The Roast of the Century

Peg was fifty-two years old and she had been roasting coffee for the better part of twenty years, so she found it ridiculous, standing in front of her closet at six in the morning, that she was having trouble picking a shirt.

She had done her usual routine, coffee at home even though she'd be cupping all day, a quick shower, the same jeans she wore most days, and then she'd hit the closet and just stopped. There were three shirts on the bed. One was a plain gray work shirt with coffee stains she'd never quite gotten out of the cuffs. One was a button-down she wore to trade shows. The third was dark green, and it happened to be the color she'd mentioned, in an email four months ago, that she liked.

"That one's ridiculous," she said out loud, and then she put it on anyway.

She drove across the bay to the warehouse in Oakland with the radio on and told herself the whole way that this was a work event. Eddy was from a partner roastery in Portland, a company they bought green coffee through and traded samples with, and he was coming down for a cupping that Jenny had scheduled weeks ago. The fact that she and Eddy had been trading emails for eight months, emails that had started as notes on a washed Ethiopian and had somehow drifted into jokes, then into longer jokes, then into things that made her close her laptop and sit there grinning like a fool, was nobody's business but hers.

(Well, hers and Eddy's, and possibly her laptop's, which had seen her type and delete more replies than she cared to count.)

The truth was she hadn't felt like this about anyone in a long time. She'd dated on and off through her thirties and forties, nothing serious, and the last relationship had ended three years ago, amicably, the way things end when two decent people just don't fit. She was fine. She had the roastery and the startup and a small apartment she actually liked. And then some guy in Portland had emailed her to argue about roast profiles and signed off with a line about her palate being "suspiciously good," and here she was at six forty in the morning worrying about a green shirt.

"Stop it," she told herself in the rearview mirror at a red light. "You're fifty-two. Act like it."

She was the first one in. She fired up the roaster, pulled yesterday's logs, and had just started weighing samples when Jenny came down the stairs with a clipboard and the look of a woman who had been awake since five.

"Okay, so, the Portland guy, Eddy, he's confirmed for ten," Jenny said. "Bo is setting up the cups in the lab and he's already made three jokes about spit buckets, so that's where we are."

"He does know cupping isn't spitting, right?"

"He knows. He just likes the word. Peg, are you wearing a new shirt?"

"It's an old shirt."

"It's a nice shirt," Jenny said, narrowing her eyes a little, and then, thank God, her phone buzzed and she went off to fight some other fire.

Eddy's flight had gotten in the night before, so he wasn't coming from an airport, and Peg had told herself that meant she'd have warning, she'd hear Jenny greet him upstairs, she'd have a minute to arrange her face. That was not what happened. At nine forty she was head-deep in the drum checking the burners when she heard boots on the concrete behind her and turned around and there he was, early for the ten o'clock cupping, standing at the edge of the roastery floor in a canvas jacket, looking around at the exposed brick and the steel beams like he was trying to memorize the place.

He was taller than she'd pictured. Gray in his beard, hair pushed back, forty-nine years old and built like someone who carried sacks of green coffee for a living, which he did.

"You must be Peg," he said.

"You must be Eddy."

They shook hands. That was the plan, that was the professional thing, and it went fine right up until it didn't, because his hand was rough in exactly the places hers was rough, the heel of the palm and the pads of the fingers, the calluses you got from decades of hot drums and heavy bags and wiping out roasters with your bare hands, and the handshake went on maybe two seconds longer than a handshake should and neither of them seemed to want to be the one to let go first.

"Sorry," he said finally, letting go. "I know I'm early. I couldn't sit in the hotel anymore."

"You're not early, you're fine. Jenny's around somewhere." She was aware that she was smiling and that she couldn't seem to stop. "You look taller in person."

"You look exactly like your emails, which is a compliment I don't know how to explain."

"Try."

"Nope," he said, and grinned, and she thought, oh, this is going to be a problem.

Bo found them ten minutes later still standing on the roastery floor talking about drum speed, and Bo, who was thirty-one, had joined the company six months ago from a barista job, and had never once let a silence go unfilled, clapped Eddy on the shoulder and steered them both into the tasting lab, where the cups were set out in long rows on the counter and the whole room smelled like ground coffee and steaming water.

