On What Grounds

Three

“I’ve done away with Flaste,” Madame had announced that morning without preamble. “He’s an utter moron.”

Flaste? Flaste? I tried to recall with a yawn. Who was Flaste again? And how would Madame have “done away” with him?

The picture of a rotund, effeminate man finally came to mind. A surreal montage ensued: I saw Madame’s wrinkled hands pushing the fat man off the Village Blend’s four-story roof; her bejeweled fingers stirring arsenic into his morning latte; her determined knuckle clenching a revolver’s cold, metal trigger.

Wiping the sleep from my eyes, I rolled over. The phone’s death-black cord coiled across my starched white pillow. Blood-red digits glowed next to the bed. I made out a five, a zero, and a two.

5:02 a.m.

Good lord.

Half-opened miniblinds revealed the striated sky—a dark cobalt dome lightening to streaks of pale blue. Silver stars flickered a losing battle, their waning light a pallid display in the face of the brilliant noise just below the horizon.

I knew how those poor, pathetic stars felt. At thirty-nine and counting, I was forty years younger than Madame Dreyfus Allegro Dubois, yet I always felt comparatively little and weak in the presence of her burning energy.

Madame’s dawn phone call may have seemed odd, but ever since her husband had passed away six months before, her vigilance with the Blend had grown keener, almost obsessive. She’d begun ringing me about everything that had gone wrong or been mishandled—in the greatest of detail, and at the oddest hours.

“Do you know what that conniving boob did?” Madame asked. “Do you?”

At last, a moment where I was expected to respond. “Uh. No,” I said.

“He had the gall to actually sell the plaque—the Village Blend plaque!—to a roving antiques agent!”

I grimaced. A part of me felt sorry for the poor bastard who’d become the latest in a long string of hired—and fired—Blend managers. Lord, if Flaste had sold that plaque, he was an utter moron.

From the day it opened in 1895, the Village Blend’s only signage has been that brass plaque, engraved with simple black lettering: FRESH ROASTED COFFEE SERVED DAILY. “And that is the way it should be,” Madame had always insisted. No lights, no awning, no vulgar oversized neon sign. Just the old plaque. Subtle. Gracious. Like a gentlewoman. Elegant, sophisticated, never calling attention to herself, simply drawing people closer with her regal air and fetching bouquet.

Situated on a quiet corner of Hudson Street, in the first two floors of a four-story red brick townhouse, the Blend had been sending her rich, earthy aroma of freshly brewed coffee into the winding lanes of Greenwich Village for over one hundred years. The historic streets surrounding the place had once felt the footsteps of Thomas Paine, Mark Twain, e.e. cummings, Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, Edward Albee, Jackson Pollack, and countless musicians, poets, painters, and politicians who’d influenced American and world culture.

Within a few blocks sat the Commerce Street home where Washington Irving wrote Sleepy Hollow; the historic church of St. Luke in the Field, whose founding vestryman, Clement Moore, composed ’Twas the Night Before Christmas; and the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theater, which was started in the 1920s by a group that included poet Edna St. Vincent Millay and decades later employed a young usher by the name of Barbra Streisand.

In more recent years, film, theater, and television stars had patronized the Blend, along with novelists, reporters, musicians, and fashion designers. Fortune holders as well as fortune hunters and most every famous resident of the Village had at one time or another stopped by for a famous Blend cup.

The coffeehouse had been a part of the area’s history—through good times and bad. And the sign wasn’t just a sign. It was practically a holy relic. Every manager of the Blend soon understood that correctly displaying the thing was less a matter of nostalgia than job security.

“I not only fired him, I made certain he was visited at one A.M. by two of New York’s Finest.”

Madame never did suffer fools gladly.

If anyone knew this fact, I did. For almost ten years, between the ages of twenty and thirty, I’d worked as the manager of Madame’s beloved Blend. (She maintains I was the “absolute best.”) Consequently, I got to know my former employer as well as my own mother (that is, if I had known my mother—she had left me and my father before my seventh birthday, but that’s another story). Anyway, even after I’d quit the Blend, we’d remained close.

“I’m curious,” I said after an enormous yawn. “What did Flaste get for the sign?”

“You know, that’s rather interesting. He sold it for nine hundred and seventy dollars, which was lucky for him, according to the officers who arrested him.”

“Doesn’t sound lucky.”

“It was thirty dollars under a thousand, you see.”

“Not yet.”

