Coffee and Closure

Brianna had been in the grocery store for twenty minutes and she still hadn't picked a cereal. Her daughter, Maddie, had left for college two weeks ago, and without her in the house the whole routine of shopping had fallen apart. It used to be a list. Now it was just Brianna standing in an aisle at four in the afternoon, thirty-five years old, holding a box she didn't want and putting it back.

That was when she saw Noel Kingston.

He was down at the end of the paper goods aisle, holding two packages of disposable plates, one in each hand, staring at them like they had personally insulted him. He was grayer at the temples than she remembered. Otherwise he looked exactly the same, which annoyed her on principle. They had spent years going at each other at latte art competitions around the county, back when they were both young and stupid about it. He had won more than she had. She had never fully forgiven him for that, or for the smirk he used to do at the judges' table.

She must have made a noise, or maybe he just felt someone watching him, because he looked up. His face did something complicated. Recognition, then dread.

"Oh no," he said.

"Nice to see you too, Kingston."

He sighed and set both packages of plates down. "Brianna. Hi. Sorry. It's been a day."

"So I gather. You're glaring at paper plates like they owe you money."

"They do owe me money. Everything in this store owes me money." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. "I'm doing my mother's memorial on Sunday. Here, at the house. A hundred and forty people said yes on the RSVP page. A hundred and forty."

Brianna put the cereal back on the shelf. That landed on her. She hadn't known his mother had died. She remembered Mrs. Kingston from a couple of competition years, actually, a small sharp woman who told Brianna her rosette was lopsided and then bought her a coffee anyway.

"I'm sorry," Brianna said. "I didn't hear. About your mom."

"Cancer. Three weeks ago. Fast." He picked up one of the plate packages again and looked at it without seeing it. "Everything else was fast too. The funeral was last Friday. The reception is Sunday at two, at the house, because she wanted it there and nobody in my family could organize a sandwich, so here I am, buying plates like an idiot."

He was talking fast, the way people do when they haven't talked to anybody all day. Brianna leaned against the shelf and let him.

"How many are you expecting?"

"Could be a hundred and forty. Could be ninety. Could be two hundred, because my cousin Rosa invited her entire church without asking me." He laughed, but it wasn't a real laugh. "Catering is handled, thank God, a friend of mine does that. Flowers are coming. But the setup. Tables, chairs, the tent guy is coming at eight tomorrow, the florist at ten, and I have to have the whole backyard and half the house arranged before any of them show up on Sunday, and it's just me."

"What about your family?"

"My brother lives in Seattle. My sister is... my sister." He waved a hand. "She'll show up Sunday in something white and cry in a way that becomes about her. That's her whole contribution."

Brianna looked at him for a moment. She thought about her own empty house, the quiet, the way she had spent the last two weeks doing laundry for one person and talking to the cat. She had nothing on her calendar tomorrow. Not one thing.

"Okay," she said. "I'll help."

He blinked. "What?"

"Setup. I'll come help. I'm good at this stuff. I ran a coffee bar for nine years, Noel, I can stage a reception in my sleep. Also I'm free tomorrow and if I spend another Saturday rearranging my own kitchen cabinets one of us is going to get hurt."

"You hate me."

"I don't hate you. I strongly disliked losing to you for eight years. That's different." She shrugged. "Your mom was decent to me. Let me do this for her, and for you, and then we go back to disliking each other. Deal?"

He stared at her. Then his shoulders came down about two inches, which on Noel Kingston was basically a hug.

"Deal," he said. "God. Yes. Thank you. Do you have any idea how hard it is to arrange chairs when you're the only one who cares whether they're crooked?"

"I know exactly how hard that is. What time?"

"Eight. Tent guy first. Bring coffee, yours is better than mine and don't let that go to your head."

"Too late," she said, and walked off before he could see her grin.

---

Mrs. Kingston's house was out past the edge of town, a long low mid-century place with big windows and a huge backyard. The oak tree back there was enormous, probably older than both of them put together. A flagstone patio ran along the back of the house, and it was currently buried under catering boxes, folding chairs in stacks, and a card table piled with extension cords.

