Espresso Shot

One

The way I see it, a wedding is a new beginning, full of hope and possibility. Death is an ending—black, dark, final. Flowers are involved with both, and tasteful music selections, but for the most part, brides and corpses have nothing in common, unless you’re talking about the bride of Frankenstein, in which case the bride is a corpse.

This particular wedding story involved a bride and several corpses. I was not one of the corpses. I wasn’t the bride, either. The one and only time I’d been a bride took place at Manhattan’s City Hall, where I waited with my groom in a long line of couples to obtain the proper paperwork, after which my future husband and I were ushered into a room with all the charm of a DMV office. A fleshy-faced justice of the peace in a snug-fitting suit then auto-stamped our marriage license in the midst of declaring us wed, which sounded something like—

“I now pronounce you”... ker-chunk... “man and wife.”

I was nineteen at the time.

In calendar years, my bridegroom was barely three years older than I. Sexually speaking, however, Matteo Allegro had traveled light-years beyond. Case in point: our first date.

The life-altering event began with my giving him a chaste tour of the Vatican Museums. It ended in a Roman pensione with me giggling naked and blindfolded on a narrow bed, my future husband hand-feeding me bites of gorgonzola-stuffed figs. Eve had the apple. For me it was a Mediterranean fruit drenched in honey and balsamic vinegar.

Dozens more times, I’d succumbed to Matt’s perilous charms (not to mention those figs), and by summer’s end my fate was sealed. I’d gone to Italy a virgin art student, determined to expose myself to Renaissance genius. I’d returned pregnant with a daughter named Joy.

Matt had been the one to name our daughter, a child he loved dearly (too often from afar), but ultimately Joy’s name had not been a good predictor of the years ahead, and after ten difficult laps with my groom around the sun, I forced myself to admit that the magnetic young man to whom I’d passionately pledged my undying fidelity viewed our vows not as a sacred covenant but as a loose collection of suggested guidelines. (His addiction to cocaine hadn’t helped, either.)

After our divorce, I’d made a new life for myself and our daughter. We moved to a suburb in New Jersey, where I put together an odd collection of part-time jobs: assisting a busy caterer, writing freelance for coffee industry trades, and baking snacks for a nearby day care center (caffeine free, I assure you).

Unfortunately, my new address across the Hudson and a ream of fully signed legal papers did little to stop my infrequent reunions with my ex-husband. Given his perpetual itches and my own pathetic weakness, the man’s magic hands, hard body, and low intentions occasionally found their way back into my lonely, single-mom bed.

Now, with our daughter grown and working abroad, I was back to living and working in Greenwich Village. My marital partnership with Matt remained dissolved, yet our alliance continued in other ways: like the parenting of Joy, for one (the fact that she’d reached legal adulthood was beside the point), and the running of the Village Blend coffee business, for another.

According to Matt’s elderly mother, who was bequeathing the Blend’s future to both of us, I was the best manager she’d ever employed and the best barista she’d ever met. For his part, Matt was more than simply the owner’s offspring; he was an extremely savvy coffee buyer and broker without whom the legendary Blend would be just another java joint.

On good days, my ex and I actually acknowledged what we meant to each other. Even on bad ones, we managed to remain begrudging friends. So, when he asked me, I agreed to help out with aspects of his second wedding, a union with the annoyingly swanlike Breanne Summour, disdainer-in-chief of Trend magazine.

For months now, Breanne had been planning the nuptials and reception. Photographers were hired (still and video), flower and cake designs selected (elaborate and expensive), dress fitted (a House of Fen original), and venue reserved (New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art). In sum, the event was shaping up to be a tad more lavish than the unceremonious City Hall ker-chunking of the man’s first marriage to me.

This was the week that brought us down to the wire. Breanne was moving into panic mode, and her groom-to-be had just moved back into the apartment above our coffeehouse.

“So you’re all settled in upstairs?” I asked Matt as he took a load off at my espresso bar.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “In my old guest room.”

“I can’t believe Breanne is happy with your moving back into the duplex. I mean, she does know I still live here, right?”

“It’s not for long. Just five days. Frankly, she’s happy I’m out of her hair.”

I studied my ex-husband’s wide, unblinking brown eyes. “She doesn’t know you’re staying with me, does she?”

“No.”

Matt, Matt, Matt... “You can stay with your mother, you know. She’d be thrilled to have you.”

He glanced away. “I told you already. Joy’s coming in this week. I haven’t seen her in months, and I’d really like to stay under the same roof as my daughter.”

“One last week of us as a big, happy family, right?”

“Right.”

“And what Breanne doesn’t know won’t hurt her?”

Matt shrugged.

I went back to finishing a double-tall mochaccino order: two steaming shots of espresso stirred into a base of my homemade chocolate syrup, a pour of steamed milk, plenty of frothy foam, and a whipped cream cloud as high as Denali. I dusted the ski slope with bittersweet shavings, set the drink on the counter, smiled at the young woman waiting, and turned back to my ex.

“You wouldn’t be avoiding your mother because she’s been chewing your ear off to cancel the wedding, would you?”

