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There were several coffee shops in Christmas Valley, but only one that bucked the tinsel and tinny carols trend, and only because it was two blocks back from Main Street where the tourists rarely went. It had, for a time, been called The Main Street Cafe, because it was on what had formerly been Main Street up until the 1940s or some shit, and the Historical Society hadn’t wanted to change the name, even when the street name changed. Finally, after a raucous town hall meeting during which a mint-chip muffin was thrown, it was agreed that keeping the name was too confusing, and The Main Street Cafe became Pioneer Coffee House. I’d worked there one summer when I was in high school, but after too many steam burns, dropped plates, and customer complaints, Mrs. Summers and I had mutually agreed I was not cut out to be a barista. Back then I’d thought she was at least six hundred years old, so I was surprised to discover when I arrived that she was not only still alive, but only looked to be in her late sixties. I guess when you’re a kid, everyone over thirty looks old.
I still remembered the first time Em said someone was “old, just like you, Daddy.”
After all the times the girls had managed to smack me in the nose and kick me in the balls while climbing me like a jungle gym, you’d think mere words couldn’t hurt.
“Frances Cuthbert?” Mrs. Summers exclaimed, and everyone in the shop turned to look at her, then at me.
I did one of those little waves that tried to be casual and understated but wasn’t. My hand ended up stopped in midair, like a storefront mannequin that’d been left in an awkward position, so I put it on my hip. It didn’t help. “Hi, Mrs. Summers.”
The worst part about coming back to the town I’d sworn never to come back to again as long as I lived—apart from everyone remembering I’d said that in the first place—was that whenever I ran into an old acquaintance, I’d have to go through the whole story all over again. Or at least the version of the story where my life hadn’t spectacularly imploded and I wasn’t totally pitiful: Yes, Mrs. Summers, it has been a while. Yes, I’m fine. Justgreat. Yes, I am back in town. For good? Oh, how about this weather?
I’d just settled into a frantic monologue about climate change, aware of Mrs. Summers’s increasingly confused expression but somehow unable to stop myself from talking, when a light touch on my shoulder made me spin around.
Cass.
God. Did he have to be so effortlessly attractive? Especially when I was composed entirely of word vomit and pit stains and my hand wasstill on my hip?
“Fran,” he said. His eyes crinkled when he smiled, and that was new. Cass wore his age as well as he wore his cable-knit sweaters. He nodded at a corner table. “Our table’s over here.”
Cass had snagged us a table at the back corner of the shop. I sat and started to rearrange the little packets of sugar in the holder.
Cass smiled. “You still do that, huh?”
“What? Oh, yeah, I guess so.” I left the sugar alone and took off my scarf. Then I still felt too warm, so I had to stand up and take my coat off. I hung it over the back of my chair, and it immediately fell off. I picked it up and rehung it, then picked up my scarf, which had also somehow dropped to the floor. While I was down there, I found my wallet, which must have fallen out of my coat pocket, because of course it had.
Cass was still smiling as I sat down again, and I had the sudden urge to tell him that I’d nursed my twin daughters through simultaneous bouts of gastro when they were three. I wasnotas incompetent as I appeared. Not that I cared what Cass thought of me. We were ancient history, me and him, even if he did remember my sugar arranging compulsion with a sort of gentle fondness.
Cass looked at me expectantly. “What do you want, Fran?”
“Oh, God. I don’t know. Isn’t that the eternal question? What do any of usreallywant?”
His brows tugged together for a fraction of a second. “Well, coffee, I figured.”
I took a moment too long to laugh, and then I laughed too loudly and stopped too suddenly. I hid my burning face behind the little plastic menu board on the table. “I would like a hot chocolate, please.”
I kept staring at the board until I heard him walk away to put our order in.
You’re doing great, Frances,Liar Bob said.You definitely shouldn’t have stayed home wrapped in misery and Xanax where you belong.
Why are you back from Brunei?I asked him in my head. But he didn’t answer.
I sat back at last and looked around the coffee shop. It hadn’t changed much since the summer I’d worked here. It had always had a bit of a tea house vibe, with old wooden chairs and tables, and decor that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Victorian novella. I’ll bet Mrs. Summers still used those china plates with the rose patterns on them. Some things never changed, and I was glad for her insistence on maintaining an island of sanity in the floodwaters of everything Christmas.
“Oh, you must love living here!” tourists would exclaim, hopped up on gingerbread and eggnog and reckless souvenir shopping. “It’s Christmas every day!”
It was a grotesque fucking nightmare was what it was, especially when you were trying your hardest to be an emo teen and the merry jingling of sleighbells dogged your every step. And here I was, almost twenty years later, right back in Christmas Valley. I couldn’t even tell myself it had seemed like a good idea at the time—it was just my least terrible bad idea. It turns out becoming a parent really limits your other options, like “go backpacking through Europe until you run out of money”, or “join the Peace Corps and dig wells in a country whose name you can’t pronounce” or even just “regress to the slutty salad days of your early twenties until you’ve slept with so many guys you can no longer remember Ben’s name.” OrCass’s, which had been the point of my first slutty salad days.
Cass returned to the table. Watching him set my hot chocolate carefully on a coaster sent a bolt of sadness through me. He’d always been a gentleman, even as a teenager. Holding doors for me, helping me into my coat, fetching drinks or snacks for us while I stayed on the couch wondering if I should pauseThe X-Fileswhile he was in the kitchen, just in case anything too freaky happened while I didn’t have his chest to bury my face in.
He took his seat.
I nodded at the hot chocolate. “My doctor definitely wouldn’t approve of this.”
He titled his own mug toward him and peered inside. “Well, this is a white chocolate candy cane mocha something-or-other, so who knows whether the caffeine or the sugar will stop my heart first.”
“Or laying eyes on me?” I suggested, then immediately flushed.
He laughed awkwardly. “Uh, yeah.”
