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1
Outside the picture window of the café, snow drifted to the sidewalk in big fluffy flakes. Sleigh bells jingled on the speaker overhead, not quite covering up the burbling sounds of the machines behind me. Scents of gingerbread and mint drifted through the air. And, in my head, a Category 2 headache was pinching the area between my eyes and radiating back toward my ears.
There are five categories in ascending order of least to most severe, in case you're wondering.
"Sir, I don't know how many more times I can say it," I told the beet-faced man on the other side of the counter. He wore flannel like most of the other people who stopped in for coffee or a pastry, but he wasn't a local. It was easy to tell who was and wasn't a local when there were only a few hundred of them. "I can't give you a refund when you drank the entire thing. I can give you a new coffee. For free. For your trouble." So you'll get out of here and leave me alone.
The man glowered at me like I'd told him his beard was patchy. "I could barely taste the gingerbread. It didn't fulfill the expectations I had of a gingerbread coffee. I don't want a free mediocre coffee. I want my money back."
Excuse me, my gingerbread coffee was not just far from mediocre; it was excellent: I'd spent days perfecting the exact blend of ginger, cinnamon, allspice, cloves, and nutmeg to flavor the coffee without overpowering it. I'd even added a pinch of crushed red pepper flakes in the mix to mimic that gentle burn a good gingerbread cookie gives you in the back of your throat. Whenever I finished stirring a new batch of it up, it smelled exactly like I'd dropped a warm, fresh-out-of-the-oven cookie into a vat of coffee. The first time I'd tasted it I'd literally pumped my fist in the air-that glorious sensation of achievement that comes from creating some excellent piece of art. Yes, fun drinks were art. "Then you should have said something after your first sip or two," I said. "It couldn't have been that bad if you drank the whole thing."
"I wanted to see if it would get better as I went on. Maybe all of the syrup had settled at the bottom."
I had to hold myself back from rolling my eyes. Except fuck it, that was a really eye roll-worthy thing to say. I rolled my eyes. My brain was now throbbing. "I'm going to have to ask you to leave."
And then he said my absolute favorite thing problem customers said, the glorious seven words that made the throbbing in my head shrink into glee. "I'd like to speak to your manager."
I drew myself up so that, despite our height difference, our eyes were level. And I smiled. Not my fake, stretched-
out customer-service smile, either. A real, true, toothy grin. "Sir, I am the manager."
I could've gone on from there. Because I wasn't just the manager. I was the owner. Well, technically the renter. But either way, I was the one in control of this warm, cozy space and the apartment above it. Another thing that had given me a glorious sense of achievement: running my own business at the age of twenty-eight and not having to answer to anyone else about how I spent my time or what drink specials I wanted to put on the board or how I wanted to talk to my customers. I didn't think I could ever go back to working for someone else again.
"Whatever," the man grumbled. He shook his head. "If this is how you treat your customers, you won't be in business much longer." He pointed at the menu board. "If your gruesome drawings don't put you out first."
I turned to look at my menu board, where I'd written all of our seasonal specials in chalk. Next to the gingerbread coffee listing I'd drawn a cheery gingerbread man going for a quick dip in a hot tub-esque cup of coffee. Though looking at it now, the gingerbread man did kind of look like he was screaming. (I was about as good at drawing cheer as I was at faking it. In other words, not very.) And you could possibly interpret his raised arms as flailing with panic.
The man was already storming out, but I wasn't going to let him have the last word. I called after him, "It's a festive doodle!" The door slammed shut with the tinkle of a bell.
I took a deep breath. His words rang in my head. You won't be in business much longer. They were just the nasty words of an aggrieved customer, I told myself. Not prophecy.
Though you didn't need to be a prophet to read what the profit margins of the last few months were saying.
No matter. I didn't have time to waste stressing over it or feeling sorry for myself. I turned my attention to the next customer in line, who was bound to be annoyed after the long wait. "Good morning, how can I help you?"
As I realized who I was speaking with, that Category 2 headache slammed back into my skull so hard it flipped right into a Category 3, which would ache at least as long as the person who caused it was in the vicinity. As long as he was in the vicinity, I should say. Because Category 3 headaches were reserved for one special customer.
"Beautiful day today!" said certain customer chirped, beaming a mouthful of very white teeth in my direction.
The snow had stopped falling, leaving a murky gray sky behind. The temperature was supposed to hover at that sweet spot between freezing and not freezing, so that what snow was left on the ground would turn into a nasty wet slush and anything that came down the rest of the day would be a sleety, icy rain. "It's supposed to be wet and rainy all afternoon."
His smile didn't waver. "Who said rain can't be beautiful?"
Ugh. When I closed the café at four and walked outside, I'd probably find him singing and dancing as the water poured around him, his tap shoes somehow magically not slipping in the slush. "What can I get you, Seth?"
It was truly a shame he was so annoying, because if not for the whole personality thing, he'd actually be handsome. I'd perked up the first time I saw him walk through my door, his green flannel setting off broad shoulders beneath dark hair that curled around his strong cheekbones.
And then he'd opened his mouth. Something he insisted on doing way too often each time I saw him. Now, instead of just telling me that he wanted a pumpkin spice latte with whipped cream-what he gets from October through December each year-he said, "Man, I wonder what that guy before me was going through. It must really be a lot for him to act like that."
I should have known better than to take the bait. I really should. But the man's words were still smarting at me, like poking at an already aching bruise. You won't be in business much longer. "Or," I replied, already mad at myself, "maybe he was just a jerk."
