I reminded myself that Christopher might not even work today. It was the weekend. Maybe he had a standing brunch date with friends, or slept in, or went jogging along the Schuylkill, or…was a super-religious churchgoer or something.
“Ginger, hey,” said a warm voice from behind the counter. I slid my sunglasses down, the world’s most un-Holly Golightly. Yep, definitely him. “You’re back.”
His smile made his dimples pop and his bright hair gleamed underneath a backward baseball cap. I felt a warm, excited feeling in my stomach and my heart started beating faster. He looked so genuinely happy to see me.
“And you’re…not in church,” I said.
“Ah, nope. It’s been a while for me. Besides, it’s Saturday.”
“Oh, right,” I said, and pointed to myself. “Jewish.”
Christopher smiled, clearly waiting for me to explain why I’d brought it up in the first place. When I didn’t, he said, “How’d it go, then?”
Though there were other customers waiting, and a flurry of activity behind the counter, it still felt like he was focused entirely on me.
“Go?”
“Yesterday. Did you manage to stay off the floor?”
“I did,” I said. “Not quite so lucky this morning though.” I ran my hand through my hair again and my fingers got tangled in it.
“I’m glad to see you again so soon.”
“I broke my coffeemaker,” I grumbled. “And I can’t without caffeine.”
“Can’t what?”
“Anything.”
He smiled at me and raised an eyebrow.
“I have a show soon, and I’m up early so I can get some painting done before I open the shop,” I explained.
“Wow, you paint? Cool. Well, let’s get you fixed up,” he said, turning to the coffee machine.
“A large coffee with a quad shot, please.”
He raised both eyebrows but made the drink without comment. “Bagel?”
“Um, yeah, sure.” I started to say which, but he was already grabbing for an everything and the chive cream cheese.
“Sorry, same as yesterday?”
I nodded, and Christopher talked as he prepped my bagel. “A lot of people always get the same thing, and they really like it when you remember. Makes them feel special. Seen, ya know? I like knowing what people want.” He put the bagel together with the graceful movements of a familiar task. “But other people like lots of different stuff and they don’t repeat their order. So I like to make sure.”
“Well, I very occasionally deviate and go for a cinnamon raisin bagel with plain cream cheese if I’m feeling the need to try and recapture my lost childhood around the holidays, but I promise to give fair warning if it’s one of those days, because the raisin bagel is the least of my issues on days like that.”
He broke into a smile. Then he put my coffee on the counter between us and held up the bagel for a long moment, watching me assessingly. Instead of putting it in a bag, he put it on a plate with a napkin. His raised his eyebrows over eyes sparkling with mischief, and bit his lip, like he was waiting to see if I’d call his bluff. He looked like a kid reaching for a second cookie when he’d been told he could have one.
Warmth bloomed in my chest at the idea that he was actively angling to have me stay here and talk with him as I ate. “Wow, you’re not subtle, huh?” I said.
“Nope.”
His p popped, and his grin was sunny and boyish, wrinkling the skin around his eyes. And I found that I liked his lack of subtlety. That he was clear about wanting me to stay.
I narrowed my eyes at him, just in case he was joking, but I left the bagel where it was. I shrugged out of my jacket and draped it over the stool, then I sat down across the counter from him. He squeezed his hands into fists and grinned.
“Yay,” he said softly, and I felt another trickle of warmth flow through me that had nothing to do with the coffee.
A book on the lost history of the Philadelphia wharves lay on the prep counter, dusted with espresso. Christopher brushed it off carefully and then rested his elbows on it so he was closer to my height. I took a sip of coffee to avoid getting lost in the magnetic blue and rust of his eyes.
“Oh, shit, that’s so much better than melted ice cream.”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Christopher shot me a wry look, then went to help a customer. He asked her how her morning was going so far, and really listened to the answer. A couple came in and called him by name, thanking him for helping them, but didn’t say with what.
“I live to serve,” he said with a wink at them.
