The Switch

10

Got a second?” Karen Wynant asked. Tanner could hear the anxiety in her voice.

“Come on in.”

A sigh. “You know that breakfast place with the funny name?”

“Egghead?”

“Right. I thought we were locked in. And now they’re not returning my e-mails or my calls or anything.”

“It was in the Globe.” The Boston Globe had recently run an article about a very hip new breakfast-only place called Egghead that had started as a food truck in Portland, Oregon, and now had brick-and-mortar shops in LA, New York, and Boston. They wanted to be the Shake Shack of breakfast joints. They served egg sandwiches on brioche buns along with sriracha this and Wagyu that and everything with gray salt. In the article, the founder and co-owner had mentioned that they would serve Tanner Roast coffee.

“Right? I’ve got a bad feeling about it.”

She had a bad feeling about most of her potential sales until the deal was inked, and then she had a bad feeling the deal would fall apart. Sometimes she was right. It happened.

“You want me to talk to someone?”

“Could you? I think it’ll make a difference if you call the CEO, Ryan whatever. He likes you a lot.”

“Text me his number. I’ll take care of it.”

“Still no contract from Four Seasons?”

“It’ll come.”

“I heard Blake Gifford was in Toronto.”

“Meeting with Four Seasons?” Blake Gifford was the clownish founder of City Roast, another specialty coffee company, one of their competitors. Blake particularly got under Tanner’s skin because of his TV show on the National Geographic Channel. Also because of his man bun and single earring. The show was called Roasted, and it starred Gifford, who traveled to a different foreign country in each episode, pretending to shop for coffee. On his show, danger was everywhere. He crept through jungles and playacted negotiating coffee deals with brigands. He crossed the Serengeti and turned up in Uganda and Haiti and Yemen, hoisting burlap sacks of coffee. It was all total bullshit. In reality he bought almost all of his coffee through brokers, large lots of mediocre Brazilian or Sumatran, not much better than Maxwell House in a can.

She shrugged. “I can’t help but wonder.”

“The deal is ours. Relax. The cold brew did it.”

“Well, I’ll believe it when I have a contract in my hand.”

Owning your own company could be brutally hard sometimes, Tanner knew. But it had long been his dream, since he was a kid.

Since the time he’d found the Box.

He had a vivid memory of the day he followed the family cat, a tabby named Tiger, up to the attic. Tanner — at the time called Mickey; he was eight — remembered how hot it was up there, the dust motes dancing in the light, the neatly organized boxes of stuff, decades old. No one ever went up there. It was declared off-limits by his parents for games of hide-and-seek. It was the place in the house where you didn’t go. But when he followed Tiger into the attic he accidentally tipped over a tower of boxes. Scared, he began restacking the pile until he noticed an old cardboard box labeled TANNER Q. It had been sealed with brown paper tape that was buckling, most of it loose. It didn’t seem like much of a transgression to peel off the rest of the tape, easily done, and open the box.

Inside he was excited to find a big, colorful menu for a restaurant called Tanner Q that listed barbecue stuff, pork and beef ribs and pulled pork, along with sides like coleslaw and corn bread. The menu was beautiful, heavily inked in red and green, with wonderful illustrations of the house specialties done in a woodcut style. Underneath the menu was a stack of booklets that said something about a “business plan for Tanner Q barbecue restaurants.”

He’d never heard of a Tanner barbecue restaurant and wondered why his parents had never mentioned it. Maybe it was old; maybe it had gone out of business. He took the menu with him, Tiger under his arm, down to the kitchen, where his mother was cooking dinner and his father was seated at the kitchen table talking to her.

“What do you have there, Mickey?” his father had said. His face was suddenly flushed. He and Tanner’s mother exchanged a wary glance.

“Oh, that’s old,” his mother said, taking the menu from him — not to look at it but to get it out of his hands. She put it down on the counter. “That was a long time ago.”

“Did you used to own a restaurant?” Tanner asked his father.

“No,” his mother said, “that was just an idea he had, a long time ago.”

“Idea for a restaurant?”

“If wishes were horses,” his father said.

“Cool!” Mickey had exclaimed.

“Throw that crap away,” his father said. He looked uncomfortable, downright embarrassed, which surprised Mickey. He might as well have brought down a girly magazine. Neither of his parents seemed pleased about his discovery.

Later, when he asked his mother for more information about Tanner Q, she shook her head. “Don’t ask your father about it,” she said. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“But what happened to it?”

“It was just a silly idea Daddy had that he decided wasn’t very realistic.”

“It’s not silly,” he said, feeling protective of his father.

“Well, it’s over and done with,” she said.