Latte, Lies, and Late-Night Lessons

I wrote the email at 11:40 on a Tuesday night, sitting at my kitchen table in socks and an old flannel shirt, and I deleted it three times before I got the words right.

Lamar had been regional manager for exactly one week. In that week he had counted the espresso machines twice, sat in the corner with a laptop for four hours on Saturday, and asked Doreen what her benefits package cost the company. So the rumor was already going around that he was here to cut two of us. Aaron Jordon, the district supervisor, had been seen in the parking lot in a car worth more than my annual pay, and everybody knows what Aaron wants, which is our building.

So I typed this.

Lamar,

It's Isabella. I've been here eleven years, I open four days a week, and I know where the good mop is kept. I'm not writing to complain. I'm writing because you seemed decent all week and I figure somebody should tell you what the staff is saying before it turns into a mutiny. People think you're here to fire two of us. If that's true, fine, but say it to our faces. If it isn't true, you should know the rumor exists so you can kill it. Also, the grinder on bar two runs hot. It's not broken, it's just old, like me.

Isabella

I hit send and went to bed feeling like I'd done something useful and probably foolish at the same time.

He answered at 6:15 the next morning, three lines, all business, and the last line said, For what it's worth, no decision has been made. Which told me a decision was being made somewhere, just not by him.

* * *

The roastery has a training loft attached, hardwood floors, a sound system, big windows looking out on the street. We run public coffee classes up there twice a month. The rest of the time it sits empty, and I knew this because I've cleaned it for eleven years.

That Friday we closed at seven. I stayed to do inventory, which is a lie I tell myself so I don't have to go home. Around eight I heard music through the floor. Not the speakers in the cafe, music from the loft, something with a slow bass line. I figured Lamar left a radio on, so I went up the back stairs to shut it off.

He was in the middle of the floor with his tie stuffed in his pocket and his phone in a little armband, headphones on, doing a box step. Slow, slow, quick, quick. He was counting out loud, quietly, as if he thought he was alone. He stepped on his own foot, swore, and started over.

I stood on the landing for a good minute deciding whether to embarrass us both. Then the practical part of me, the part that has run that loft for a decade, won.

"Your left foot is getting lazy," I said.

He about jumped out of his skin. He yanked the headphones down around his neck and the music blared out loud, some old slow jam, and he fumbled to kill it. "Isabella. God. How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough to see you lose the fight with your left foot."

I came up the last three steps. "I took dance for twenty years, Lamar. Ballroom, salsa, the whole thing. Taught beginners at a studio on Fifth for six of them before I got sensible and started pulling espresso."

"You danced?" He looked like I'd told him the espresso machine could fly.

"Still do, when my knees agree. Why are you doing it alone in my loft at eight on a Friday?"

He sat down on the edge of the little stage we use for demos and laughed, but not the fun kind. "Two weeks ago I moved here for this job. Back home I had a gym, a group of guys, a life. Here I have a budget spreadsheet. Somebody at my last company's holiday party told me dance classes were the only thing that kept him sane during his divorce, so I looked it up. Group classes are Tuesdays and Thursdays and I'm traveling both those nights this month. So I bought a speaker and I practice in here after close because the floor is better than my apartment's." He rubbed his jaw. "It's going terribly, in case you couldn't tell."

"It's going terribly," I agreed. "But you're not hopeless. You've got rhythm, you're just scared of it."

"Everyone's scared of something."

"Sure." I stood there a second, doing the math in my head, because I'd already decided and I wanted to say it before I talked myself out of it. "Here's my offer. I'll teach you. Three real dances, actual lessons, you'll be able to get through a wedding without hurting anybody. In exchange, you give me your word that nobody on this staff gets laid off for six months. Not Doreen, not Mateo, not the new kid. Six months of no cuts, and I'll make you a dancer."

He looked at me like I'd offered him something too good. "You'd do that?"

"I've got eleven years and a knee that predicts weather. What do you think I'd do, let you fire Mateo and dance with strangers?"

"That's not a fair trade, Isabella. That's you giving me something enormous for something I should be doing anyway."

"Then say yes and we're both winning."

He stood up and stuck out his hand, and we shook on it like people at a car dealership. "Six months. No cuts. You have my word."

"Good. First lesson, no wait, not now, I have inventory and my feet are dead. Sunday morning. Nobody books the loft on Sundays."

* * *

Sunday morning, nine a.m., I brought coffee and he brought nerves. I put on a slow salsa track and showed him the basic. Step, replace, step, hold. I made him do it alone for ten minutes while I drank my latte and called out corrections.

"You're looking at your feet."

"I'm looking at my feet because they're betraying me."

"They're not. Lift your chin, feel the floor, one two three, hold. Better. Again."

Then I stepped into open position in front of him and took his hands. He counted out loud the whole first minute, and then he stopped counting and immediately stepped backward into the demo table.

I caught his arm, and I put my palm flat on his chest to stop the backward drift, just a quick steadying thing, except he was warm through the shirt and his heart was going fast from the work and my hand stayed about two seconds longer than a coach's hand needs to.

"You're fine," I said. "Everyone eats that table their first day."

"Does everyone?" He was grinning.

"Not everyone. Mateo didn't. You've got a rival."

We ran the basic until eleven and he sweated through his shirt and thanked me twice at the door, and I went home and did not think about his heartbeat. That's my story and I'm keeping it.

* * *

Lesson two was the following Sunday, a rumba, which is the box step with hips and bad intentions. I warned him it was a slow dance and he said slow was the only speed he had.

We were ten minutes into the pattern when his hand slipped. Not on purpose, I don't think, his palm just slid from my shoulder blade down to the small of my back and settled there, and I felt it as if a match had been struck. Heat, all the way up. He corrected it right away, moved it back up, and said "Sorry," and I said "It's fine," and neither of those things was entirely true.

Then, two bars later, his hand drifted down again and this time it stayed.

I have been forty-two kinds of alone for six years and I know exactly what a hand on the small of my back means to me. But he's my boss and I made a deal with him over a staffing promise, and the loft has great big windows and no blinds.

"Isabella," he said, quiet, still moving with the music, "should I move my hand?"

I counted one, two, three, hold.