The Morning Shift at Silva's

The knock comes at 5:45 in the morning and I know it's him before I open the door. Nobody else in Silver Pines knocks like that, three quick raps, then waits.

I open the door in my robe. Hugh Raymond is standing on my step holding two paper cups, and he's already dressed for the day, flannel and boots, snow cap on his head because it's December.

"Morning, Miriam," he says. "I brought coffee."

"I have coffee."

"This is better coffee. It's my coffee." He holds one out. "Can I come in or are we doing this on the porch?"

"Doing what on the porch?" I take the cup anyway. It's warm and my hands want it. "It's five forty-five, Hugh. What could possibly be so important at five forty-five?"

"You're thirty-four years old and you've been in that apartment for eight months except for wine runs. I did the math. I manage the shop now, the one you used to run, and I need a manager for the morning shift, and I'm not asking some stranger when I've got the best one in town sitting two blocks away drinking wine and staring at the mountains."

I lean against the doorframe. "I can't just come back."

"Sure you can. One trial shift. Today. You hate it, you walk home, no hard feelings, and I never bother you again." He sips from his cup. "You love it, well. Then we talk about something more permanent."

"Today is the trial shift?"

"Today is the trial shift. Doors open at six thirty. It's now five fifty." He turns and starts down my steps. "Wear something warm. The windows face the slopes and it's cold as hell in the morning until the machine warms the room up."

"Hugh, I haven't worked since Dev died. I don't even know if I can stand behind a counter for six hours anymore."

"Then we'll find out," he calls over his shoulder. "Six thirty, Miriam."

And he's gone, boots crunching on my gravel, leaving me standing in the doorway with a good cup of coffee and a heartbeat that feels too fast for five fifty in the morning.

I look at myself in the hallway mirror. I don't look terrible. I look tired, thin, like a woman who eats toast for dinner. But not terrible. I put on jeans and a sweater and Dev's old flannel, and I stand in front of the mirror a while longer, and then I go, because if I don't go now I never will.

---

The Last Drop sits at the end of Main Street with big windows facing the runs, and in the dark before six the slopes are just pale shapes against black sky. The lights are on inside and Hugh is there, unlocking the door for me, holding it open.

"There she is," he says.

"Here I am." I step in and the smell hits me first. Coffee, pine, the faint dust of the old floor. My smell, our smell, mine and Hugh's and every winter before. My chest hurts for a second and I breathe through it.

"You okay?" He's watching me close.

"Yes. No. I don't know. It smells like before."

"It should. Nothing's changed back here except the machine." He walks toward the counter and stops and gestures at it like a game show host. "New espresso machine. Italian. Cost me more than my truck."

It's a beautiful thing, chrome and black, all levers and gauges. "That's not a machine, that's a religion," I say, and he laughs.

"Come here. I'll show you." He comes around behind the counter and I follow and he stands close, too close for a boss, and his hand hovers at the small of my back, not touching, just there. "Portafilter comes out here. Grind is set on this dial, and I set it for the beans we're running, so don't touch the dial. Tamp, lock, pull. Thirty seconds, roughly. You'll hear it, you'll know."

"I pulled shots for three years, Hugh. I don't need the manual."

"I know you don't." He doesn't move away. "I'm stalling, honestly. I like having you back here."

"Do you?" I turn my head and he's right there, looking down at me, and his gaze does that thing it does, it lingers, travels, comes back to my eyes.

"Jackie says hi, by the way. She comes in every morning before the ski school kids show up. She's been asking when you'd come back."

"Jackie was still teaching the bunny slope when I started here."

"And now she runs the whole ski school and she still misses you. Everyone misses you." He steps back, finally, and pulls the portafilter and hands it to me. "Go on. Prove it."

I take it. My hands remember. I fill the basket, tamp, lock it, pull the lever. Dark liquid comes down in a slow ribbon and I watch the clock in my head, twenty-eight seconds, and I cut it and pour into a cup and slide it across the counter to him.

Hugh picks it up and drinks it and doesn't say anything for a moment. "Yeah," he says. "That's the stuff."

"Good?"

"Best thing that's happened to me all week, and it's only six." He sets the cup down. "Miriam. Can I say something and you won't run off?"

"That sounds ominous."

"Probably." He rubs the back of his neck. "I've thought about you a lot these eight months. Not just about you working here. About you."

The room goes very quiet. The machine ticks as it heats. Out the window the sky is starting to go gray at the edges of the peaks.

"Say the rest of it," I tell him.

"I don't know what the rest of it is. That's the truth. I just know that when I knocked on your door this morning I stood there a full minute working up the nerve, and I'm a grown man of thirty-six who owns a business." He laughs, short and rough. "And there's something else, and I don't know how to say it, and you can tell me I'm out of my mind."

"Try me."

He looks at me a long moment. Then he checks the clock, six ten, and looks back at me.

"Twenty minutes till open," he says. "Do you want the rest now, or do you want to work the shift first and have it after, when we're both less jumpy?"

I should say later. Every sane part of me says later. But my hands are steady for the first time in eight months and I don't want to lose that.

