“Right.”
“There’s a mug in the cabinet to your left. The ratio is on the card taped to the kettle.”
The card taped to the kettle has grams. It has a temperature specification. It has a bloom time, which is a phrase I didn’t know applied to coffee. I read it twice and make the coffee, following the card with the same scrupulous attention I give to precise operations in high-stakes situations, which is most of my job and also apparently now this.
I make it wrong. It’s terrible. Almost as bad as Beck’s coffee that first morning at Station 7.
I don’t know how. I followed the card. But something in the execution goes off and what comes out is technically coffee in the way that a controlled burn is technically fire. It’s present. It’s attempting.
I pour it into the mug anyway.
I look at it. It looks back at me. It’s the color of the right thing and the temperature of the right thing and it smells approximately like coffee, so I’m going to commit to the position that I made coffee and not investigate further.
“How is it?” she asks, from the window.
“It’s great,” I say.
She looks at me.
“It’s fine,” I say.
“You made it wrong.”
“I followed the card.”
“You can follow a recipe exactly and still make it wrong,” she says. “It’s a feel thing. You have to—” She stops. Reconsiders. “Come here.”
She shows me. She redoes the bloom step, thirty seconds of water, letting it sit, the patience of it, and then the pour in a slow spiral, which is apparently deliberate and not just however your hand happens to move. Four minutes, total. I watch her hands and try to pay attention to the coffee.
I’m not entirely paying attention to the coffee.
“Eyes on the pour, Sullivan,” she says without looking up. She’s warm against my side, hair loose, smelling like sleep and her shampoo, and I am a man in a small kitchen learning patience from a woman in bear-print pajamas.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“The ratio’s fine,” she says when it’s done. “The pour is the thing. You were going too fast.”
“I’ll remember that,” I say.
She gives me a look that means she’ll believe it when she sees it, which is fair.
She pours the new cup and hands it to me and takes her own mug back to the window. I stand at the counter and drink the corrected coffee, which is considerably better than the first attempt. The light is coming up over the ridge now, going fromblack to gray to the dry brown of August, and on the southern ridge there are three fingers of smoke that weren’t there when I drove over last night.
I look at the smoke.
Three fingers on the southern ridge means an overnight run somewhere in the southern drainage. Not close, not yet, but the wind is off the mountain at the angle that carries things east, and east is where Copper Ridge sits. The grass between here and there is about as dry as I’ve seen it.
August is always a month that makes decisions. You either get through it, or you don’t, and you never know until the third week which version you’re in.
My phone lights up on the counter. Then again. Then a third time. Cal.
Cal: how’s the vet at 7am
>
Cal: asking for me
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