A few other customers came in and I ate my bagel as he made polite conversation with mother and daughter tourists, pointing them toward the Liberty Bell and laughing when the mother made the joke about it being broken that everyone who lives in Philly has heard a thousand times before.
Shit, he was nice. Not faking-it-to-get-a-good-tip nice, not gritting-my-teeth-and-secretly-plotting-your-death nice. But for-real nice. Appreciates-the-human-animal nice.
“If you have a regular coffeemaker at home—when it’s functional, I mean—how much coffee do you have to drink to get the same effects as a large with a quad shot?” he said when he’d finished serving the last customer.
“I dunno, I just…drink it until it’s gone? I mostly only end up at coffee shops in the morning when I do silly things like break my coffeepot. I shouldn’t order the quad shot. It’s stupid expensive.” Especially since it was money that could be going toward buying the shop.
For a second I thought I’d offended him, but Christopher just nodded, and I relaxed.
“My friend Daniel just moved to this wackadoo small town in northern Michigan, and he’s losing his mind because everyone there is out of a David Lynch movie or something. So, I guess there’s a coffee shop there. Yeah, one. And Daniel would always order the same thing—a triple shot in a large coffee. And the lady who runs the shop kept giving him crap about drinking so much caffeine, yadda yadda yadda. Then he goes in there the other morning—Daniel can’t even make coffee without burning it so he’s seriously there all the time—and this lady had named the drink after him! Like, on the board it said ‘The Daniel’ only the way she wrote it was expresso…”
Christopher quirked a grin. He’d probably heard it ordered that way a hundred times.
“Whatever, I’m not winning any spelling bees myself, but he’s an English professor, so in his head he’s like ‘It’s a totally different prefix!’ Anyway, he was mortified because he hates anyone drawing attention to him in any way, but I told him I was gonna start going around ordering The Daniel at random coffee shops in Philly and then looking at people like they were from another planet when they didn’t know what I meant.”
Christopher smiled as he wiped down the countertop. “If you’d ordered The Daniel here, I’d have just made you some concoction as if it were totally a thing.”
I raised my hand and he high-fived me.
“Uh, no offense to your friend, but…three shots?”
“I know, I know. It’s vintage Daniel. The first time he ordered it, he was super distracted and the barista was like, ‘We pull double shots so I’ll just have to dump this fourth shot unless you want me to throw it in,’ and Daniel was so delighted that he got a free fourth shot that he just started ordering three. Half the time people would give him the fourth anyway.”
“But you don’t do that too?”
I shrugged and slowly looked him up and down. “I ask for what I want.”
Christopher gulped audibly and dropped the bar rag, pupils widening. The counter was between us and suddenly we were both leaning into it, as if the desire to feel each other’s heat could make it disappear.
Then the tinkle of the bell ushered customers in and the spell was broken.
✕ ✕ ✕
Somehow, the next day I still hadn’t replaced my coffeepot and I found myself back again, chatting with Christopher over coffee and a b
agel.
“So, you work at Small Change, right?”
“Why, however could you tell?” I looked down at my fully inked-up arms and hands.
“I might have seen you around.” He flushed slightly. Then he gestured to my tattoos. “But nah, you could just as easily work at Whole Foods.”
“Well I sure as hell can’t afford to shop there. Yeah, I work at Small Change. I own it, actually.”
“Rock on, small business owners,” he said. “And a Tom Waits fan to boot. Assuming you named the shop?”
I nodded and held my hand up for another high five, but this time he didn’t move away right after, instead curling his fingers around mine. My heart sped up a little, but I didn’t pull my hand away.
“Your art is beautiful,” he said, looking down at my forearm.
It was one of my favorites—a detailed black and gray seahorse, its spiny body curled under water. Jonathan had done it and he had a way of making the translucent look solid and the solid translucent like no other artist I’d ever seen. I still didn’t know how he did it, but the water looked real enough to touch and the bones of the seahorse delicate and membranous. “Thanks. Do you have any?”