"Maybe he was tired and somebody rear-ended his car yesterday and his head hurt and he just wanted to feel like someone was taking care of him," Seth said.
"Or maybe he was just a jerk," I said. "Lots of people are. What do you want, Seth?"
"To continue believing that humanity is generally good, and that people who behave badly usually have a reason for it," he said. "Also a pumpkin spice latte, please. With whipped cream."
"Latte coming right up." I felt a little better as soon as I turned my back to run the machine, breathing in the sweet steam bath of coffee and sugar. He probably assumed I drank my coffee black and strong, but I actually loved a good pumpkin spice or vanilla or hazelnut cream latte. See? Just because I saw humanity as it really was didn't mean I was some sad, bitter person who snubbed anything sweet and indulgent.
Not that he'd gotten to me, or that anything he could say would ever get to me. I was one hundred percent right, and he was one hundred percent wrong. If he thought there weren't plenty of people out there who weren't jerks just for the sake of being jerks, he clearly hadn't met very many people.
As the machine was finishing its magic, I held the cardboard cup underneath the spout to let it fill. The moment I pulled it away, steaming and topped with a thick layer of pale foam, Seth said, "I like your drawings, by the way. They're funny. I mean, it's not like you drowned a real gingerbread man. Or like gingerbread men are real and can drown."
I gritted my teeth. "The gingerbread man isn't drowning. He's soaking in his hot tub of coffee."
"Oh. Well, it's up for interpretation. All good art is, right?"
"It's not art," I said, just to be contrary. "It's supposed to be fun." Bah humbug. I was never making a festive doodle again.
I spun around as soon as Seth's cup was finished filling to find him looking at me with what appeared to be sympathy. "I never like to assume people are just jerks; I like to think they're having a bad day and they feel bad about it afterward. Have you ever read Anne Frank? 'In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.' I try to live by her example."
I set the cup on the counter for Seth to take. Irritation boiled inside me. Why did people always need to bring up Nazis as a rhetorical talking point? They weren't rhetorical. My great-grandmother had lost both her parents and her sister to them as a child. "Yes, I've read The Diary of Anne Frank. I wonder if she still would've said that after the people she was talking about killed her."
Seth frowned. I thought he'd come back with something else about the Holocaust-good luck to him; my Hebrew school education might not do me much good in this land of Presbyterians and Methodists and hard-core atheists, but I could out-knowledge anyone about the Holocaust any day. Instead, he said, "What about the whipped cream?"
"We're out," I said. It was an asshole thing to say, especially considering it was making my business look bad and I couldn't afford to lose even my most annoying customer, but I couldn't help but feel a muted sort of joy as he looked sadly down at his cup. See, Seth? Some people really did just like being mean. At least to people who deserved it. I waited for him to protest that he could literally see the whipped cream can behind me, to call me out, to do something, anything-
His lips rose in an infuriating little smile. "That's probably for the best," he said. "I should be watching my sugar intake anyway. Have a wonderful day, Abby!" He grabbed his coffee and strode off whistling. Whistling.
The whistling alone made my headache throb at a steady Category 3 for the rest of the morning into the afternoon, as I wound down the coffee orders and took some time to swipe crumbs off tabletops with a damp rag, then ran into the back for a sorely needed bathroom break. I washed my hands carefully for sanitary reasons, because I was good at what I did, damn it, and stared at myself in the mirror. My cheeks were even hollower than usual, and the bags beneath my brown eyes hung heavy enough to hold a croissant each. Or maybe the lighting was just super unflattering in here since the bulb directly above me had gone out.
I'd go with that, I thought, making a mental note to replace it and at the same time knowing there was at least a fifty percent chance I'd forget by the end of the day. It would be so much easier if I still had an employee or two I could ask while I manned the counter, but I'd had to let go both the teenager who helped out on weekends and the retiree who came in on weekday mornings for some extra cash and socialization. It was either that or take a pay cut myself, and I literally couldn't cut my pay any more without skipping meals or getting behind on rent.
My stomach clenched, as it did every time I had these thoughts. Maybe I wasn't as good at what I did (damn it) as I thought, because if I was, wouldn't I be making enough money to keep a couple part-time workers? As it was now, I could barely pay the rent, and that was with me praying that the bakery a few towns over continued to be generous enough to sell me their baked goods at cost in exchange for strategically placed advertisements. What was the point of them advertising in my café, after all, if there weren't enough people stopping in to see them? Now my stomach unclenched and rolled. If I lost my café, I'd have to start all over somewhere else. I wouldn't have the capital to start my own business again.
I could practically hear Seth's irritating chirp. Look on the bright side! You get so much extra time to brainstorm Christmas coffee specials and draw designs on the menu board.
My foot hurt. It took me a moment to realize it was because I'd kicked the counter.
Sometimes there was no bright side. Sometimes things just sucked.
2
I usually closed the café up around four, after the lunch rush (in other words, my usual ten regulars stopping in for a salad or a fancy grilled cheese that was fancy because I used Gorgonzola and put fig jam and arugula on it). My headache was finally beginning to dissipate as I slipped my silenced phone out of my apron pocket for the first time in hours.
Some invoices due I'd deal with after I ate my own lunch (a decidedly non-fancy grilled cheese made with whatever leftover bread and cheese I had in the back before it could go stale or moldy). Some spam emails-those I deleted. A few requests for collaboration with other town businesses-the bookstore wanted to know if I'd consider stocking a few punny cookbooks to try to drive traffic to their store; the craft store asked if I'd want to sell some of their soaps in exchange for them selling bags of my coffee. Those I starred to deal with later, too.
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