“Well, my dear, theft of one thousand dollars is a Class E felony. So the officers were forced to book him only on a petit larceny charge, a mere misdemeanor. Consequently, Moffat ‘walked’—as the policemen put it—after an appearance in night court.”

“Not exactly a case for an Alan Derschowitz defense,” I said.

“Nevertheless, I made my point.”

“Your point?”

“I may be old, but I’m not stupid.”

I laughed. “What about the plaque?”

“Oh, those polite boys from the Sixth Precinct who explained the charges, they retrieved it for me. I was so happy to have it back where it belonged that I told them to come by anytime for a free cup of Kona. The real thing, Clare. You know what I mean.”

Indeed, I did.

Coffee and crime may not seem the likeliest of pairs, but you’d be surprised how often they went together. Take the great Kona scandal of 1996. A cabal of coffee producers, one of whom Madame had known rather well, had been caught rebagging cheaper Central American blends and transshipping them through Hawaii marked as that exceptional bean, Kona—ironically mellow for something grown in volcanic lava. As far as anyone knows, at least at this writing, Madame’s friend is still in federal prison.

“Now, the reason I called,” continued Madame. “You must come to see me, Clare. This morning.”

A long silence followed in which I heard opera music on the other end of the line. The mellifluous tenor was singing an exceptionally gorgeous piece from Puccini’s Turnadot. “Nessun dorma!” Translation from the Italian: “Nobody shall sleep!”

Appropriate, I thought, because Madame wasn’t just playing opera. She was trying to make a point. Besides being one of my favorite pieces—full of all the tragic yearning and beautiful heartbreak that exemplified Italian opera—it was orchestrating what Madame had promised would one day come: my wake-up call.

No, I can’t come, the coward in me wanted to say. I have a deadline. Which was, in fact, true. For the past twenty days I’d been writing a two-part article for Wholesale Beverage magazine on the quality of Latin American coffee harvests. The piece was due next week.

But I had to admit, if only to myself, that I was grateful for the call and the invitation to get out of the house—because I was ready to tear my hair out. The subject of the article wasn’t the problem, the isolation was.

Working at home had been fine while I was raising Joy. But since my lively daughter had moved out the month before, I found the small house in the sleepy suburbs of New Jersey to be less than stimulating. Lately I’d begun staring at the lengthening grass in the front yard and thinking about Madame’s furious words the day I had quit my job managing the Blend.

“I do understand why you feel the need to leave,” Madame had said after much wailing and breast beating. “But the suburbs! I swear, Clare, one day you will wake up to find the suburbs have far too much in common with the cemetery.”

“The cemetery!” (I had been outraged, hurt, and angry at Madame for her lack of support, given my personal circumstances at the time.)

“Yes,” Madame had countered. “Both have well-tended lawns, far too much silence, and far too little traffic in the full range of the human condition.”

“It’s safe! And restful!”

“Safety and rest I’ll enjoy when I’m dead. I’m warning you, Clare, you’re making a mistake, and one day you will admit it.”

I had ignored Madame, of course, and moved ninety minutes west of the city, determined to prove the woman wrong. And for the most part, Madame had been wrong—

Raising Joy had been a joy, and the income I’d made from a combination of jobs (providing paid help at a day-care center, baking part-time for a local caterer, and writing the “In the Kitchen With Clare” column for a small local paper) had helped make the difference between the monthly bills and my ex-husband’s inconsistent child support payments.

Then just last year, after a rather soul-searching thirty-ninth birthday, I had actually pushed myself to pitch articles to food-and-beverage trade magazines like Wholesale Beverage, Cupping, and In Stock, and miracle of miracles, they’d actually bought a few.

But now that Joy had packed up and moved to Manhattan to attend culinary school…well, things were different. Unlike many teenagers, my daughter had centered her social life around the house and a close group of girlfriends. Half a dozen teenagers hanging around wasn’t unusual. And I often joined their Video-Movie-Rental parties and “Martha Stewart Survivor nights,” in which the group of girls would cut out cooking projects from Martha Stewart’s Living magazine, then randomly pick them out of a brown paper bag and have to complete the dish in ninety minutes—even if it meant racing to the store for missing ingredients.

(With a game like that, it was no surprise to me when Joy and all four of her friends ended up enrolled in culinary schools or restaurant management programs after their high school graduation.)

These days, however, my evenings had been spent eating Snackwell cookies (what’s the point of baking for one?), watching Lifetime movies, and blowing catnip-laced soap bubbles for Java (whose fur happened to match the color of a medium-roast Arabica bean).

