Bitter Brew

Thirty years I've been pushing this cart through the same corner of St. Jude's, and in all that time the hospital has never once asked my name unless something was wrong with the machine.

That's not me being dramatic, either. There's a plaque by the elevators with donor names carved into it, brass and shiny, and I have read every single one of those names a hundred times during slow hours and not one of them says Gonzales. The cafeteria ladies get a break room. The custodians get a union. I get a dented espresso machine, a folding table, and a string of Christmas lights I put up in 2004 that nobody has ever asked me to take down, which is the closest thing I have to job security.

The pay is a joke. I've had three raises in thirty years, and each one came with a speech about how the budget is tight and how much they appreciate me, appreciate me like furniture, like a fire extinguisher, something bolted to the wall that you're glad exists until the day you need it. So yeah, I'm bitter. I've earned every drop of it, the way you earn coffee, slow and under heat.

The one pleasure I allow myself is the roasting. I buy my beans cheap because the margin on this cart is thin, but I roast them dark, darker than the bags say, darker than is strictly polite, and when somebody from the fourth floor comes down whining about how the coffee tastes burnt I look them dead in the eye and say, "That's the flavor profile," and they believe me, because I say it with confidence and I'm sixty-two years old and nobody argues with a sixty-two-year-old woman holding a scoop. It's a small rebellion. It's the only kind I've got left in me, and I take it every single morning like a vitamin.

This particular morning was Thanksgiving, if you can believe it. The hospital doesn't close for Thanksgiving, people still get sick on holidays, the sick don't check the calendar, but the administration does, so the halls were empty and the vending machines were glowing like shrines to nobody. I'd been on since ten the night before. My feet had formed their own judgments by four a.m. and around five I started talking to the espresso machine, just little comments, nothing concerning, and that was the exact moment she showed up.

I heard the sneakers first. Nurses wear those squeaky things and they squeak in a rhythm you learn to dread, because it means somebody wants something, and then she was at my cart, all five foot four of her, scrubs printed with some cartoon turkeys, and a face on her like she'd already fought three battles and won them all and was looking for a fourth.

"Flat white," she said. "Oat milk. Please." She added the please the way you'd add a tip to an insult.

I looked at her. She looked at me. My oat milk situation was one sad carton in the little fridge, half empty, and honestly I was not in the mood, and also, and I will admit this freely, some small mean part of me thought, you know what, no.

"Sure," I said, and I steamed the whole milk.

She took the cup, drank a sip right there at the cart the way nobody with sense drinks a flat white, and her whole face changed. Her eyebrows went up, then down, then came together like they were having a meeting.

"This is whole milk," she said.

"Is it?" I said, wiping the steam wand with a rag, real busy with the rag.

"I asked for oat."

"Huh. Machine's got a mind of its own," I told her, which was a lie so lazy it barely qualified as one.

She stared at me. I stared back. She had skin the deep, warm shade of strong tea, and eyes that were doing arithmetic, and I did the thing you're not supposed to do, I guessed out loud.

"Jamaican, right?" I said. "My cousin's husband is Jamaican, you've got a look I can't place."

Oh, the look she gave me. She set the cup down on my counter, on my counter where customers don't set things, and she folded her arms.

"My mother was Ethiopian," she said. "My father was white as copy paper and twice as bland. So no. Wrong continent, wrong everything, and I'd thank you not to sort me like mail."

"Well, excuse me for living," I muttered, and I turned to the machine because turning away was easier than whatever my face was doing. I felt caught out, is the truth of it, caught and scolded, and at my age, in my own cart, in my own corner, that was not a feeling I was accustomed to and I did not care for it one bit.

She picked the cup back up, drank the rest of it even though it was wrong, and I watched her do it out of the corner of my eye, which was a strange kind of apology without being one.

"Tricia," she said suddenly. "Jorgenson. Oncology floor. Since you've never asked in three years of me buying this swill."

"I've been here thirty years and nobody's asked mine either," I said before my brain could stop my mouth. "Marcy. Gonzales. Since apparently we're exchanging information now."

"Huh," she said, and she looked at my Christmas lights, the sad year-round ones, and something happened at the corner of her mouth that I chose to interpret as a smirk and not a diagnosis. "Those are festive."

"Go take care of your patients, Jorgenson," I said, and she went, sneakers squeaking, and I stood there feeling like I'd been through a car wash without the car.

You'd think that would be the end of it, one ugly exchange on a holiday morning, and I figured she'd avoid my cart forever after, nurses are good at holding grudges, it's basically the job description. But around eight she came back down, and this time the sneakers were slower, and when she got to the cart she leaned an elbow on it like she owned the place.

"Regular coffee," she said. "Black. No fanciness. I've been up for fourteen hours and I've stopped having preferences."

"Rough one?"

"Mr. Delaney in 402." She said it flat, the way nurses say those things, flat on purpose because anything else won't fit in a hallway. "Family flew in from Phoenix. He rallied enough to embarrass his daughter about her boyfriend, then went back to sleep. It was actually kind of beautiful, if you like that sort of thing."

"Do you?" I asked, and I don't know why I asked it, it just came out.

"Sometimes," she said. "Not on Thanksgiving."

I poured her the regular, the cheap stuff, no roasting games, and she wrapped both hands around the paper cup and stood there breathing the steam like it was oxygen, and for a minute neither of us said a word and it was fine, it was the first fine minute I'd had in about six years.

Then she nodded toward the vending machine down the hall, the one with the granola bars stuck sideways behind the glass, and she said, "You know what gets me? Fifty years of medical progress in this building and that machine has been holding those same granola bars hostage since at least 2015. I've reported it. There's a work order."

"There's a work order," I repeated, delighted despite myself. "Honey, I've got a work order in on my espresso machine that goes back to the Obama administration. They wrote me back once to ask if I'd tried turning it off and on."

She laughed. It came out of her like it surprised her, a real one, short and rough, and I laughed too, right there in the empty basement, two women in turkey scrubs and a coffee apron, and the sound bounced off the tile like we were getting away with something.

"Okay," she said, pointing at me with the cup. "You're funnier than you have any right to be, for a milk saboteur."

"And you're pushier than you have any right to be, for a person who drank the whole milk anyway."

"I did," she admitted, and drank the black coffee, and stayed leaning on my counter another minute, which for a Thanksgiving morning was more company than I'd planned on and more than I knew what to do with.

Around nine the basement went quiet the way hospitals do, that false lull where everybody's either asleep or dying and nobody wants to talk about either, and Tricia stayed put at my counter instead of going back upstairs, and I didn't tell her to leave, which was maybe the strangest part of the whole morning. She'd gotten herself a folding chair from somewhere, one of the wobbly steel ones with the cracked vinyl, and she sat there with her legs stretched out and her cup balanced on her knee, and I kept wiping down the counter even though it was already clean, because my hands needed something to lie about.

"So what's your deal, Gonzales?" she asked eventually. "Thirty years pushing this cart. Ever married, ever anything?"

"Never," I said. "And before you ask, no tragic backstory. No fiancé died in a boating accident, no secret heartbreak. I just liked my own company better than anybody else's. Still do, most days."

"Huh," she said again, and I was starting to learn that her huh had a whole range of meanings, like a second language. "That's a better answer than most people give. Most people get defensive, like being single is an accusation they have to beat down."