Matt massaged his eyes. “Let’s not go there.”

“Well, I wouldn’t blame you. She’s been chewing my ear off about it, too. For months.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay...”

I moved back to the espresso machine, unlocked the portafilter handle, dumped the packed cake of grounds into the under-counter garbage, then moved to rinse the filter in the small sink. The mochaccino order appeared to be my last of the evening. Gardner Evans was due to relieve me any minute, and most of the twenty marble-topped café tables were empty, which was typical for a Monday evening in April. The tourists wouldn’t start flowing back into the historic district for at least another month.

“Anyway,” I told Matt, “all of us have enough to do this week to keep us out of trouble. You’ve got your pals flying here from every country of the coffee belt, don’t you?”

“Practically. They’ll be arriving all week, but I’ll see most of them as a group on Thursday.”

“At your mother’s luncheon?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re going to have a bachelor party with them, too, right?”

“A bachelor party?” Matt snorted. “She would murder me if I had a bachelor party! Didn’t I mention that?”

“She who? Your mother?”

“My bride-to-be.”

“Breanne would murder you? Just for having a bachelor party?”

Matt slipped off his exquisite Armani blazer and laid it carefully on the high bar chair next to him. As he rolled up his sleeves, my gaze drifted up his tanned, sculpted forearms to the open neck of his fashionably tie-free dress shirt.

For as long as I’d known him, Matteo Allegro had been his own man, a hiking-booted, extreme sports-loving explorer. Ever since his involvement with Breanne, however, I swear my ex had been fitted with an invisible collar and leash (compliments of some name designer, of course).

“You want a double, right?” I said, moving back to the espresso machine.

“Single.”

“But you usually have a doppio espresso at this hour.”

“Single. That’s what I want.”

“O-kay,” I said.

I ran the burr grinder, which I’d set up earlier with some very special beans, and wondered if a drink order could be Freudian. “Set me straight here. If ‘what Breanne doesn’t know won’t hurt her’ when it comes to your bedding down upstairs, then why don’t you feel the same way about a bachelor party with your buddies?”

“Because what Breanne doesn’t know will become known if paparazzi take embarrassing photos of the thing and post them on the Net. Or worse, sell them to ‘Gotham Gossip.’ ”

“Oh, I see. So it’s more like what Randall Knox doesn’t know won’t hurt her?”

“Right again.”

Knox was the New York Journal’s new “Gotham Gossip” column editor. I’d never met the man, but Tucker Burton, my actor/playwright assistant manager with an unhealthy appetite for celebrity prattle, had warned me already about the guy’s rep:

“Knox is wired into this town, Clare. They say he has tentacles running around every New York inside track. And when those slithery limbs retract, look out!”

“Look out?” I said. “For what?”

“Bombshells, sweetie. Usually scandalous, always readable!”

“Damn the man,” Matt muttered. “Did you know Breanne has some sort of history with him?”

“History?” I said. “What do you mean, history? Were they lovers?”

“No. Bree says their relationship was professional. That’s all I know. That’s all she’ll tell me. Either way, the prick’s only too happy to publish dirt on her—”

“Or you,” I noted.

Matt shook his head. “You don’t know the half of it...”

“What do you mean? Are you talking about that snarky item Knox published on Joy?”

Our daughter had been arrested for a terrible crime a few months back. When the news broke, there was enough dirt to fill ten pages, let alone a single gossip feature. Strangely, however, Randall Knox spent some of those precious column inches pretzeling his report so he could embarrass Breanne, and even Matt, whom he described not as an international coffee broker but as “Breanne Summour’s flavor of the month.”

“It has nothing to do with that item on Joy,” Matt assured me. Then he sighed and ran a hand through his short, dark Caesar. “I don’t want to alarm you or anything—”

Few things alarmed me more than my ex saying, “I don’t want to alarm you.”

“—but Knox has got some photographer trailing me around the city, waiting for me to do something embarrassing. Breanne saw the man stalking me one night. She knows he works for Knox.”

“What?!”

Matt lowered his voice. “It’s one of the reasons I’m bunking with you, if you want to know the truth. This is my place of business, so my being here is nothing unusual. All I have to do at the end of the night is take the back stairs up to the apartment, and I’ll have my privacy.”

“And I thought you were ducking a fat hotel bill.”

“Well, that, too, honestly.”

“So what does this photographer of Knox’s think he’s going to get by following you around?”

Matt sighed. “He snapped me just the other day, picking up a magazine from a newsstand.”

“So?”

“So, it was Maxim.”

I rolled my eyes. “Big deal.”

“I know. It’s ridiculous, right?”

“Your picking up a lads’ magazine is not scandalous behavior. Thousands of men do the same thing every day!”

“I know, but you see my problem, don’t you? I could stay in a hotel, but then some pretty young thing might ask me for directions or the time of day near my room door or the elevators that go up to my room, and bam, a photo’s snapped, a suggestive caption’s written, and my wedding’s off.”