He shook his head, still looking at my arm. His gaze gave me goose bumps, raising the hairs not only on my arms but at the back of my neck, like my body was imagining what it might be like to feel his breath there.
“How’d you get into tattooing?”
“As a kid I drew constantly. I copied the characters on cereal boxes, drew portraits of my classmates, doodled in the margins of…well, everything. Freshman year of high school, I was in art class and this guy, this senior, had a little tattoo on his arm. I saw it when he pushed up his sleeve to wash his hands. It was this crude little star. Probably supposed to be a pentagram but it was kind of fucked up. I asked him where he got it and he said he just used a safety pin and the ink from a ballpoint pen.”
“Christ, that doesn’t sound sanitary.”
I grinned at him. “Definitely not. So of course I tried it that night.”
“No way. Do you still have it?”
I pulled up the other sleeve of my T-shirt and pointed to my left upper arm where, just visible in between the paws of a wolf and above the crown of a pinecone, was a small, wavery tattoo, faded with time.
“Oh, that’s…uh. What is that?”
“Did you ever read Sideways Stories From Wayside School?” He shook his head. “It’s brilliant, for real. It’s about this bonkers elementary school—super absurdist and hilarious. Anyway, one of the kids’ dads lets him get a tattoo. The kid’s, like, ten or something. And he’s all excited because his classmates are jealous and they think it makes him cool and hardcore, but he won’t tell anyone what he’s going to get because he can’t decide. He agonizes over it. Then the next day when he comes in, everyone gathers around him to see the big reveal.”
Christopher leaned in toward me, eyes wide. “And? What’d he get?”
I tapped my arm. “A potato.”
Christopher burst out laughing. He had a fantastic laugh—loud and rich and from the belly, and it terminated in a kind of chuckle, like he wasn’t quite ready to stop yet. It was the kind of laugh that made you feel lucky that you said something he thought was funny.
“Oh, man.” He wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “That’s the cutest thing I’ve ever heard.”
He waited on a customer, still chuckling when he glanced over at me.
“See, that’s something I always wondered about,” he said, picking the conversation right back up. “So many people with lots of tattoos seem to have stuff like that, that’s just a joke or whatever. But doesn’t it feel kind of serious putting something on your skin forever? Or once you have so many does it not matter any more?”
“But that’s the thing. It isn’t a joke. The potato. I mean, yes, I know what you mean. Lots of tattoo artists and folks who are heavily inked don’t care so specifically about each individual piece. It stops being about each tattoo as a work of art and starts being about an approach to life where you carry your history with you. You wear it. It’s visible for the world to see, but more importantly so you can’t forget any of it. So yeah, you might get a tattoo from a friend to commemorate an event and not care so much what it looks like as you do that every time you see it you’ll remember the moment you shared. And the more you have, the more possible that is because they blend together into just…you. Your past made present on your body.”
Christopher’s eyes scanned my visible ink like he was trying to read that past. My arms, my hands. When he lingered on my neck, my breath hitched.
“It…confronts you with yourself. With the things you’ve thought, felt, done. You can’t pretend something didn’t happen if it’s on your skin. You can’t forget. And they’re also a way to retell the story, I guess. You know, like, if something bad happens, a lot of people get a tattoo. Not because they want to remember the bad thing, but because once they’ve lived through it, or figured it out, then every time they look at the tattoo they remember that process. Tattoos are the scars you can choose.”
He was staring at me intently, then he cleared his throat. “No, that makes sense. I never thought of it like that. So, the potato. Why isn’t it a joke?”