"Now," I say. "Before I talk myself into leaving."

"Okay." He comes around the counter and stands in front of me and there's maybe a foot between us. "After Dev, you were gone. And I get it, I do. But I watched you go numb and it scared me, because I've been numb too, in my way, since my divorce, and I never did anything about it, and look at me. Forty hours a week behind a counter alone."

"Hugh."

"Let me finish." His voice drops. "Here's the crazy part. There's a thing I want. A thing I've wanted a long time, and I never had anyone I could say it to. And this morning, watching you pull that shot, I thought, maybe she's ready for something real. Something that isn't wine and staring at mountains."

"You want to fire me and hire a better barista?" My joke comes out thin.

"I want to ask you to let me watch you." He says it plain, no flinch. "Here, after close. Just me. And if that's the wrong thing to say, tell me, and I swear it never leaves this room, and we go back to coffee."

I stare at him. The machine ticks. Somewhere up on the mountain a groomer is running, I can almost hear it.

"You want to watch me," I say.

"Yes!"

"Watch me do what, Hugh?"

He holds my eyes and doesn't look away and the gray morning light comes up behind him over the slopes.

"You know what," he says.

"Okay," I say. "Okay. I'm not saying yes. I'm not saying no. I'm saying I heard you."

"That's more than I expected, honestly." He backs up a step, gives me air. "Sit down. No, wait. First, make me a pour-over. Sit me at a stool and make it like you would on a normal morning, and I'll watch, and we'll see how your hands do."

"That's the test? Coffee?"

"That's the first part of the test. The easy part." He drags a stool from the end of the counter and sets it right in front of the brew station, two feet away, and sits on it like it's nothing. "Go ahead."

So I do. I grind the beans into the paper, and my hands shake. Not much. A little tremor at the wrist, like the eight months are sitting right there in my knuckles. I wet the filter, level the grounds, and start the pour, slow circles, and I can feel him watching every move.

"You're shaking," he says.

"I'm aware."

"Good. Means you're feeling something." He leans forward, elbows on knees. "Keep going. You're doing fine."

I keep going. The bloom rises and falls and I pour again and the water draws down and my hands steady themselves the way they always did, some old muscle memory taking over from whatever part of me was shaking. I finish the pour, pull the filter off, and set the cup in front of him on the counter.

He picks it up, drinks, sets it down. "There she is," he says. "There's the Miriam who ran this place."

"Don't do that."

"Do what?"

"That voice. Like I'm a bird you're trying not to startle."

He laughs at that, a real laugh. "Fair. Sorry." He turns on the stool to face me. "But here's the hard part of the test, and you can throw me out for it. The part I was talking about."

"Which is?"

"Trust." He says it slow. "That's the real thing. Not watching for a thrill, though I won't pretend there isn't that too. It's whether you can stand in front of another person and be seen, all the way, and not disappear into a glass of wine. Whether you can want something again in front of a witness."

"That's a lot of words, Hugh."

"I know. I rehearsed."

"How long?"

"On the walk over. Two blocks. It's a long two blocks."

I look at him sitting there on the stool with his coffee, and I think about Dev, and I think about the eight months, and I think about how my hands just steadied themselves over a pour-over like nothing happened to my life at all.

"So what does it look like," I say. "This trust thing. In practice."

"Slow," he says. "One piece at a time. You take off your apron first. Then your shirt. Then your jeans. You stop whenever you want and I won't ask twice. And I sit right here and I don't move and I don't touch and I just watch, and you see what that does to you. Whether it makes you feel alive or makes you want to crawl out of your skin. Either answer is information."

"And if it's the skin-crawling one?"

"Then we stop and you still have your job back and I still buy you dinner sometime as friends and none of this ever happened."

"You'd buy me dinner?"

"Best friend my wife never was, all that." He winces. "Bad joke. Nerves."

I look at the clock. Six fourteen. Sixteen minutes till open. The windows are bright now, the peaks pink at the top, and nobody is on Main Street yet.

"Jackie's going to walk in at six thirty," I say.

"Then we have sixteen minutes, and I'll lock the door if you want more time."

I stand there. My heart is going. It hasn't gone like this in eight months and I notice that, I catalog it, the way my pulse is loud in my ears, the way my palms are actually sweating. Numb, Hugh called me. He's not wrong. And here is a man offering to watch me take my own clothes off in my old coffee shop at six in the morning, and the strangest part is that my body is saying yes before my head catches up.

"Okay," I hear myself say. "But I'm setting the rules. You sit. You don't get up. You don't touch. And if I say stop, that's it, we go make muffins and never speak of it."

"Deal. Muffins. Never speak of it." He puts both hands flat on his knees like he's landing a plane.

I reach back and untie the apron. The strings are stiff, I tie them too tight every shift, some old habit, and I work the knot loose and pull it over my head and fold it over the back of a chair. Black apron on a chair. Already the room feels different, like I've taken off one skin.

"That's one," he says quietly.

"I can count, Hugh."

"I know. I'm narrating. Helps me stay still."

I take a breath and grab the hem of my shirt. Old flannel, Dev's