in today. Your boyfriend—”
“Husband.”
“—let me in. Usually, people give me a key or leave the door open.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” I said. “You’re going to have to knock. One of us will let you in, I promise.”
He looked hurt and his mustache drooped. “You don’t trust me?”
“I’m not in the habit of giving keys out to anyone.” Damn, I sounded stiff; I knew I was not scoring any points with this guy, and my tone was making it worse every second. But I was also beginning to suspect that there were no secret words to get him to work. “I’ll leave you to it. If you have any questions, just holler. I’ll be upstairs—no, cancel that. I’m going out. I’ll be back in half an hour.”
My heart beat a little faster as I opened the door to Café-Nation; maybe it was just joyful anticipation of my morning fix, maybe it was just a contact high through the density of coffee molecules in the air.
“’Lo, Emma,” the woman behind the counter in the blue apron greeted me. “Red Eye?”
“Lord, yes, Tina. Feed me coffee, make me human.”
“Well, I can do the one; the rest is up to you. You want it here?”
“Yes—no, I guess I better get back to the house. To go, please. And a pound of beans, whole.”
“Less than two minutes.”
As she busied herself with the holy apparatus, I sat on a stool by the register, an earnest and grateful supplicant. I sighed, then rummaged through my wallet for my Café-Nation card, the one that asked “Have you been CaféNated today?,” and counted off how many more trips I had before I got a free drink. Not this time, but not many more to go. I’d already been through two cards since the place opened a couple of months ago.
One of the kids who worked there came in, smiled, and said hi. It took me a second to remember her name: Bell, bell…Isabel. Isabel had a dumbbell in a piercing over her eye. I had always thought the piercing looked painful, but maybe if I had one, it would keep me from falling asleep facedown on my students’ blue books.
I smiled back; something of a feat for me, at the moment, but she had access to the coffee, and therefore my happiness. “How’s the pack?” I asked Isabel.
“Oh, they’re fine,” she said. “Got a new picture. Wanna see?”
I nodded and she pulled out her wallet. The picture was of her three pugs: Liam, Casey, and Wee Mikey. Bulging marble black eyes and panting tongues strained to reach the camera lens. I could swear they were smiling, all linked up with their little green harnesses.
“Nice,” I said. “Wee Mikey isn’t so wee anymore.”
“No, but that’s not why we called him that, anyway.”
“Oh?”
“Well, it’s kinda gross, but when we’ve got them all harnessed up together? Everyone runs to have a pee? Mikey’s aim is pretty bad. Pees all over the other guys, pees all over himself. It’s a mess.”
“Oh,” was all I could manage.
“Charming,” Tina said. She handed me my double cappuccino with an extra shot, and grinned as she measured out the bag of Columbian beans.
I handed her my card, which she stamped, and the money for the coffee; I tossed the change into the jar.
Tina looked at me a little more closely. “Here,” she said, reaching under the counter and pulling out a small stick of chocolate.
“I didn’t order a mocha,” I said.
“No, but you look like you could use the fix.”
“Hey, thanks; you’re not wrong about that. See you, Isabel. Take it easy, Ms. Willner.”
She picked up the counter cloth as she completed our ritual. “You too, Ms. Fielding.”
Back home, I fled immediately upstairs to my office. Odd, I thought as the door knocked over an unseen obstacle, the room should be clean. I thought I’d cleaned it earlier this summer. Once I fought my way in, I realized that I had, and I could see that the rug was recently vacuumed. But between the notes and crates of artifacts dumped after the fieldwork, and the piles of books pulled for lecture writing, on top of the rush at the beginning of a new academic year, you were bound to lose a little surface area.
I saw a note stuck to my computer, reminding me that I’d promised to bring some books on introductory archaeology to Raylene Reynolds. She and her husband Erik ran the Lawton Yacht Club and Tiki Bar, one of my favorite haunts. Raylene homeschooled