Brianna pulled up at eight with a thermos and a travel cup of her house blend, and Noel came out the front door looking like he had slept in his clothes, which maybe he had.

"Thank God," he said, taking the cup. "You're a saint."

"I'm a bored divorcée with a truck. Don't oversell me." She looked at the patio chaos with her hands on her hips. "Okay. Walk me through it."

The morning went okay, mostly. The tent went up. The chairs came out of the garage and got lined up in rows facing the oak, which was where the little podium went. Brianna found she liked the work. It was the first time in weeks her hands had a job that mattered to somebody, and Noel, for all his mouth, was easy to work beside once you got used to the way he narrated everything.

The flowers showed up at ten and that was where it went sideways.

"The big arrangements go on the head table," Noel said, pointing.

"They're way too tall for a head table. People won't be able to see across it. Nobody talks to anybody at a funeral lunch behind a forest."

"They're supposed to be tall. They're the focal point."

"A focal point nobody can see past is a wall, Noel."

He turned around and looked at her. "You've been here two hours."

"And I've already fixed your chair rows, so we're even." She pulled one of the arrangements off his table and set it on a side table by the patio door. "Look. From here you can see the whole yard. Put the tall ones on stands at the corners, the low ones down the middle. It'll look better and your guests won't hate you."

He came over and stood next to her and looked at it. He didn't say anything for a second. Then, quieter, "She would've hated the tall ones too. She always said flowers were for looking at people through, not hiding behind."

"There you go then."

"You're annoying when you're right."

"You've been telling me that for fourteen years. You'd think it would stop stinging."

He laughed at that, an actual laugh this time, and Brianna felt something in her chest she hadn't felt in a while and chose not to examine it. There had always been something there, back in the competition days. She used to tell herself it was just rivalry. Standing in his mother's backyard, watching him carry a flower stand across the grass, she let herself admit it had maybe been something else, once, neither of them brave enough to find out.

The heavy work came after lunch. The catering friend had sent an extra six-foot table nobody had ordered, and Noel decided the bar setup would work better up on the patio instead of in the dining room, which meant hauling it through the kitchen. It was a heavy table and the doorway was tight.

"Tip it," Brianna said, backing through first, holding her end up at an angle.

"I know how to move a table."

"Then move it, and watch the doorframe."

The doorframe won. His end clipped the trim, he swore and jerked it sideways, and the whole thing shifted, and suddenly they were pressed together in the middle of the kitchen, the table between their hips, her back against the counter, his hand slapping down on her hip to steady both of them.

Neither of them moved.

The table sat there. His hand sat there, warm through her shirt, right at the curve of her waist. Brianna could feel his breath. Up close he smelled like coffee and cedar, and she realized she had been wrong all those years at the competitions, that she had never once looked at him this long with this little to say.

"Well," Noel said. His voice came out lower than usual.

"The doorframe," Brianna said, and made no effort to go anywhere.

"Right. The doorframe." His thumb moved once, a small thing, maybe not even on purpose. "This table is a lot heavier than it looks."

"It really is."

He didn't take his hand away. She didn't step back. Outside, a wind chime his mother must have hung went off in the breeze, and they stood there in the kitchen with the table between them, both of them clearly waiting to see who would be the first to do something about it.

They got the table through eventually. It cost them twenty minutes and most of their dignity, and after it was set up on the patio with the urn bar and the coffee urns Brianna had hauled in from her truck, Noel called a stop to the heavy work and they moved on to the tables themselves. Linens. Folding chairs. Place settings for a hundred and thirty, because Rosa had apparently recruited her entire congregation and nobody had the heart to uninvite them.

By late afternoon the backyard looked almost like something. Rows of chairs on the grass, the podium under the oak, the tables dressed in white cloths Noel's mother had bought for some anniversary party years ago and never used again. Brianna smoothed the last tablecloth flat and stepped back to look at it.

"Not bad," Noel said beside her.

"Not bad at all. Your mom would've had opinions about the chair spacing, but it's solid."

"She would've had opinions about everything. That was her whole deal." He walked toward the