The truth was a bitter residue building up at the bottom of my underused life: fulfillment (except when it came to my daughter) remained elusive. Madame’s call was a welcome excuse for me to take the express bus to the Port Authority terminal on Forty-second Street. And, after my morning espresso and a bracing shower, that’s precisely what I did.

Madame lived near Washington Square in an expansive suite of rooms capping one of those old buildings on Fifth Avenue that had a concrete moat and a doorman who dressed like a refugee from a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Pierre Dubois, her late second husband, insisted she move in with him there in the early 1980s. He’d said he vastly preferred it to Madame’s more modest West Village duplex above the Blend, which was the site of their original steamy encounters.

Much like Madame herself, the venerable Fifth Avenue address bridged two worlds. Nearby was New School University. A mecca for writers, artists, and philosophers, it had once served as a “University in Exile” for intelligentsia fleeing Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Also nearby was the Forbes Magazine Building, which housed a lavish collection once owned by millionaire Malcolm Forbes—everything from ship models to Fabergé eggs made for Russian czars. It served as another sort of mecca: a capitalist’s.

Pierre had definitely leaned toward the Forbes end of that particular spectrum. His vast Fifth Avenue penthouse apartment firmly reflected this—as well as his affinity for all things “Old World.” Really old—like eighteenth century.

Brocade drapes, heavy gilt-edged furniture, and overwrought statuary made me feel as though I’d entered a Gallic museum. Then again, Madame’s late spouse always had harbored a love for Napoleon, whom the short-statured Pierre had even slightly resembled.

My trips here always had me contemplating Madame’s contradictions. While I understood she had fallen in love with an Old World man, I also knew that the New World was still a very important part of her. Why else would there be such a note of tremendous pride in her voice when she told her tales of sobering up Jackson Pollack, William de Kooning, and other abstract expressionists at the Blend with more than one pot of hot black French roast? Or allowing the occasional struggling poet (such as the young Jean-Louis—“Jack”—Kerouac) or evicted playwright to sleep on one of the second-floor couches?

Upon my arrival, Madame emerged from her bedroom suite still wearing mourning black, yet elegant and regal as ever. The unadorned dress was impeccably tailored. Her only jewelry was Pierre’s diamond and platinum wedding band. Her hair, once a rich dark brown, had long ago turned gray and was now rinsed a beautiful silver and blunt-cut above her shoulders. Today she wore it in a French twist, a sleek and simple black pearl comb holding it in place.

This elegant façade had deceived many over the years into assuming Madame was nothing more than an elite socialite.

But I knew the truth.

There was unbreakable marble in that woman’s satin glove, and I’d seen it unveiled on every sort of person in this city: from corrupt health inspectors, shady garbage collectors, and chauvinist vendors to bratty debutantes, self-important executives, and narcissistic ex-hippies.

The key to Madame’s contradictions was quite simple, really. Although her family had been very wealthy back in prewar Paris, they’d lost everything to the Nazi invasion and were forced to flee to struggling relatives in America with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

Little Blanche Dreyfus may have been raised a pampered, cultured Old World girl, but her harrowing trip to America, during which both her mother and sister had died of pneumonia, made her grateful for its shelter, and every day since her arrival in the New World, she had risen from her bed determined to make a contribution to its greatest city.

So you see, no matter what her affectations, her core beliefs were no different from any other destitute immigrant’s. Few people recognized this, but I had, because of my own immigrant grandmother, who’d pretty much raised me from the age of seven. Grandma Cosi had the same sense of honor, of spirit, that same combination of gratefulness, determination, and frayed-lace pride. I suppose that’s why Madame liked me so much. I guess she knew how deeply I understood her.

“What did Flaste do with the cash, by the way? I mean, after he’d sold the Blend’s plaque?” I asked without preamble.

(Madame and I had always shared the ability to resume conversations within hours, days, or even weeks of when we’d started them.)

“He immediately spent it,” Madame said as we settled into the French antiques showroom that served as the Dubois salon. “The bill confirmed the entire transaction amount was used to purchase a pair of cuff links apparently worn by Jerry Lewis during the opening night party for Cinderfella.”

“You’re joking.”

“Clare, you know I never joke when it comes to swindlers.”

“Yes,” I said, “but still, he sounds more like a movie buff than a criminal.”

“Mad for celebrity. Like most of the Western world. I’m sure he wanted to show them off at those theater parties he was always attending.”