The cupping took most of the morning. Jenny ran it, because Jenny ran everything, calling out the samples while Bo slid cups down the line and made his jokes and Peg did what she always did, which was lean over each cup, break the crust, and take her time. She wrote her notes in a little spiral book she'd used for years, short plain words, and she'd forgotten, in eight months of emails, that Eddy had actually read some of those notes, because they'd been attached to sample shipments, and that he'd read them closely.

He proved this at cup number six, a natural process Yirgacheffe that she'd scored high, and he leaned back from the table with his spoon in his hand and announced, loudly enough for the whole room, "I'm going to say something, and I want everyone here to witness it."

"Oh no," Peg said.

"Her tasting notes on this coffee. 'Jasmine, peach, and a finish that won't quit.' This coffee is not jasmine. This coffee is bergamot at best. Her notes are overly floral. She does this every time. She smells a nice coffee and suddenly it's a garden."

The room laughed. Bo pointed his spoon at her like he was witnessing a crime. Jenny, without looking up from her clipboard, said, "She does kind of do that."

"Okay, first of all," Peg said, standing up straight and pointing her own spoon back at him, "you're from Portland, a city that once charged me eleven dollars for a cortado, so your opinion on what's excessive is worth nothing. Second, it is jasmine, and I'll tell you how I know. You're tasting it fast because you're showing off for a new room. Let it sit. Let it cool all the way down. The jasmine comes in at the back end, when the cup's nearly cold, and if you miss it, that's a you problem, not a me problem."

Eddy held her eyes across the table, and there was a beat where neither of them smiled, and then he started laughing, a real laugh, head back.

"She's right," he admitted to the room, still laughing. "I've had this argument with her over email for eight months and she's right every time. I keep thinking I'll catch her out one of these days."

"You won't," Peg said.

"He really won't," Bo said.

"And to be clear," Eddy added, dipping his spoon again, "the cortado was worth eleven dollars and I'll defend it with my life."

The morning went on like that, sample after sample, the two of them circling each other across the counter, and Peg caught Jenny watching them once with an expression she couldn't quite read, and decided not to think about it, and went back to her cups.

By two in the afternoon the cupping was done, the score sheets were stacked on Jenny's clipboard, and the visiting roasters had all gone back to their hotels or their cars, which left just the four of them and a hundred and forty kilos of the Ethiopia that Peg had been meaning to get into the hopper since Tuesday. The sacks sat by the loading door where the delivery guy had dumped them, and Peg looked at them the way she always looked at a job she should have done three days ago, which was with a kind of stubborn reluctance, and then she grabbed the front of one and hoisted it up onto her shoulder before Eddy could say anything about it.

"Here, let me," he said, coming around the sack. "That's a fifty-kilo bag and you're doing it wrong."

"I've been doing it wrong for twenty years," Peg said, "and I've got the shoulders to prove it."

But he took the other end anyway, because that was the kind of man he was, and together they walked it across the floor to the hopper, his shoulder against the sack and hers against the sack and somehow, on the step up to the platform, his shoulder against hers, warm through two layers of shirt, and they stayed that way a beat longer than the sack required while they tipped the beans in and the green coffee ran down into the drum with that rattle like gravel being poured into a metal bucket.

"There," Peg said, brushing her hands on her jeans, the same jeans she wore most days because they had coffee stains in exactly the right places. "Now we roast!"

"You're roasting now? It's three o'clock and we've been tasting since ten."

"I'm roasting now because the drum's warm and the Yirgacheffe won't taste like jasmine in the cup if I burn the first crack, which is what you would do." She was already at the controls, dropping the charge temperature, checking the probe, and she knew she was doing the thing where she went quiet and fast and stopped being a person and became a pair of eyes on a gauge, because Eddy had read her emails for eight months and he'd know what it was, and she did it anyway, because that was who she was too.

He pulled a stool over and sat where he could see both the drum and her face, which she noticed and chose not to comment on. "Are you always this intense about a first crack?" he asked. "Be honest. Is this a me audience thing or is this a Tuesday thing?"

"This is an every day thing. Ask Jenny. Ask Bo, he'll tell you I once made him