“Oh. Well, I mean, not to sound all lit professor about it, but it’s a metaphor, right? In the book, I mean. It takes the expectations that people have of what a tattoo means and the expectations that people have of what a potato is and combines them. Crosses them? I dunno.” I was sure Daniel would know some fancy literary term for what I meant. “People think of potatoes as boring and blah and safe and totally unaesthetic. And they think of tattoos as flashy and dangerous and badass and artistic. So a tattoo of a potato—it frustrates both expectations, you know? Or, maybe it highlights both. Either way, it kind of manages to make a tattoo blah and boring and safe, and make a potato flashy and dangerous and badass.”
I shrugged. The doubled absurdity of sitting here giving a thesis on a potato caught up with me so I took a sip of my coffee to stall.
Christopher looked very serious though. His eyebrows drew together and he bit his lip as he reached out and touched my arm, covering the potato with the pad of one finger. “That’s really damned beautiful, actually,” he said.
“Christopher, help me with these, sweetie,” called a voice from the door. Neither of us had even noticed the tinkling bells. Christopher’s eyes widened for a moment, then he shook his head in amusement. I could feel the ghost of his touch on my skin, like his finger had left a print on me even after he’d turned away.
In the doorway stood a tall woman in her late fifties or early sixties. Her gray-shot brown hair was windblown and her cheeks were flushed. Two canvas grocery bags hanging off her wrists pulled her shapeless coat askew, and she was juggling a bakery box and the largest Tupperware I’d ever seen in my life.
“Whoa, Ma, I got it,” he said, taking everything from her in one easy movement.
“Just put it there,” she said, pointing to the counter, and she walked right over and began pulling things out of the bags—a baguette and a round of cheese and some grapes. She popped the lid off the Tupperware and the smell of spicy, briny tomatoes filled the air of Melt.
“Ma, no, not here!”
“What’s wrong?”
“What’s wrong? What’s wrong is that this is a sandwich shop and you can’t start plating up puttanesca or people are gonna want to eat puttanesca instead of sandwiches.”
“Chris, it’s just leftovers, it’s not a big deal.”
Christopher ran a hand over his face, and I got the distinct sense that this wasn’t the first time a similar scenario had played out.
“You don’t have to bring me lunch. I make food here. Remember?” He gestured to the deli meats, cheeses, and vegetables around the shop.
“Just give me a kiss, shut your mouth, and eat the puttanesca.” She tapped her cheek and Christopher leaned in to kiss her.
“Th
anks, Ma.”
“Maybe your friend would like some, anyway,” she said, looking me up and down. Then she was out the door as fast as she’d come in.
“Oh my god,” I breathed.
“Um. That was my mom.”
“Yup. Yeah, I got that.”
He loaded the groceries back into the bag and put it behind the counter. “Do you want some though? I know it’s only ten a.m. but it’s kind of the one thing my mom makes well.”
“It smells amazing, but I have to go. Gotta open the shop in a few.”
He nodded. “Right, sure. What about later? We could meet up for dinner…”
For a moment, I wondered what it would be like if I had a normal schedule and, like, was a person who had ever eaten pasta prepared by someone’s mother.
“Oh. Well, the shop stays open late,” I said, flustered. “Past dinner late, you know?”
“Sure,” he said, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I was imagining that he sounded disappointed. “Bye, Ginger.”
✕ ✕ ✕
Hours later, in a break between clients, when my stomach was rumbling and I was thinking about how good some pasta puttanesca would taste, I said to Morgan, “Riddle me this, Batman. Exactly how many times can you awkwardly run away from someone before they come to their senses and stop wanting to see you?”
Morgan raised one shapely eyebrow, but didn’t ask for details. “Depends on who you’re running away from, I guess,” she said. “And whether you want to get caught. Hell, that Cinderella bitch’s sisters cut off their own heels.”
Aaaand with that she was off on a tear about fairy tales, and I found myself wondering if that pasta would taste as good as it had smelled.
⌃ ⌃ ⌃
J—
You never could resist a romance, huh? Works every time ;) Or maybe you finally got so bored in there that confessions of my pathetic love life seemed like a good time. Either way, it’s good to hear from you. Thanks for writing back.