I smiled wider. The smile I reserve for tax auditors and men who look at me like I’m a problem to be tolerated. The smile mygrandmother used to call mypie smile,because no man could resist a slice of her apple pie, no matter how hard he tried, and the smile was my way of sayingyou don’t know me yet, sugar, but you will.
“Coffee, black, coming right up,” I said.
I poured him a cup from the pot that had been sitting on the warmer since four-thirty. I did not warn him that it was the second pot, not the fresh one I’d just brewed. I did not warn him that sitting coffee on a warmer for that long turns it into something that tastes like a burnt tire smells. I slid the mug across the counter at him without a saucer, watching his face to see if he would react.
“Thank you,” he said.
It was the first thing he’d said that wasn’t a one-word order. I noted that. I also noted that he didn’t pull a stool out from the counter — he sat directly across from me, on the third stool from the end, the one closest to the door. The stool you choose when you want to be able to leave. The stool that tells everyone in the room you’re not staying long.
He pulled out a phone. He did not look at me again.
I poured myself a cup of the same bad coffee and held it for the warmth. My hands had been cold since November, and the coffee mug was the closest thing I had to a space heater. I wrapped both palms around it.
I watched him from over the rim of my mug.
He had one of those wide hockey-player wedding-band-finger hands, except there was no ring. Knuckles like the topographical map of a mountain range. Two of them looked like they’d been broken at some point and not quite reset right. There was a small scar at his temple, half-hidden by the line of his cap. His coat sleeves were pushed up to his elbows. He had a tattoo on his left forearm — a number, a date, and what looked like a name, but in cursive too small to read from across thecounter. The tattoo was the color of old ink, which meant it had been there a long time.
He took a sip of the coffee.
His face did something complicated. His jaw tightened. His eyes closed for a fraction of a second like he was bracing for impact.
“Bitter,” he said.
“I know,” I said sweetly. “It’s been on the warmer since four-thirty.”
He looked up at me. Slow. Like he was meeting me for the first time. Which, technically, he was.
The ice-blue eyes did one thing they had not done up until this moment. They focused.
It was — and I am embarrassed to write this down — like being seen by a searchlight. Like he had been looking through me before, past me, and now he was actually seeing the shape I occupied in the room.
I had to put my mug down on the counter so I wouldn’t drop it.
“You did that on purpose,” he said.
“You ordered black coffee and refused pie before five in the morning, sugar,” I said. “I’m doing my best to give you a learning experience.”
A muscle in his jaw moved. Not a smile. The thing that lives in the basement under a smile and runs the heating system.
He picked up the cup.
He drank the rest of it in three swallows. The kind of drinking that was about endurance, not taste. When he finished, he set the empty mug down on the counter very gently, like he was handling something he didn’t want to break.
“Another,” he said.
I had not been expecting that.
“Another?” I said.
“Black. Hot. Fresh, this time, if you’d be so kind.”
It was theif you’d be so kindthat did me in. He delivered it like a man reading from a manual on politeness in a language he was still learning. Like the words were heavy. Like he had not used them out loud in a long time. Like he was translating something private into something public.
I poured him a fresh cup. I slid it across.
He took it.
He took out his wallet — black leather, beat-up, looked like it had been through a war — and put a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. The bill was worn soft at the creases. He’d had this wallet for years.
