Two Sugars

The espresso machine was screaming, the line went to the door, and I had two cups going, so I didn't look up.

That's my story. I didn't look up.

"Medium latte."

I knew the voice before I knew my own hands. Three years, and it landed in the same place, right under the ribs.

I set the cup down slow. I wanted the extra second.

Marisol Vega stood on the other side of my counter in a gray coat, hair wet, no umbrella, like she'd walked here from somewhere she wasn't supposed to be. She looked at me the way people look at a house they used to live in.

"You work here," she said.

"I own here."

She almost smiled. "Since when?"

"Since I stopped waiting for you."

That came out meaner than I meant, and truer than I wanted. Behind her the line shifted. Somebody's kid was kicking the pastry case. I didn't care about any of it.

"Coffee first," I said. "Then whatever you came to say."

She read the board like she didn't already know. She'd known since the door.

"I'm not here to say anything," she said. "I'm here to stay."

And I stood there with one cup in my hand and nothing else to hold onto, and I believed her. First mistake. Not the last.

Where do you stop believing her?

She drank it standing up. That's how I knew something was wrong before she said anything.

Marisol Vega never stood still in her life, but she always sat down for coffee. Always. The morning she left, she sat.

"So," I said. "Staying."

"Staying." She said it to the window, not to me.

"For how long."

"Jules."

"For how long, Mari."

She turned the cup in her hands. The gray coat had a hole at the cuff, stitched shut with the wrong color thread. She'd never have left the house like that. Somebody else's needlework. Or nobody's, for a while.

"Six months," she said. "Maybe more."

I heard it. The little lift at the end, like a question wearing a coat.

"And you're staying where."

"Above the bookstore."

There is no apartment above the bookstore. There's a storeroom and a dead water heater. I've been inside it. I know the smell.

I didn't say that. I put a rag on the counter and wiped a spot that was already clean.

"Good," I said. "That's good."

She smiled then, and it was the old smile, the one that used to make me stupid, and it worked. That's the thing about her. She can lie with her whole face and mean it.

Behind her, the kid kicked the pastry case again. I let him.

She left the cup on the counter. Didn't pay. I let her.

At closing I did the math. Six months. Above the bookstore. A storeroom with a dead water heater and the smell of wet cardboard.

I went up anyway, just to stand in the doorway and be right.

Empty. It's always empty.

Coming down, I saw her through the window. Back to me, phone at her ear, talking low. Her mouth made a shape I know. Please. Twice. Then a name that wasn't mine.

She turned, saw me, and the smile came back on like a light.

"Walking home?" she said.

"Which way's home."

"Jules."

"No furniture up there. No light. A water heater dead since the storm. So either you're lying to me, or you're sleeping on a storeroom floor. I want to know which. I've done both."

She looked at her cuff. Wrong-color thread. Cross-stitches, the kind you make when you're mad at the needle.

"You sewed that," I said.

"I sewed that."

"Mari. You sewed your own finger to a hem in front of me and cried for an hour."

"New skill," she said. "People get new skills."

She walked off the wrong way. Away from the bookstore. Away from everything she said she came back for.

I stood there until the streetlights came on.