“Well, if it’s a piece of fame he wanted to own, it’s a wonder he didn’t keep the plaque itself, given its noteworthy place in cultural history—”

“Oh, yes,” Madame said with sublime gravity. “An O. Henry short story, an Andy Warhol print, and a Bob Dylan song…at last count.”

“Of course I can also see where Flaste wouldn’t want it,” I said. “I mean, it’s not as if he could wear a ten-pound brass plaque to a cocktail party. Even as a conversation piece, it would be cumbersome.”

“A swindler, I say. With a revolting lack of respect for the Blend’s heritage. And a pig besides.”

“You mean prig, don’t you?” I asked.

“Pig, my dear. In the six months since I hired him, he’s gained fifteen pounds alone from eating half the shop’s morning pastry selection. The profits have never been lower.”

“How in the world did you end up hiring him?”

“Well, you know, he’s just the latest in a long string of disappointments. Eduardo Lebreux actually recommended him. Highly recommended him, if you can believe that. Flaste had worked for Eddy. And Eddy had worked for Pierre so…” Madame shook her head and sighed.

“I see,” I said.

“What can I say? I took a gamble and lost. And I’ve grown tired of gambling. I want you to manage it again.”

My breath stopped for at least ten seconds. “You know I can’t.”

“I know no such thing. Come now, Clare, aren’t you yet weary of the wilderness?”

“It’s New Jersey, Madame. Not Nepal.”

“And your dear daughter. She’s in the city now. Wouldn’t you rather be closer to her?”

I hated it when Madame hit a bull’s-eye. I shifted on the velvet cushions. Still, there were issues. Big ones. First of all there was the long commute, and barring that, the astronomical rents of Manhattan. I was almost forty years old, and I wasn’t about to regress to my college years by cohabitating with a roommate, for heaven’s sake.

Then there was the issue of my future, and my continued struggle to build a career out of a string of freelance magazine assignments. Despite my unhappiness with the isolation of writing, it was going pretty well. Just this month I’d actually sold a short piece on the trends in U.S. coffee consumption to The NewYork Times Magazine.

(Almost fifty percent of the population drinks it, averaging about three cups a day, with the market trending toward higher-quality varieties.)

But all those reasons aside, there was still one unavoidable reason why I did not wish to return to the Blend. It sat like a big blue tiger in the center of the room and neither I nor Madame wanted to acknowledge it.

With a sigh, Madame snapped opened a twenty-four-carat cigarette case, encrusted with gemstones and filigreed with her initials. Pierre had bought it for her years ago on the Ponte Vecchio, the “old bridge” of Florence, renowned for its gold trade. She pulled out an unfiltered cylinder of tobacco and lit it. This was something I rarely saw Madame do unless she was overly anxious.

“Do you recall the first cup of coffee you ever made me?” she asked.

“Of course. An espresso.”

“On an old gas range, using a five-dollar stovetop machine.”

I smiled. My Grandmother Cosi, an immigrant who had settled in Western Pennsylvania (where waves of Italians had come to work in the steel mills), had run an Italian grocery with her husband for most of her life. She’d brought the little three-cup silver pot with her from Italy and given it to me the day I’d left for New York.

I knew the two-part octagonal-shaped pot looked far too old-fashioned, even suspiciously simple to most appliance-happy Americans, who firmly believed that the more they spent on their espresso maker, the happier it would make them.

I had seen this same little unassuming stovetop pot on every old Italian’s stove in my childhood neighborhood. For me, it would always be the most satisfying way to make the boldly potent beverage that condensed into a lovely demitasse cup the truest essence of coffee, extracting from the beans the finest concentration of aromas.

Stovetop espresso pots usually come in three-, six-, and nine-cup models. Using one is quite simple. First you unscrew the bottom of the pot and fill the base with water, up to the small steam spout. Then grind whole beans. (The Blend uses one heaping tablespoon of grounds for every 3 ounces of water.)

The term espresso refers to the method of brewing and not to the bean so a quality bean will give you a good cup, and the Village Blend suggests a dark roast like French or Italian.

Grind them into fine particles, but be careful not to overgrind! Beans ground too fine, into a powder, will make the brew bitter.

Once the proper amount is ground, place the grinds in the little basket provided with the machine, tamp it down tightly. The basket will sit above the water as you screw on the top part of the pot.

