"I'm telling you that as a kindness."
"Understood."
Dottie nodded.
"Coffee's on the house this morning, Mad Dog."
I left a five on the counter anyway. Dottie’s hospitality was best paid for by ignoring it. I touched the brim of my cap without looking at her face and carried the cup out the side door I’d come in by.
I parked in my own drive and crossed the road on foot — the cul-de-sac was grey and quiet, the only sound a bird off in the distance. I let the warm cup settle in my palm.
At six-fourteen her headlights swung in off the county road.
I'd faced down things in my life that would've turned a lot of men's hair white and done it with a steadier pulse than the one I had now.
All over a coffee.
I held my ground and let her come.
7
Sophia
The night had been busy. A kid with a head lac. A chest-pain scare that turned into anxiety the second the tests came back clean. The usual handover. The morning nurse calling me sweetheart on her way out and meaning it.
I pulled into my driveway a little after six and cut the engine, taking a minute to sit there and trynotto think about Caleb. In his house across the street. It should have been easier.
I grabbed my bag and got out, searching for my keys.
They weren't in the front pocket. Or the side pocket. Or the pocket specifically designed for keys.
By the time I found them, I was standing on my porch with my forehead creased and my tote hanging off one shoulder.
Then I smelled coffee.
I turned my head.
He was sitting on my top step.
His weight was on his hip the way it had been at his workbench, one knee up, the other boot flat to the boards, his hands folded loose around a single Dottie’s cup. Same boots as the day before, a clean t-shirt, and the look of a man who’d hearda woman lose a fight with her own bag and decided to let her finish it before he said a word.
I startled. There’s no dignified way to describe what my body did — a small full-system jolt, the bag swinging off my hip, a sound out of me that was not a word.
“Sorry,” he said, not sounding it. “Didn’t want to make it worse.”
I had a hand flat to my sternum and my heart doing something athletic. “How long have you been sitting there.”
“Little while.”
He stood, the cup coming with him, and held it out — his hand steady in the dawn the way it had been steady on the rag at his bench. I took it without deciding to. It was hot through the sleeve. And then I got the lid off and smelled it properly, and it was —
It wasmyorder. The thin micro-foam, the caramel at the ratio you only got when somebody had been told to put in less than people think you ought to, the extra hot, extra hot. The drink I’d been apologizing for in this town for years and never once got right from anybody who wasn’t Dottie herself.
I sat down on my own top step. I didn’t entirely decide to do that either.
“Oh my goodness,” I said, to the cup. “My hero.”
“It’s a coffee.”
