with surprise. ‘But then, they are up against it most of the time.’
‘True. Same as yesterday?’
‘Please,’ he said, sounding almost affable. He must have slept better. ‘Do you serve anything as simple as toast and Vegemite?’
‘Sure do,’ I said and jerked a thumb in the direction of the menu board on the wall behind the counter, above the servery window. He scanned it while I ground the coffee beans.
‘Just the toast, with Vegemite, thanks.’
Wow, I thought, a please and a thank you. Nothing pressed my buttons more than an ungracious customer who treated me like the help. He took the coffee and sat at the same table as the day before.
When I put a plate bearing two slices of perfectly toasted multigrain down in front of him five minutes later, he said, ‘I’d like to apologise for being rude yesterday. Totally uncalled for. I’m sure it’s the coffee and your good looks that keep bringing ’em back.’
He made eye contact and although he didn’t smile, his eyes hinted at humour. For a second I was stupidly tongue-tied. Then the front door squealed and the sound loosened my tongue. No way I was going to oil those damned hinges.
‘We’re all entitled to a grumpy day every now and then,’ I said and breezed off to serve the woman who’d come in.
She made a beeline for Macchiato Man’s table. ‘There you are,’ she said stridently. His wife? Oh, dear. She looked to be a similar vintage. Same colour hair. There was something vaguely familiar about her. Had she been into the cafe before? She slung a ridiculously large handbag over the back of a chair at his table and made her way over to the counter.
‘I’ll have a large cappuccino with two shots and he’s paying,’ she said, her chin jutting in Macchiato Man’s direction.
‘Something to eat?’
She shook her head. Her face was devoid of makeup, her eyes red and puffy with purplish-coloured bags underneath. It’d been a while since her eyebrows had seen a pair of tweezers, but then, I was no-one to talk.
‘I’ll bring it over,’ I said, but she loitered. She watched as I loaded the basket, locked it into place and set the machine going.
‘You must be Ruth,’ she said, startling me. ‘Dad told me how he used to come here for a cappuccino twice a week, Tuesday and Thursday mornings.’ She had to raise her voice to be heard while I frothed the milk.
‘Oh,’ I said, as realisation struck. I tapped the metal jug on the counter and then poured the milk. ‘You’re Theo Adams’s daughter. I was sorry to hear that he’d passed away. Please accept my sincere condolences.’
She glanced away. I saw her pallor and red-rimmed eyes for what they were: the mien of the freshly bereaved.
‘I didn’t get to visit Dad as often as I should have,’ she said. ‘I, for one, didn’t appreciate fully how lonely he was after Mum died.’ She took a deep breath, exhaling slowly. Her shoulders slumped with it. ‘It has been a horrendous few days, as you can imagine. I don’t know how anyone ever comes to grips with something like this.’ She blinked rapidly. ‘I can’t even put all the pieces together yet.’
Crikey, I thought. What response goes with something like that? To my immense relief, the hospital admin girls chose that moment to burst in through the door, chatting animatedly. I really needed to thank those girls for showing up the way they did.
‘Why don’t you sit down with your husband and I’ll bring your coffee over,’ I said.
The woman’s eyes widened and she snorted, of all things, disconcerting me completely. My hand jerked and the chocolate sprinkle went everywhere except where it should have landed.
‘He’s not my husband,’ she said with a grating laugh.
‘Sorry,’ I said, conscious the admin girls had stopped chatting to listen in. ‘I shouldn’t have assumed.’
‘No,’ she said, ‘you shouldn’t have.’
Just like that, any compassion I’d felt for her moments before evaporated. Confide in me one second and then rebuke me the next? I came around the counter with her coffee and followed her to the table where the man who wasn’t her husband sat.
‘I haven’t paid,’ she said and sat down. I placed the cappuccino in front of her. He threw a dark look her way before extracting a note from his wallet. She didn’t so much as say thank you to either of us.
The front door opened and several more folk came in for their morning caffeine fix. I hurried back to the counter. The admin girls rolled their eyes as I passed. I winked.
Macchiato Man and his sidekick drifted out about fifteen minutes later. I didn’t think they’d said one word to each other the whole time they’d been there. Was she sure they weren’t married? Thank goodness they were out-of-towners and it was unlikely I’d ever see them again. Sure, the customer was always right but that didn’t mean they couldn’t be nuts along with it.
* * *
No-one was more surprised than me to find Macchiato Man loitering outside the front door when I opened the cafe on Thursday morning. It was a few minutes before eight and I was tired and irritable.
