The Roastery Rendezvous

I got to the Burrows & Son roastery at nine in the morning, three hours before the memorial was set to start, because flowers take time and grief waits for nobody. My name is Angelina, I'm twenty-eight, and I plan events for a living, which mostly means I get hired by sad people who want things to look nice while they cry. This one was for Bryce Pinch, a local artist who had carved wooden things out of a garage on Delancey Street for forty years. His family had picked the roastery because Bryce used to drink there every morning and once got asked to leave for arguing about the foam ratio.

The roastery was this big industrial space with a gleaming copper roaster in the middle like a shrine. There was a loft area up a metal staircase in the back, and I had already decided the memorial would flow from the coffee bar to the roaster and then up, like the man himself ascending. Event planners think like this. It's a sickness.

I was arranging forty stems of white ranunculus into galvanized buckets when the side door banged open and a guy in a gray uniform walked in with a canister sprayer on his back.

"Morning," he called. "Pest control. Somebody here called about mice in the bean storage?"

I poked my head around the flower buckets and it was Liam. Liam Easton, thirty years old, who I had last seen three years ago at my friend Blair's wedding, where we had a fling that lasted exactly one weekend and ended with him driving me home Sunday morning while we both pretended we weren't sad about it. He still had the same shoulders. I want that noted for posterity, the shoulders came first.

"Angelina?" he said, and the sprayer hose drooped out of his hand a little.

"Hey, Liam."

"You're the event lady?"

"I'm the event lady. Bryce Pinch memorial, starts at noon." I wiped my hands on my apron. "You're spraying for mice during a memorial?"

"I'm spraying before the memorial, which is the whole trick. Nobody wants mice at a funeral. Mice are terrible at condolences." He looked around at the buckets and the folding tables I'd set up. "This looks great, by the way."

"You haven't seen it finished."

"I've seen enough to know." He unslung the sprayer and got to work along the back wall, and I went back to the flowers, and about every thirty seconds one of us found a reason to walk past the other. By the time the roaster started up at ten, its drum turning and the beans crackling, we were both standing next to it like it was a campfire, which is the oldest trick in the break-room book.

"So are you seeing anyone?" he asked, casual as anything, eyes on the roaster.

"Not in about two years, honestly. Dry spell with a capital D. You?"

"Nobody steady." He nodded at the beans. "These are Ethiopian. Freddy roasts them dark, don't let him tell you it's a medium."

"Freddy?"

"Owner. Freddy Burrows. His dad was the Son in Burrows and Son. Freddy's thirty-five, carves canoe paddles, don't ask, he'll tell you anyway."

I did not have to wait long to hear about the paddles. At eleven the guests started arriving, mostly older folks in good coats, and Brenda, the barista, came out from behind the counter to work the room. Brenda was thirty-one, dark hair in a bun with a pencil stuck through it, and she moved like she'd done a thousand of these. She'd met Liam through a climbing club two years ago and they were tight, which I learned later, and she handled the urns of coffee like a surgeon.

By noon the memorial was rolling the way memorials roll, which is quietly with a lot of coffee. Freddy himself showed up around one, a big bear of a man in a flannel shirt with sawdust still on one forearm, and he pulled Brenda aside near the paddle.

"That's one of mine," he told her, pointing at the carved paddle mounted on the brick wall above the roaster. "Carved that ten years ago. Cherry wood."

Brenda squinted at it. "It's shaped like a penis, Freddy."

"It is shaped like a paddle."

"It's a paddle-shaped penis and you know it. Look at the handle. Look at the grip ridges."

A couple of mourners nearby tried very hard not to laugh. Freddy took it with grace. "Every paddle has grip ridges, Brenda. That's for your hands."

"Sure it is."

Liam appeared at my elbow with two cups. "See what I deal with," he said, meaning all of it, the roastery, the paddle, the penis debate. He handed me a flat white. "Freddy's doing okay? He and Bryce were close?"

"Bryce taught him to carve, I heard. The family asked us to hang one of Bryce's pieces next to the paddle, that little loon on the shelf there."

"Sad day," Liam said, and we both looked at the loon, and then at each other, and something passed between us that had been waiting three years to finish passing.

The guests cleared out by three. The family left last, thanking me, and then it was just the four of us in a big empty roastery smelling like dark roast and, faintly, cherry sawdust. Freddy locked the front door behind the last mourner and turned around with his hands on his hips.

"Alright, cleanup can wait an hour. Anybody want the tour?"

"What tour?" I asked.

"The loft tour. Nobody ever sees the loft. Brenda, you've seen the loft."

"Twice," Brenda said, "and I'd go a third time, it's got the good chairs."

"Come on then." Freddy led us up the metal staircase, and the loft turned out to be this warm low-ceilinged space with old couches, a record player, and a wall of windows looking down over the whole roastery floor. There was a second paddle mounted up here too, bigger, and Brenda pointed at it immediately.

"See, even bigger penis up here. He keeps the big penis where the guests can't see it."

"That one's walnut," Freddy said, wounded.

Liam laughed and dropped onto the couch, and I sat down next to him, closer than strictly necessary, and he didn't move away, which I counted as data. Brenda took the armchair across from us and tucked her legs up under her. Freddy fetched a bottle of bourbon from behind a cabinet, because apparently the loft has a bar policy, and poured four small glasses, one finger each.

"So, Angelina," Freddy said, settling into the other couch. "You do events here now. You seen the whole operation?"

"Downstairs, mostly. The green bean room I haven't."

"We'll show you. Liam, you spray in there enough, tell her about the bean room."

"There's mice," Liam said. "Were mice. Past tense. I earned my invoice."

Freddy was three-quarters through a story about a canoe race on the Muskegon when Brenda set her glass down and looked at me with this frank, friendly look.

"Can I say something kind of forward?"

"Sure," I said.

"You and Liam have been making eyes at each other since the flowers. I noticed it downstairs before I even knew your name. It's very cute and also it's painful to watch, like watching two people stand in the rain refusing to acknowledge the rain."