His mouth had a cruel slope to it, like someone had just given him bad news that wasn’t his fault.
The truth was no one had given him any news in a long while.
Even in the crowded shop, his aloneness emanated from him like a foul odor.
He was standing near the condiment station, waiting for his coffee. As others moved to grab a napkin or a Sugar in the Raw, he found himself shuffling a few steps to the right, a few to the left, his battered running shoes making a shushing sound as he moved. Running shoes, he thought. As if I’m going to run anywhere.
“There’s space over there, sir,” shouted the barista, her face blurred behind the sneezeguard.
The man wore dark glasses, an older style, a bit too big for his face.
“How long does it take to pour a cup of black coffee?” he said to no one in particular. “I didn’t order anything fancy.”
No one answered him or made eye contact. It was as if he was a ghost or a succulent, something you could easily ignore if you chose to.
He moved over to the end of the counter, slid a wooden stool across the scuffed but still shiny floor. The stool objected, its feet eliciting a keening sound from the synthetic tile below. It was the sound of mourning, of something on the brink of giving way.
Amidst all the hisses and clinks of the coffee shop, the keening sound still managed to break through. He saw the barista who had shouted at him rolling her overlarge eyes in much the same way his daughter used to do, back before she moved out of state. In much the same way her mother had done.
Barista. He sighed. His daughter had taught him the word. “Is that Italian for coffee-maker?” he’d asked, feigning curiosity. She didn’t know. All she knew was that he was deeply annoying. The things he said and the things he did. “I’ll just sit here and keep quiet,” he had said, more than once. She hadn’t objected.
He half-sat, half-fell back onto the stool, keeping his eyes on the flurry of the baristas. So this is what it’s come to, he thought. All this over a cup of coffee.
“Is anyone sitting here?”
She was young — hell, everybody was young to him — maybe 30, and not unattractive. He cursed himself for noticing.
“I haven’t seen anyone,” he said, hating the way his voice sounded, like an old blender having trouble getting up to speed, all groans and whirs. “Hmmmph,” he heard himself utter, an odd verbal tic he’d begun adding to the end of his sentences, reminding him of his father.
“Grande Americano for Ben and a venti half-caf with a splash of oat for Gwen!”
He started to get up, an elaborate process these days. “Are you Ben?” the young woman asked, her speech as fluid as her movements, not waiting for an answer. “I got it.”
She snatched up both drinks and was on her way back to their counter before he had even resettled himself.
“Ben and Gwen,” she said, as happy as if she’d just written a poem or baked a cake.
She set the two cups — hers taller, leaner; his shorter, more squat — side by side on the counter in between them, with the names written on the cups facing toward them.
There it was:
BEN and GWEN.
He was reaching for his cup when she grabbed his hand in her warm grip, looking him squarely in his giant sunglassed blackness.
“I have to get a picture,” she said, her phone already in her other hand. “This is too good.”
“I don’t want to be in any picture,” he said too quickly, surprising himself.
“Not you, silly, your cup.”
“You are the silly one,” he said, withdrawing his hand from hers so that she could get a better grasp on her phone. His voice sounded different to him now, younger, less old blender and more the sound of the elevated train, a staccato inevitability to his tone. A kind of pushy confidence that he recognized as his former personality, back when he had one.
He slid his sunglasses from his face and set them on the counter.
“Not there,” she said, moving them farther down the counter. “You need an art director.”
“I need someone to tell me what to do,” he said softly. “At least that’s what my wife used to say.”
She ignored him, thank goodness, and she pushed the cups closer together, centered them in a beam of light from the window. “Wrap your hand around yours,” she directed, “thumb up.”
She was smiling at him now, and he took a moment to study her face. She wasn’t beautiful, at least not as beautiful as he’d imagined in the moments before he’d really had a chance to look at her. But her face was soft and pleasant, and her eyes were lit up like someone seeing fireworks for the first time. And her mouth! A plump curl, harmlessly churlish, not mean so much as mischievous.
She balanced her phone on her left palm as she grasped her cup with her right hand, thumb up.
“Oh, this is too good,” she said, “don’t move!”
A series of shutter clicks ensued as she snapped off maybe a dozen more shots with slightly varied angles.
“That’s gonna cost you a fortune in developing,” he said, pleased with his joke.
“What?”
“Never mind,” he said.
“Okay,” she said. “You can drink your coffee now.”
“Thank you for the gracious permission,” he said, hearing himself almost affect an English accent. He felt flush, drunk, alive.
“Give me your number,” she said.
“You’re young enough to be my daughter,” he said, smiling his best smile, one he hadn’t broken out in quite a while.
“Oh, you,” she said. “I’m going to text it to you. The picture. For social media.”
“Unsubscribe,” he said, feeling his lips quiver and shift.
It was as if he had lost control of everything. His face. His feelings. What he said. Who he was. He was a stranger to himself again, after too many years of knowing just what to expect from himself, and it was glorious. He was as lost as a child who’d wandered off at a county fair, seduced by funnel cakes and oversized stuffed animals.
“I bet you don’t even have social media, do you?”
“You mean FriendSnap?” he heard himself say, half-chuckling now, an adoring audience to his own awkward performance.
What was he even doing?
“You are too cute,” she said.
“This is too good,” he replied after taking a deep sip of his coffee, his voice clicking across imaginary train tracks like a heartbeat.