I frowned. “Matt, if you’re really on solid ground with Breanne, one stupid photo in a tabloid shouldn’t change it.”

“Forget it, Clare. You just don’t understand.”

“Apparently not.”

I turned my attention back to pulling Matt’s shot—something I did understand, thank you very much. After dosing and tamping the fragrant black sand into the portafilter, I locked the handle, pressed the Go button, and began to monitor the extraction process. As high-pressure steam released oils from the finely ground beans, I began to feel better. The aromatics were soothing. They were also very different from the caramelized earthiness of our regular house roast. Sweet and light, these very special beans flaunted naked floral notes, and (to my olfactory nerves, anyway) traces of jasmine, honey, and bergamot.

Within twenty-five seconds, the potable perfume was nearly finished oozing out of the machine’s spout, a fine-looking crema topping it off like a perfectly pulled dark beer. I stopped the pull, placed the Village Blend demitasse on its matching saucer, and slid the single shot across the blueberry marble counter.

Matt regarded his shot. “Where’s my lemon twist?”

I smiled. “You won’t need it.”

The espresso method actually wasn’t the best way to serve these particular beans. A French pressed or brewed method would have been better at bringing out the amazing flavor characteristics in the single-origin cherries. (And since we’d finally invested in two $11,000 Clover machines for the shop, I could have perfectly brewed Matt a single cup.) But I couldn’t resist the surprise factor.

Matt gave me a skeptical look until he sniffed his drink. Then one dark eyebrow rose. “This isn’t our house espresso roast.”

“No.”

He sipped once, and his eyes smiled. “You gave me the Esmeralda?”

“Yep.” For the past week, I’d been in the Blend’s basement, test-roasting the green beans that we’d acquired for Saturday’s wedding. Tonight’s test was the champagne of the coffee world, aka Esmeralda Especial.

I was stunned when Matt was able to secure the auction-lot Esmeralda beans. Although the Peterson family was still selling the most recent crop from their world-famous heirloom geisha trees, the celebrated first-place Panamanian Cup of Excellence microlot was as scarce as a sack of Hope diamonds.

Matt and I had explained this to Breanne, and we planned on purchasing other Esmeralda beans; the ones still available on the market. But the woman pitched a fit, absolutely insisting that we secure the famous, first-prize, $130-a-pound auction-lot beans for her high-profile wedding guests.

“They’ve read about the auction lot beans; they’ve seen the cable stories about it; and that’s what I want my guests drinking. The world-record auction lot. Not sloppy seconds!”

Sloppy seconds? I’d wanted to strangle her. The Esmeralda beans still available were among the highest quality on the planet. They were from the same damn geisha trees as the world-record auction lot, for goodness’ sake; grown on the same damn farm! But Breanne refused to “settle.”

Lucky for us all, Matt had some friends who owed him favors. He made a few calls, and voilá! Two ten-pound bags of the scarce green beans appeared at my doorstep. (And since one pound of coffee yielded approximately forty cups, we now had enough for Breanne’s 350 VIP guests to sample.) Along with the Waipuna farm’s 100 percent Kona Peaberry, the small lot of Kopi Luwak, and our signature espresso drinks, the Village Blend was bound to make an impression, too.

“Nice job on the roast,” Matt said between long, contemplative sips.

“Thanks. I kept it light to preserve the nuances—a no-brainer on the Esmeralda.”

“Aren’t you having any?”

“I cupped it earlier with Dante—” I tipped my head toward my newest barista, a tattooed, shaved-headed, fine arts painter with a penchant for space and ambient music. (He had some of it playing now: a hypnotic, rhythmic electronic pulsing that would have sent me to dreamland if it weren’t for the double espresso I’d consumed before Matt sat down.)

Hearing his name, Dante Silva glanced up from his conversation with the pretty young mochaccino orderer.

“Need anything, boss?” he called.

“No, it’s okay.”

I wasn’t thrilled with Dante calling me “boss,” but it was better than “Ms. Cosi,” which is how he’d repeatedly addressed me when I’d first hired him. Sure, I’d asked him to call me Clare, but despite Dante’s outlaw appearance, the guy had scrupulous manners—no doubt from the same sort of traditional Italian upbringing I’d gotten from my own grandmother. Luckily, our resident slam poetess, Esther Best, held virtually no respect for authority, and her routine, semisarcastic address of me as “boss” had finally loosened up Dante enough to break him of his “Ms. Cosi” habit.

Matt knocked the counter with his knuckles. I glanced back to him.

“You off soon?” he asked.

“Why?”

“I thought you’d like to come with me to the White Horse. Koa Waipuna just got into town, and I’m meeting him for a drink.”

“Sure. I’m sorry I missed him the last time he was here. We can go as soon as Gardner gets here to relieve me.”

Five minutes later, the front door bell jingled, and a long-limbed African American jazz musician with a freshly trimmed goatee strode purposefully across the wood-plank floor.

“Okay, Dante,” called Gardner, waving a hand-labeled CD case. “Enough with your Sominex playlist! I just cut a new fusion mix with my group. Let’s wake things up in here!”