Whatever. All I know is that I am pumped for this, and as I reach over to plug my phone in, I can feel the stress leaving my body, like it can’t sink its grubby little claws into me once we leave the Columbus city limits.

“What are you doing?” Nick asks, not taking his eyes off the road. He’s a responsible driver, I think as I stare at his hands, firmly placed at ten and two on the steering wheel. It’s a turn-on, in an authoritative, responsible adult kind of way.

I wave off his question. “Shush. How are we supposed to have a road trip with Father John Misty playing? Do you think I want to spend this drive thinking about the collapse of capitalism?”

Nick sighs.

“Let me . . . okay. Here we go,” I mutter, scrolling through my phone until I find my playlist. The opening notes of Hall and Oates’s “You Make My Dreams” fill the car.

With his eyes on the road, Nick calmly states, “I am going to grab your phone and throw it out the window if I have to listen to Hall and Oates all the way to Indianapolis.”

I let out a cackle as we keep on driving.

* * *

We get stuck in some nasty traffic and end up getting there later than we planned, and Nick doesn’t want to miss anything (he was being a real dad about this, talking a lot about “making good time” on the road), so we decide to check in at the hotel later tonight and go straight to the convention center now. As we get our name tags from an alarmingly perky young man (I assume he’s been sampling the coffee all morning), I’m struck by how huge this place is. I mean, it’s an entire convention center, filled with coffee shop owners, employees, distributors, and roasters.

“Oh shit,” I say as we step onto the convention floor and I flip through the schedule we received. “Are we gonna take this workshop on Espresso Machine Preventive Maintenance? It sounds positively scintillating. I could run that workshop, and it would be, like, ‘Do NOT let Tobin use it when he’s distracted.’ Problem solved.”

Nick ignores me, looking through his own schedule.

“Hmmm, a workshop called ‘10 Ways to Lose Employees’? I wonder if ‘badger them incessantly about their amazing musical taste’ is anywhere on that list?”

Nick glances up at me, a half smile on his lips, then points to his schedule. “We’re going to this one. ‘An Introduction to Roasting Your Own Coffee Beans.’”

I lean toward him to look at his schedule. “Seriously? Are you suddenly into roasting your own?”

He shrugs. “It’s not really sudden. I want to do some new things with the shop.”

I stare at him and narrow my eyes. “Who are you? What have you done with Nick Velez? Who is this man talking about change?”

“Leave me alone,” he mutters, looking at his schedule again.