chapter eight

The morning greets me with the scent of coffee seeping through the guest room floor from the café below. Yesterday’s sandwich forgotten, my stomach forces me from my nest of pillows and tangled sheets to hunt down food. I’ve slept in my clothes, the sweatpants and bookish shirt, so I’m even more wrinkly and unkempt than usual, but somebody has brought my duffle bag in from my car, the keys set neatly on top. I rush over and check that my precious 101st copy is still inside, wrapped in a dish towel and zipped into a huge protective baggie. I let out a sigh of relief when I see it, and I continue to stare at it while I change into jeans and a clean T-shirt.

When I reach the café, there is a small group of women sitting around one of the tables, strollers nestled at their sides, and a lone man reading a paper in the corner, but no sign of a familiar face. I had half hoped Endsley would be waiting for me, coffee and breakfast burrito in hand, ready to talk about Jenna.

“Amelia?”

A head appears above the marble counter, next to a glass case stuffed to the brim with breakfast pastries. It’s an older man, gruff and unshaven, crinkles upon crinkles on his sun-weathered face. He cocks his head to the side.

“Val said you’d be down,” he says when I near. His voice sounds like an old car on a gravel road, rough and meandering. “She also said to tell you that she came into your bedroom while you were sleeping to take your car keys and fetch your overnight bag. Well, she may have told me to omit the bit about coming into your bedroom while you were sleeping, but I figured you would ask.”

“That’s fine,” I say, too hungry to think of anything but the pastry case. “How much are the Danishes?”

“I’m Larson,” he continues as if I haven’t spoken. “Most young folk call me Mr. Larson, but you can call me whatever you want so long as you don’t complain about the coffee being too strong. Your generation doesn’t know what coffee is supposed to taste like, with all the sugar and creamers and that artificial sweetener you dump in by the handful.”

I am definitely not awake enough to follow this conversation. If Jenna were here, she would already be poking her credit card across the counter in a borderline unfriendly fashion, asking to be served now and chitchatted at later.

“Mr. Larson, may I just have a Danish and some water?” I ask.

“Since when is coffee supposed to taste like ice cream? And who on God’s green earth decided that pumpkin, a gourd of all things, ought to be a coffee flavor?” There is no end to his chatter in sight, but he blessedly moves toward the pastry case with tongs and wrestles with a Danish, unable to open the tongs wide enough to grasp it.