Dan sits on the shallow curb, legs folded in front of him so that his knobby knees are nearly scraping his stubbled chin. He is a fixture on the curb, belongs there as fully as the growing crack in the hard cement beside him. A fog of smoke and steam billow around him, rising lacily from the cup of black coffee in his left hand, from the cigarette in his right. The smell of the cold and the smoke and the cement of the garage mingle, sharp and bitter. He mutters a thick and monotone greeting, one that barely cuts into the darkness beyond the single dim light over the employee entrance. It is a worn greeting, one he has mumbled to Kat for this past year, to others for the over a decade he had already worked here before she started. When Kat asks him to move over so she can get inside, he stands up and walks to the wall. The smoke clears around his sharp edges and he leans on the brick. “Cold morning,” he says. She nods and wishes she hadn’t. Anna isn’t scheduled today, but her little hand-sewn journal is stuffed in the back pocket of Kat’s coffee-stained jeans. The two of them spent half the night on the woven blanket tossed across the backseat of Anna’s brand new used sedan, dark moonless evening the screen of a confessional. “You’re here early,” Dan tells her. The metal door handle is cold and familiar. “I couldn’t sleep,” Kat answers. The stitches in her bedspread had dug into her thighs, and her eyes burned as she read through Anna’s pages. Through the notes in familiar handwriting bookmarked between them. Bringing the journal this morning had been an afterthought, a last-minute impulsive snatch. She wishes she had left it on her bed. Dan reaches into his chest pocket, lazily holds his pack of cigarettes out to Kat. She did not smoke before she started here. It was her fourth or fifth shift when the habit began, she got in too early and Dan offered her a smoke as naturally as a handshake. If she turned it away she worried she would be turning away all the hours of bonding the two of them had shared the past week. That she would be turning away his friendship. She was proud when she hadn’t choked on the first acrid inhale. She hesitates before brushing off his offer and continuing into the café. The heavy door swings shut. Rich, earthy notes of hot coffee are already filling the crevices of the store. The darkly stained coffee shuttles are neatly aligned beneath the brewer. Dan has been here long enough to brew the first few gallons of the day, but this is all he has done. Kat clocks herself in, fingernails clicking against the register. The café is lit dimly by streetlights outside the window.
Anna’s car is not the usual teenage mess of crumpled to-go food bags and crushed bottles and crumbs smashed into the cracks of seats. Bright woven blankets are tossed across the seat backs, a dream catcher waves under the rearview. Kat walked her back to it last night, after they locked the café doors. Something was wrong, clear in her slumped steps and the wetness rimming her wide, light eyes. There was still plenty they could do, plenty of corners of the café to clean. It only nagged at Kat slightly to leave these tasks undone. It felt more important to be there for Anna, to listen to whatever she was going through. So important that Kat was the one there for her. Anna had spent most of the time Kat was sweeping loose coffee grounds uselessly around the café floor absent. On the back dock, on her phone. It was not Kat’s shift – a text from Dan at the last possible minute brought her in to cover for him. She didn’t mind filling in. She craved the comfort of the café whenever she was not there, and needed the hours to make her rent for the month. But she worried -- he had an aging dog, a shaky relationship. She asked if he was alright. He never replied, and her concern had found a new place to settle. “You okay?” The words were a switch, jolting Anna’s swaying forward motion to a halt. They were not to her car yet, but the air was cold and refreshing. A streetlight shone a few steps ahead of them, illuminating the conflict folded into Anna’s normally seamless brow. Her long caramel hair shone gold in the yellow light. “I’ve been wanting to tell you for a while,” she said. Anna rubbed at her wet eyes with the back of her fist, and the motion made her seem even younger than she was. Made Kat think of a worn toddler on the back end of an hour of sobbing. Everything about her was mature – she looked like a woman, spoke like one. It didn’t take long working in the café for Kat to realize that men found no shame in flirting with Anna as she took their orders. Kat made it her duty to stare them down coolly from the register beside the younger girl. Made pointed, loud comments about her high school classes with them in earshot. Kat started walking again, walking away, maybe. But Anna followed, unlocked her car. Got into the back seat, motioned for Kat to follow. Tears were tracing paths down her freckled cheeks, glinting in the moonlight. The echo of the car doors closing resounded through the night.
