smirked. “Don’t pull my chain, Bird man.”
Gardner laughed.
Esther’s impatience couldn’t be blamed totally on her overstimulated anterior cingulum. Her shift had ended twenty minutes ago, and I’d asked her to hang around until Matt showed.
I reached beneath my blue Village Blend apron and felt for the cell phone in my jeans pocket. I pulled it out, flipped it open.
No messages.
My annoyance was changing to worry. Matt was over an hour late now. Had something happened to him? Why hadn’t he called? I pushed the speed dial for his cell and reached his voicemail.
With a sigh, I went ahead with the tasting preparations. As I set up a second burr grinder beside our espresso machine, I made the quality-control point to my staff that when properly preparing decaf for service (as we were about to do again) one grinder should be used for caffeinated beans and a second for decaffeinated beans.
I ground the beans coarsely and measured the grinds into a large French press. The water was simmering on the burner, but I didn’t want to pour until Matt arrived. Once again, I tried his cell number. I was just hitting speed dial when I heard the bell over the Blend’s front door give a little jingle.
On this rainy Tuesday evening, only six of the Blend’s nineteen marble-topped tables were occupied. In the last forty minutes, we’d had a mere two new patrons approach the coffee bar, so we were a little surprised by the arrival of a new customer, until we realized we hadn’t gotten one. Coming through the door at long last, was my ex-husband.
Anxious to grill him, I closed my cell phone and set it down on the counter—an act I would soon regret.
TWO
“WHERE were you? I couldn’t reach you? What happened? Why didn’t you call?”
A moment after barking these charming queries, I wanted to take them back. Matt and I functioned best when we communicated in a cordial, businesslike manner. The tone I’d just used had more attitude than a jilted fiancée on Dr. Phil.
Matt didn’t appear bothered by it. He walked up to the coffee bar, flashing one of his confident, masculine smiles. “Sorry, honey.”
Behind the counter, I tensed even more.
“Honey” was a term of endearment appropriate for a married couple. We were no longer married. I’d pointed this out several times. Matt never disagreed. He usually turned sheepish, saying it was a hard habit to break.
“Well, please try harder to break it,” I’d told him just last week, “because you’ve clearly got a pretty steady ‘honey’ these days, and it’s not me.”
“I mean, you’re right, Clare,” Matt quickly amended. Beneath a new charcoal cashmere sweater and black camel hair jacket, his muscular shoulders shrugged. “I would have called, but I couldn’t get a signal, and Joy wanted to come down for the tasting.”
“Okay,” I said. “But where . . . wait! Did you just say Joy’s coming?”
“She’s here. That’s the reason I’m late.”
My spirits instantly lifted. I hadn’t seen my daughter in nearly three weeks, and I was used to her stopping by almost every day—if not to see her mom, then at least to get her vanilla latte fix.
“I was on the Upper East Side anyway,” Matt explained, “and I checked in on her. She needed a ride downtown, so I hung around until her shift ended.”
This was Joy’s internship year in culinary school, which was why she was not taking classes in Soho. Instead, she was working all hours in the hot, new Upper Eastside restaurant Solange and over its even hotter gas burners. She’d be taking one more year of classes after the internship, guiding her through courses in restaurant management and marketing, and finally she’d graduate.
“Where is she then?” My head attempted to bob around my six-foot ex to see where the heck my daughter was hiding.
Matt jerked a thumb towards the front door. “She saw someone she knew on the next corner. She wanted to say hello.”
Matt then began studying the customers in the coffeehouse. It didn’t take long. There were only about a half-dozen men and women sitting at the Blend’s cafe tables, reading books and magazines, going through work papers, or typing away on laptops.
“Where’s my man, Ric?” he finally asked.
“Ric? Ric who?” asked Tucker Burton.
“Federico Gostwick.” Matt checked his watch. “He was supposed to meet me here. Clare, have you seen him?”
“First of all, you didn’t mention he was coming tonight. And secondly, I haven’t seen him in over ten years.”
I’d known Ric Gostwick fairly well back