The Roast of Your Life

Noah had been driving past Bourbon & Bean for about four months before he finally turned in. That was mostly because it sat on the edge of a sheep farm, half a mile down a gravel lane, and the only sign was a hand-painted board leaning against a fence post, so unless you already knew it was there you just kept going. But it was a Tuesday in late March, he was twenty-four and bored out of his skull, and his last three dates had all ended with the same polite text message, so when he saw smoke curling up from behind the farmhouse he figured anything was better than going home to rewatch the same show again.

The gravel crunched for a long time under his hatchback, longer than he expected, and then the lane opened up onto a yard with a low tin-roofed building and a few sheep watching him from behind a wire fence like he owed them money. Inside, the place smelled like roast coffee and warm wood, and there was a tasting room with a big window looking out over green hills, and a chalkboard menu written in handwriting that was nicer than the coffee probably needed to be.

"Hey there, welcome in," said the man behind the counter, who was broad and sunburned and looked like he might be the owner or might just be built like one. "What can I get you?"

"I have no idea," Noah admitted, and the guy laughed like that was the best order he'd heard all week. "That one. The pour-over, whatever that purple sticker means."

"That's the Ethiopian. Good choice. Sit anywhere, it'll be four minutes."

Noah took the seat by the window and that was when he saw her, through an open doorway to the back, kneeling on the floor with tweezers in one hand and a pastry in the other, arranging crumbs on a white plate with the kind of focus most people saved for surgery. She was twenty-six, maybe, dark hair pulled back with a clip, a canvas apron over her jeans, and she was moving a single almond sliver a quarter inch to the left, staring at it, then moving it back.

His coffee came and he drank it and it was genuinely good, but mostly he kept glancing through that doorway, which was rude, and he knew it was rude, and he kept doing it anyway. There was a light setup back there, a tripod, a table with three croissants in various states of dismemberment, and her, adjusting things and stepping back and frowning at them like the croissants had personally wronged her.

She caught him. Of course she caught him. She looked up mid-crumb, straight through the doorway, right at him, and instead of looking away fast like a normal guilty person he froze with his cup halfway to his mouth, and she smiled, one corner first, and went back to the plate.

He lasted about ninety seconds before he got up and wandered back there like he had a reason. "Hi. Sorry, that's a weird question, but are you fixing the croissant?"

"I'm styling it." She didn't look up. "There's a difference. Fixing implies it was broken. This croissant was born perfect and I'm just helping it pose."

"That's an almond sliver. You spent two minutes on an almond sliver."

"Four minutes," she said, and stood, and wiped her hands on the apron, and gave him a proper look. She had a small silver pendant and flour on one wrist and eyes that did the thing where they seem to be evaluating you and finding it funny. "Food styling. For the product shots. My name's Heidi."

"Noah." He shook her hand and it was dusty with powdered sugar and he noticed he didn't mind. "I'm the creep who was staring through the doorway."

"The creep by the window, yeah, I clocked you around almond sliver number two." She said it easy, no edge on it, just a fact. "Most people pretend they're looking at the hills. You didn't even try."

"The hills are less interesting."

"Well." She looked pleased about that, in a quiet way, like she filed it somewhere instead of reacting to it. "I should tell you things up front, since you're clearly going to keep coming back, you have that look. I'm transgender. Been out for years, everybody here knows, it's not a secret or a tragedy, it's just a thing about me, same as the flour."

"Oh," Noah said, and then, because he could hear how that single syllable was going to hang in the air like an idiot, he added, "cool. I mean. Thanks for telling me. I dated a girl for a while who ghosted people by moving to Wellington, so my bar for honesty is basically on the floor."

Heidi laughed, a real one, head tipping back a little. "That's a low bar and I respect it. Okay, dentist by the window." She nodded at his shirt, where the little tooth-shaped pin from work was still clipped to his collar because he kept forgetting to take it off. "What brings you out here on a Tuesday?"

"Boredom, mostly. Bad dates, secondarily."

"Honest. I like that." She picked the tweezers back up. "You can watch if you want, but I'm gonna warn you it's the most boring thing you've ever seen. It's a crumb and I'm moving it."

It was, in fact, the most boring thing he'd ever seen, and he watched for forty minutes.