‘You’re still here,’ I said. ‘I thought by now you’d have gone back to wherever it was you came from.’
‘Now who’s being rude,’ he said with a lift of an eyebrow. He held open the door while I took an ice-cream container full of water outside to top up the dogs’ water bowl I left on footpath. It was for customers’ dogs to drink. Or any passing dog really. Dogs didn’t discriminate.
‘Sorry about that, but I did think you’d have gone by now, given there’s not going to be a funeral.’ We went inside.
‘Apology accepted, besides I have a remarkably thick skin,’ he said. ‘Or so I’ve been told. And, I’ll be honest I’m conflicted about the whole no-funeral thing. It might have been what Dad wanted in the … circumstances … but it doesn’t sit right with me.’
‘Dad? Are you Theo’s son? The woman you were with yesterday, she’s your sister?’
‘Good coffee, good looks and intelligent,’ he said. ‘And please don’t hold Natalie against me. She doesn’t like anyone, especially not me.’
‘She’s grieving. We’re not ourselves when we grieve. If the loss is great enough, we’re never that same person ever again.’
‘No, I suppose not,’ he said, eyeing me with something akin to respect. ‘I don’t think it’s sunk in yet. I’m trying to make sense of what he did, but it’s as if it’s all too much. That I don’t have what I need to process it. And the policeman’s taking me to Kadina today so I can bring Dad’s car back. I’m not sure how I feel about doing that.’
‘Couldn’t you get someone else to drive it back?’
‘Who?’ he said. ‘The police took it away Friday evening but now they want rid of it, because they’ve done what they needed to do with it.’
I began making his coffee, trying not to dwell on what he must be feeling about the task he had in front of him. My long black was cooling on the counter beside the machine. ‘Breakfast?’ I said, for want of anything else.
‘I’m Hamish, by the way.’ He glanced up at the menu board. ‘And are you Rosie?’
‘Ruth. Rosie was my mother. She loved to bake and we always told her she should have had her own cafe.’
‘Ah,’ he said, the single syllable loaded with meaning.
I looked up to find him watching me. ‘I’m not living my mother’s dream, if that’s what you’re thinking. It never was her dream, more our dream for her because we thought she’d be good at it.’
‘We?’
‘Me and my two older brothers. Breakfast?’
‘Same as yesterday, thank you, Ruth,’ he said. I slid his coffee across the counter. ‘And in answer to your earlier question, after I’ve collected the car, I’ll head back to where I came from. Which is Adelaide. North Adelaide, to be precise. Nat went home yesterday.’
He paid and took the coffee to table three. Did he know that’s the table his dad always chose? I made his toast and tried to ignore how unsettling I found his situation, and this conversation. I’d become so used to a diet of superficial chit-chat; the most in-depth discussions I had were the ones I had with myself. The ones that kept me awake in the middle of the night.
When I delivered his toast, I said, ‘I am sorry about your dad. Hard enough to lose a parent without adding any of the other, er, complications. I imagine after experiencing something like this there’d be a certain amount of … soul-searching?’
He lifted his shoulders and then let them drop as he gave a resigned sigh. ‘That’s a very tactful way of describing what I call a guilt trip. Does everyone in this town know the poor old bugger topped himself?’
‘That’s not the impression I get and I hear a lot of what’s going on around the place because, believe me, people can’t wait to share,’ I said. ‘But I understand your father kept to himself, more so since your mother died.’
‘And how did you find out?’
‘One of my staff lives a few doors down and she saw the ambulance and of course she knew Theo because he was a regular here. Twice a week. A milky cappuccino, raisin toast and the Advertiser . Only ever stayed an hour. You could set your clock by him.’
Hamish took that in, his expression grim. He waited a bit and then said, ‘You would have seen more of him than I did.’
‘Perhaps. However, let’s keep it in context. I’m not a gossip and neither is my staff member, but this is a small country town.’ I didn’t let the defensive edge creep into my tone, even though it was how I felt. This man had enough to deal with.
‘Fair enough. I’d better eat the toast before it goes cold. And thanks for being upfront with me.’
‘My condolences to you and your family and travel safely, both trips,’ I said, thinking how strange this conversation and the whole situation was. I suppose some things are easier to say to a stranger, a person you’ll probably never see again.
When I returned to the counter I was surprised to find the admin girls and two others were waiting for me. I hadn’t heard the door.