Next place the pot over low heat. In a few minutes, the water will boil. Steam will rapidly force the water up through the grounds and into the empty pot, filling it almost instantly.

The stovetop method also leaves more grounds in the cup than the steam method. Grounds are essential for “readings.” Not that I’m ruled by superstitions, but I certainly don’t ignore them. Besides, when I was a child, my grandmother taught me how to read coffee grounds, and I’ve always enjoyed the parlor game.

“I’ve had Roman baristas use thousand-dollar machines who couldn’t make a cup that good,” Madame told me that morning with a lilt of motherly pride.

I was shocked by the light blush that came to my cheeks. It had been so long since anyone had expressed pride in me, I couldn’t even recall the last time. (The inevitable result of middle age and motherhood—let’s face it, everyone expects you to do the expressing.)

“Oh, come on,” I said, brushing it off. “The fact is, you were relieved when you met me. You were terrified I would turn out to be some harlot with a tube top and tattoos. You liked me, so you decided to like my coffee.”

“I never pretend to like coffee, my dear, and you very well know that. It’s either good or it’s garbage. And yours was very good.”

“And you know very well it was my grandmother who taught me how to perfect it,” I said.

“Yes. She taught you. And then I taught you.”

“Yes, of course. I know. I owe you a lot, Madame—”

“You owe me nothing. But you do owe yourself, Clare. We woman all owe ourselves. And we forget to pay.”

I shifted, cleared my throat. “You think I’m not being true to myself?”

“Yes, that’s right. You know where you belong. You know what will make you happy, but you ignore it.”

I took a deep breath. “I have to.”

“You’re just hiding. Hiding from him.”

There it is, I thought, bracing herself. The big blue tiger.

“It’s cowardly,” continued Madame. “And it makes no sense when it’s not what you want out of life.” Madame blew out a puff of smoke then raised an eyebrow. “I noticed what you said at the end of your Times article: ‘When we drink coffee, we drink its history, which is also our own history.’”

I squirmed. I had not attributed that line to Madame. Under the pressure of impressing my editor, I had decided to simply convey the sentiment as part of my own coffee I.Q. But the truth was, much of my knowledge had come from my years of running the Village Blend under Madame’s tutelage.

“I’m sorry,” I said softly. “I should have attributed the words to you—”

“Don’t be stupid. I’m not scolding you. I’m reminding you.” Madame rose, walked to an end table, and picked up the week-old Times Magazine. She waved it proudly at me, returned to her seat, then placed her reading glasses on the end of her nose.

“And I quote,” she began, “‘If we are a civilization of coffee drinkers, then the coffee we buy, brew, and drink should be as great as our civilized heritage. For though coffee may seem a small thing, it is a ritual that reflects the daily standards we set for ourselves throughout our lives. Whether the highest or the lowest, it is the standard we pass on to our children. And if we fail to pass on the highest standards, even in the smallest things, then how can we, as a civilization, hope to progress? Perhaps T.S. Eliot was right: Some of us do measure out our lives with coffee spoons. All the more reason to pay attention to the quality of the bean.’”

Madame smiled. “That wasn’t me. That was you, my dear.”

“I learned it from you.”

“Have you? Prove it then.” She stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and reached for a small bell. “I’ve drawn up an offer, Clare. I want you to read it and then accept it.”

The tinkling bell brought Madame’s personal maid with a silver tray. On it was an official-looking contract next to a small egg timer, a thermal carafe of steaming water, and a French press that I knew from the aroma contained perfectly ground Jamaica Blue Mountain.

I nearly swooned.

This full-bodied yet mellow and delightfully aromatic bean grown on the 7,000-foot-high Jamaica Blue Mountains has a limited harvest: a mere 800 bags annually compared to the 15,000 bags of the lesser Jamaican varieties (High Mountain and Prime Jamaica Washed). While importers and roasters have used Blue “blends” to cut the price along with the quality, true Blue has sold for as high as $35.00 a pound and more. I hadn’t tasted a drop in ten years. Not since I’d left the Blend.

In silence, Madame placed the contract in my hands, then she poured the steaming water over the grounds in the press, replaced the lid, turned over the egg timer, and gave me a look that said—

Five minutes.

In the time it took to steep the coffee, Madame expected me to read the contract and agree to it.

With a deep breath, I read the terms. If I signed on for five years, I would receive:

A piece of equity in the business to the tune of fifteen percent ownership right away with five percent more added for every fiscal year that came up with a ten percent or greater profit.The keys to the furnished duplex apartment on top of the shop. (One cannot exaggerate the invaluable opportunity to live in a rent-free two-bedroom with a fireplace, balcony, and garden courtyard in the heart of the most in-demand neighborhood in Manhattan.)