Dan comes through the door as Kat is tasting the first shot of the day. The sharp, chocolaty bitterness clings to her throat and chokes her. It tastes like smoke, like stale tobacco. Makes her itch for more and grimace all at once. “You okay, Kat?” “Fine.” Her throat stings. The dark espresso swirls down the drain. She coarsens the grind, thumb and forefinger tight on the cool metal dial. His eyes prickle on the back of her neck. She purges the new grinds. The machine hums, the beans crackle, her chest contracts. Impulse, gut instinct nurtured over years, over hundreds of shared shots of espresso passed between shaking fingers, urges Kat to shove the journal deeper into her pocket. To crack a flimsy joke, to ask him if he is okay in return. “If I can do anything to help,” he says, “I will.” Years, hundreds of shared shots of espresso, assure her that he means this. “You can’t.” The espresso is too coarse. The next shot is sour cherry, and the bright acidity burns. He holds out a hand, waits for Kat to hand off the demitasse. Between the two of them, the daily morning dial-in is a problem solved in a few simple sips. A few mumbled words about brightness, about bitterness, about balance. If she hands the espresso off to him, he will say that it is close enough, to leave it as it is. Kat pours it down the drain. His hand drops to his side. Dan turns on the lights as Kat unlocks the front door. Thick white flakes of snow are falling heavily. The frozen ground preserves each in its singular perfection, but the next piles quickly over the last. The cold tingles against her arms. She pulls the door closed, crosses back across the café. When she slips back behind the counter, he is pulling a shot of the espresso she has not finished dialing-in. She tells him to stop it at 26 seconds. It will be bitter. She does not tell him that. He should know. His eyes are dark, his hair hasn’t seen a brush. Sallow circles are carved above his cheekbones. “How were midterms?” He sips espresso from a demitasse. Lip curling, mustache twitching, just perceptibly at the bitterness. His eyes scan and squint like he is trying to make out a mess of handwritten words on a page. He runs thin fingers through his hair. Only makes it messier. “Great,” Kat answers. She had worked so many hours last week that she had slept through two of them. She wishes someone would come into the café. The journal is gaining weight, the words in it boxing her in. She doesn’t know how she missed it, how all the notes bubbled between the pages, doubling the width of the notebook, passed behind her back. In front of it. There was a moment in the office, weeks or months or days ago. Dan had just returned from vacation in the mountains with his girlfriend. It was his first shift back and Kat was clocking out as Anna was clocking in. Kat grabbed her coat from the hook on the wall and had to press between them. A little grey rock was in Dan’s hand. The same rock hung from a leather strand around Anna’s neck the next day. Kat makes herself a cup of the coffee Dan brewed, leans the small of her back on the cool metal countertop. Wishes the caffeine would start to buzz in her veins like it used to, wishes she didn’t feel a perpetual yawn clawing at her throat. She stares past him at the snow, coming down harder now. If it would stop, people would come. It isn’t going to stop. The silence between them is gaining weight, piling on her shoulders. She sets her coffee down, and liquid sloshes over the fat rim of the mug. She made a red bucket of sanitizer water when she came in, and the liquid is still warm when she dunks a rag and her fingers into it. “You don’t have to do that.” Kat rings out the thin rag over the tub. The foamy white water sloshes like the coffee but doesn’t spill over. She turns to the coffee shuttles first, to the stains that adorn the sides, maps of every mess made in the café over the past years. Her fingers lock as she scrubs, digging her fingernails through the towel. They scrape across the metal, tear right through the dark masses spotted over it. Her stomach is turning. Regret that she has waited so long to clean the stains fuels her sharp motions. When the first is clean, she moves on to the next. Dan watches silently. “Why’d you ask off yesterday?” She feels accusing and bold, but her voice sounds small and tinny against the silence. Inadequate. Like she is at the register a few years back, trying to find the buttons to ring up a muffin, feeling her heartbeat whispering about her failure through her veins. Knowing it is only a matter of time before she is pulled aside and told that this was not going to work out. The only thing that kept her going then was Anna’s gentle hand on her shoulder, her soothing voice telling her to relax, saying that there was no rush, reminding her to breathe. Telling her it was only coffee, that the people in line could wait. Dan does not answer her.
Anna was shaking as she pulled out her notebook from under the driver’s seat. The rock necklace. The notes. “I wasn’t supposed to keep them,” Anna said. She was clinging to the journal, the necklace. “He’s afraid someone will see.” Her voice quivered like it was caught up in a breeze. Kat touched her shoulder, thought about reminding her to breathe. Thought about allowing her voice to trail into a whisper, thought about telling her that he was only a guy. That she should wait. “Give them to me,” Kat said instead.
The journal is slipping towards the top of Kat’s pocket, too fat to be fully contained. She lets it. Scrubs harder, so her nails scrape metal again and again. Her fingertips buzz electric. She wishes she had not waited so long. She wishes there was someone else to do this for her. “This is a mess,” Kat says. Dan will not look at her, only offers a half of a shrug. Shuffles his feet in a way Kat has learned to associate with oncoming anxiety, with a screen full of tickets at 7 in the morning. He runs a hand through his hair again. The brown stains are deep, engrained into the metal. Kat drops the torn rag back into the bucket, and water sloshes again, droplets splattering against her hand. It has gone cold. Tomorrow, Dan will be on the cracked curb. Anna will be the young girl in the notebook. The coffee shuttles will be stained. The caffeine still will be numbing, the smoke will still burn Kat’s throat. She will still have two friends. The espresso will still not be dialed-in. The dial indents her thumb when she returns to it, urging it just slightly finer. She purges the grounds again. Fills the silence with the crushing pressure of blades on beans. Kat counts the seconds as dark espresso floods into the demitasse, turns her back to Dan’s stillness. The journal is sticking out of her pocket now, she can feel it barely holding on, she lets it. It is quiet in the cafe, the only sound the soft hum of water pressing through tamped grounds, the gentle purr of the machine. Quiet enough for Kat to hear Dan’s even breathing catch, ever so slightly -- enough to crack through the still air between them. His voice floods into it. “You don’t have to worry about that,” he tells her. “No one else does.” Kat presses back on the lever to stop the shot. Her fingers linger on the familiar warm wood, hold onto it. Tense energy buzzes through her veins, pale in comparison to a rush of caffeine, but a stronger sensation than Kat has felt in some time. The espresso shot has pulled perfectly this time. She stares down into the brown liquid. “Maybe they should,” she answers, letting the comfort of the handle slip from her fingers.