Page 2

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.

And about a million texts, all from the same group chat. I sighed through my nose. The first one was from Lorna Begley, the president of the town’s small business council, which I was on by virtue of running a small business in town. Emergency mtg at 5pm today in craft store. Very imprt.

I massaged my temples. Lorna held a whole lot of emergency meetings. Usually, they were because she’d spotted a mouse in her store or heard a rumor that a movie might be filming a few towns over, but occasionally they were about something serious, like when the diner on the town outskirts had burned down and she wanted to brainstorm ideas on how to raise money to rebuild, or when major floods similar to the ones that had hit our town a few years ago were forecasted again. I did not want to deal with Lorna or her weird, unintuitive text abbreviations tonight, but I couldn’t skip just in case it was something real.

So instead of replying-all and blowing up everyone else’s phones, I just reacted to Lorna’s text with a thumbs-up.

Which she reacted to with snark as soon as I showed up to the meeting. “Oh, Abby,” she said, glancing up briefly from her phone. “I wasn’t sure if you were coming, since you didn’t reply.”

I gave her my best stretched-lip customer-service smile, trying to counter the usual resting bitch face. I’d gotten enough snark from Lorna asking why I always looked so “angry” or why I couldn’t be “happier” around the “holidays.” “I liked your text. That meant I was coming.”

Her own return smile was equally insincere. “Oh. I see.”

If my café was barely staying afloat despite being the premier (read: only) place in town to get decent coffee and a quick lunch to go, I had no idea how Lorna’s craft store was still in business. She sold goods for tourists, of which there weren’t enough these days: fancy soaps shaped like trees and infused with maple syrup; earrings made of wire in the shape of maple leaves; T-shirts with sayings like I tapped that in Vermont. I at least got business from locals. No local would be caught dead with anything in this store.

Lorna and I might have stood there giving each other dead-eyed smiles until meeting time, but someone cleared their throat uncomfortably behind me. It was a familiar throat clearing, one I was used to hearing before its owner asked me if I could show him where the cleaning products were (even though cleaning the bathroom was one of his only chores) or if I could please just apologize to his grandma to keep the family peace (even though I’d always been perfectly polite to her and she was the one who’d called me, to my face, a “humorless money-grubbing bitch not good enough to scrape [her] grandson’s boots”).

I took a deep breath, fully ready for the headache to flare into a full-on Category 4 as I turned around. “Connor.”

To his credit, Connor had his shoulders hunched forward like he was trying to fold himself up and disappear, which was difficult when you were precisely six-foot-four and had ears that flamed bright red with any feeling of embarrassment or nervousness. I’d noticed it even in the near-darkness of the grubby Brooklyn dive we’d met at after matching on Hinge. Back then I’d found it endearing.

But that had been a very long time ago. He scratched his reddish curls, grimacing. “Hey, Abby. Been a while.”

It really had been, which, to think about it, was impressive in a town with less than six hundred full-time residents and only one main street. I wondered where he was getting his coffee now. Probably letting his mommy make it for him in a standard coffee brewer. “Yeah, I guess,” I said, like I didn’t know it had been exactly eight months and four days since he dumped me. Which, in turn, was three and a half years after I moved here for him.