* * *

He came back the next evening, which surprised nobody, least of all himself. The manager, Cooper, was hauling bags of green coffee in from a truck when Noah walked in, and he nodded at him, a man who remembered faces and didn't waste words on them. "Pour-over again?"

"Sure. Is, uh, is the croissant still being styled?"

"Back there. Same spot. She's been back there since two, don't take it personal if she doesn't look up."

She looked up. "Dentist," she said, like a greeting, when he leaned into the doorway. "You're back."

"You remembered."

"You're easy to remember, you're the only customer who watches food styling like it's television." She waved him in. "Actually, come here. Cooper's got a new roast he wants opinions on and I've tasted it so many times today I can't tell if I like it anymore, my tongue's dead. You've got a fresh one. Professionally, even. You feel things in mouths for a living."

"That's a horrifying way to describe dentistry."

"And yet it's accurate." She poured from a carafe on the side table and handed him a small cup, and when she passed it over her fingers landed on his for a second, warm from the cup, and neither of them hurried about it. "Okay. Tell me what you taste. And don't say coffee, I will put you out."

Noah sipped, taking his time the way she was clearly expecting him to. "Okay. It's... brighter? Kind of a berry thing. Blueberry, maybe. And something underneath that's almost like, I don't know, brown sugar?"

Heidi stared at him. "Blueberry and brown sugar. That's what's written on the tasting card. Word for word."

"I'm a natural?"

"You're a natural," she said, and laughed, and shook her head, and pulled out a stool for him at the little styling table, which had a hole burned into one corner and a coffee ring the shape of Australia on the surface. "Cooper's gonna want to hire you. Ignore him, he pays in beans. Sit. Tell me about the bad dates, I feel like there's material there."

"There's so much material." He sat. "Last month a woman brought her mom to a first date. Not as a surprise, as a third party. They split the bill three ways and discussed whether I was husband material in front of me like I was a used car."

"No!"

"The mom said I had good teeth, which, professionally, fair."

Heidi laughed so hard she had to put down her own cup. "Okay, that's terrible. That's genuinely terrible. The worst I've got is a guy who took a phone call in the middle of dinner and came back twenty minutes later and said 'so where were we.' He was on a call with his mate about fishing."

"Fishing."

"Snapper," she said solemnly. "Apparently the snapper were running."

They talked until the light coming through the big window went from gold to grey to nothing, and Cooper stuck his head in once to say they were closing in twenty and Heidi waved him off without breaking a sentence, and at some point Noah realized he had told her about his whole last year, the dating rut and the boring Tuesdays and the patients who asked if the drill was going to hurt when it was already in their mouth, and she had told him about three years of food styling, the weeks she spent making a bowl of soup look hot with a blowtorch and a syringe, the time a client's dog ate the hero sandwich two minutes before the shot. It was easy in a way his dates never were, no performing, just two people at a scratched-up table with good coffee going cold between them.

"So tomorrow," Heidi said, walking him toward the door while the sheep outside did their dim staring thing at the yard light, "Cooper's roasting a new batch and I'm shooting the packaging photos, and I need a pair of honest hands to hold a reflector. You in?"

"For the reflector, sure. Also for the rest of it."

"Good answer," she said, and held the door for him, and the gravel crunched all the way back down the lane in his mirrors.

The reflector thing turned into a whole evening, because the light was wrong and then the wind was wrong and Cooper kept coming out of the roasting room smelling like smoke and saying things like ten more minutes, and by the time they were done the sun was down and the tasting room was empty and officially closed. Heidi left the reflector leaning against the wall and looked at Noah standing there with his hands in his pockets, and she tilted her head the way she did when she was deciding something.

"Okay. You held a reflector for three hours without complaining. That deserves wine."

"You have wine here?"

"Cooper keeps a bottle under the counter for when a client is impossible. We are going to drink the client wine and he is going to pretend not to know."

She got two mismatched glasses and the bottle was a pinot noir with a label half peeled off, and they sat on stools at the styling table with the hole burned in the corner between them, and the only light was the big lamp over the table and the yard light out the window doing its thing on the sheep. She talked about the shoot, about how the light had been coming in at the wrong angle all afternoon and he had kept adjusting the reflector without being asked, just reading where she wanted it.

"You're observant," she said, turning