5 Joey
Joey
The coffee shop is the busiest it’s been in weeks.
The temperature is expected to touch seventy today. If Joey was in a clearer headspace, she would have put a sandwich board outside advertising their cold brew. And she would start selling cold brew.
She’s on edge and hasn’t eaten at all today; it’s already almost one.
Her mind is still back in those woods, the whispers all around her.
The bell jingles as the door swings wide.
A child runs in, followed by her grandmother.
She gives Joey a friendly wave. Beyond them is Front Street, which is busier than usual.
Small clusters of people she doesn’t know stand nearby, not ogling the mountains but the movie set, which Joey can’t see from here, thankfully.
Other than the gawkers and what she assumes are film crew, the town looks just as it always has from her vantage point.
The square lines of old brick buildings look small against the shadow of the mountain behind them.
Beyond that, though she cannot see, she knows there are two more peaks, making up the famous Three Elks that surround the town. The tallest is capped white with snow.
The credit card machine beeps, making her jump. She gives Zach an apologetic look as she passes him yet another order for a lavender latte.
“We need more lavender syrup from the back,” says Zach, wagging an empty bottle in her direction. There’s a small stain of sweat on his chest just below his beard. He does not look happy.
“I’ll go,” she says quickly. She should give her employee the break and not take it for herself, but she doesn’t. She can tell Zach notices this lack of good management, but she is desperate for a minute of quiet. She just needs to think.
She ducks into the storeroom, where the din is a little more tolerable.
A fleeting thought about how she wishes she ran the kind of coffee shop that served freshly infused syrups to her customers.
She’d serve it as a latte with a sprig of lavender on top of thick foam, and the air would smell of wildflowers and steamed milk.
While she was at it, she would get rid of all the old tables and replace them with something natural but colorful—a hygge-meets-mountain-town vibe. Quinn would have loved that.
But as it is, Joey barely cares if anything is nice.
What right does she have to dream about rattan light fixtures when Quinn is in the ground?
Joey’s mom too. That happened five years after Quinn, almost to the day, which made the dulling pain sharp again.
And Joey has been bouncing between sharp and dull ever since, never quite free of the caked-on grief that, at some point, had stuck to her bones.
But this morning, when the trees whispered to her, something changed.
Everything changed.
She climbs on a sturdy box and reaches up to the top shelf.
She heaves herself to her tiptoes, pulling down the bulk syrups she ordered online, bottle by bottle.
This is the kind of thing she has done since she took over the place six years ago.
She pretends she doesn’t know about the rumors that the coffee shop has gone downhill and that she doesn’t maintain the same level of quality as Barbara did.
Barbara used to wake up at four in the morning to bake lemon blueberry scones and spent her evenings slicing vanilla beans to make her own syrup while on the phone debating the high school athletics budget with the school board.
After what happened to Quinn, Barbara didn’t want the coffee shop anymore, and, honestly, neither did Joey, but it was the least she could do.
A thin cloud of guilt, one she has gotten used to by now, moves into and out of her thoughts.
“The director is Phillip Granger,” someone at the table closest to the storeroom is saying.
“Cal Pierce is in it and, what’s her name, Nicola Bianco.
” The speaker’s companion doesn’t seem to know any of these people, so there ensues a long explanation of previous movie titles and accolades that sounds like it’s read straight from IMDb.
Joey rolls her eyes as she arranges the bottles on the tray she’ll bring out to the front.
Though the weather is nearly perfect, and the promise of a seasonal change is so close you can smell it in the air, that’s not why the coffee shop is busy today.
It’s this stupid movie. The whole town is in heat over it.
She stops for a second and thinks about what she heard in the woods this morning.
Fifteen years is a long time to go without knowing the truth.
But today, a slow trickle of terror and exhilaration has been filling her veins, making her feel out of control, like she’s hooked up to an IV drip with the wrong medication.
She’s been searching for answers for so long.
Now that she thinks she has something, what is she supposed to do with it?
She lugs her tray of fresh syrup bottles out to the front. In her absence, the noise has grown to middle school cafeteria levels.
Zach runs the steamer, and there’s an extra ringing that stays in Joey’s ears for a minute afterward.
He says something to her, asking her a question, but she can barely hear him.
Someone stands at the door looking straight at her, someone who makes the rest of the world disappear.
Joey goes completely numb and knocks a bottle onto the floor.
It shatters, but she doesn’t even flinch.
Sophie.