And finally:

3. The assurance by Madame that the Blend’s unnervingly charismatic coffee buyer would be consulting with me no more than one week a month.

“You can’t control him with a contract. You know that. He’s still a pirate,” I found it necessary to point out when the timer ran down.

“He’s his father’s son,” answered Madame as she pushed the French press’s plunger, squeezing the grounds to the bottom of the glass pot with a bit more force than necessary. She looked up into my eyes. “What else can I say?”

“It’s all right,” I said as Madame poured the coffee into the simple cream-colored French-café-style cups that sat on the silver tray. “We’ve been down this road a few times before.”

“Yes, my dear. It was a bumpy ride…for both of us.”

There was a long pause, as there always was right before the painful subject of Madame’s son was dropped. Matteo Allegro, now in his early forties, was not only the Blend’s coffee importer and Madame’s only child by her late first husband, Antonio Allegro—Matt Allegro also happened to be my ex-husband and the father of my pride named Joy.

I took a cup from Madame’s elegant tray, added a splash of cream, then sipped the freshly made Jamaica Blue Mountain. The sensual, sweet, full-bodied aroma of the coffee flowed over me as I considered Matt, along with Madame’s very tempting offer.

“So, my dear, what is your answer?”

I looked up and for the first time noticed that my ex-mother-in-law’s eyes were not quite the color I remembered. They seemed more gray now than blue since her second husband had died. And the elusive lines about her mouth and eyes—the ones that used to appear and disappear depending on her expression—now seemed to be permanently with her, like cruel, unejectable tenants.

A dark thought occurred to me. Married couples sometimes died within a year of one another. The first would expire from a major disease, but then the second would go soon after—usually for some minor reason (like a cold that suddenly developed into pneumonia). Doctors diagnosed it clinically—a depressed immune system during a traumatic time. But it was still death due to grief. To loss.

Madame did seem a bit frail today. Quite a change from when she’d first trained me to run the Blend. The woman’s stamina a decade ago had little to do with the caffeine in her pots. Pride had driven her, a sense of wanting the Blend to live up to the thousand stories about its own history, its colorful customers, its high standards, and its commitment to serving the community.

After her first husband had died, Madame had run the Blend by herself for years, right up to the day before her wedding to Pierre, one of the city’s foremost importers of French perfume, wine, and coffee. Right up to the day before her life had suddenly changed into a whirlwind of travels and uptown dinner parties, of entertaining Pierre’s clients, adopting and raising Pierre’s teenage children, and running a European villa every August.

The coffeehouse had moved, like the days of her youth, onto a back burner. But it never moved off the stove. Even though Pierre’s fortune was immense, Madame had refused to sell the Village Blend. For all these years, she had hung on, as if it were a thread to something so vital, so precious, that she’d fight to her last breath before letting it go.

“I need you, Clare,” Madame said at last, her tone dropping to an octave I rarely heard.

She’s choosing me, I realized in that moment. I’m the one she wants to carry it on.

I suddenly wondered what the Dubois children would think about this decision of their stepmother’s. I’d met most of them over the years. And none seemed to understand the importance of the Blend—not to the community as an institution nor to their stepmother as a symbol of her convictions.

Of course, their attitudes weren’t surprising to me. Raised in wealth, educated in elite schools, constantly surrounded by art and culture, the Dubois children believed themselves above the difficult daily toil of managing a small business. They were all grown now, of course. Some resided in Europe, others on the West Coast and New York, all in the upper reaches of society, and consequently out of touch with the way most of the world lived.

Matteo Allegro had next to nothing in common with them. I could say that for my ex. But he was apparently not Madame’s choice for guardianship of her beloved coffeehouse, either.

While Matt worked around coffee, his passion came not from serving the beans but from traveling the world in pursuit of them (among other things—usually women). The man was a hard worker, but he couldn’t hack a marriage commitment, let alone the stationary lifestyle that running a daily business would require. And his own mother apparently knew it, too—just as she knew that business was never the point.

The Blend wasn’t about buying and selling. It was about tradition. About legacy. About love. And that, more than anything, was why I agreed to sign her contract.

“I’ll do it, Madame,” I promised, finally meeting the woman’s gaze.

“Thank you, my dear. Thank you.”