Orange Coffee
I’ve never been to Massachusetts. I’ve also never really had fall. Not like they do in the nation’s tea spout, in the Vermont woods where the colors are as vibrant as neon flames and the leaves fall in carpets and don’t get swept away in storms and sewers. But if I were in Massachusetts, just forty-five minutes from all that beauty, that’s what I would be thinking about, as I sit next to a window and sip hot chocolate. I’d hope that it’d be like one of those Instagram photo shoots, with my hair French fishtail braided with highlights that aren’t there in a big sweater that covers half my hands, and just my painted nails peek out to hold the cup.
I’m thinking it’s an artisan coffee shop, not a chain store. The kind of place with $900 orange canvases on the walls and $7.60 for a blueberry scone. The kind of place with a bearded man in skinny jeans and a gray V-neck and beanie lazily mixing drinks like he’s being paid by the minute. It’s a place frequented by, to put it nicely, snobs. Specifically coffee snobs, which are objectively the worst. 75% of the population drinks that stuff every morning, and they act like it’s a personality. You know the ones I mean; the guy in the maroon suit and skinny tie chattering into his Bluetooth while pecking at his iPhone; the group of girls behind him, chattering.
And then I imagine an old couple comes in. He holds the door for her. I imagine they’re ordinary people let’s say a couple I used to know, Rich and Laure Stone. He’s tall, but otherwise average looking. His glasses, combined with the cut of his brown hair practically print “IT Guy” across the front of his grey quarter-zip, but the way his smile shines in eyes creasing at the corners tell of a golden-retriever personality. His wife unzips the purple parka that comes down to her knees, smoothing back her short, messy hair with one wrinkly hand. It’s bleach blonde, without a bottle, even after 53 years, an enduring gold that still makes people value her as out of his league, even after a house, a kid, and 25 years. She studies the scene shrewdly through tortoiseshell glasses, and points, and Rich immediately pulls a chair out at the table she indicates. Laure rifles through her purse, pulling out a camera with a strap. Rich looks around the sunlit cafe, smiling at a high school student by the counter who reminds him of himself, a boy in jeans, standing stiffly, still trying to prevent his fingers from pinching his arm and waking him from the dream that the girl with the long blonde waves beside him, texting someone with pale pink nails, really agreed to let him buy her a coffee.
And I imagine the 17-year-old junior/future engineering student-let’s say Jack- is drawn by the power of the stranger’s gaze, and his shoulders relax as his own eyes meet the knowing smile. And Amy, the girl in the pink beret and tall brown boots beside him, senses his change in posture and looks up into those eyes like melting chocolate that make her feel safe. And she wasn’t intending to sit with him here today, but the crispness of the air outside makes her want to sit at one of the fragile little tables better suited to the side of the Eiffel tower and let the heat from a ceramic mug burn her hands. She points at a table a few feet away from the couple she’d seen walking alongside the sea earlier, mittened hands wrapped around each other. Maybe if they sit close enough, some of the magic of that eternal love might hop the distance between their tables. Jack pulls out her chair for her, because he saw the old man do it, and the smile he receives makes his heart start pounding like he’s been running sprints. They sit in silence for a while, smiling awkwardly at some point slightly behind each other. It’s only when the smile opposite him slips does Jack realize that the people beside him are talking, to someone who’s not present. And when he listens, the words, the slight shudder in the woman’s voice and hands during her plea for healing, and the quiet strength in the man’s voice and the hands that hold hers during his tale of gratitude and acceptance, make his own heart stutter. They lift their heads, and the woman returns to fiddling with her camera and the man to sipping his coffee and watching the world go by.
And it’s only then that Jack smiles, because he realizes it’s been chosen strategically, though not consciously, for the view. Laure’s facing the window, so she can easily pick up the camera beside her coffee and capture the dog outside leaping into a tumbleweed of orange leaves, whose boundless joy reminds her of the man she might lose. And Rich is sitting with his back to that window, so he can tilt his head and see the sun pick out the clear blue in his wife’s faded eyes, and watch the summary of a story that echoes throughout history with a familiar refrain, that promises half a century of Christmases and overpriced coffee shops on October mornings in Massachusetts, of all the things that make life worth living even if you only get half that time.
Angela Henle is in her second year as a History and Spanish major at the University of Alabama. She is a National Merit Finalist from Chicago, IL, who works in the Archives department of the UA Libraries as well as her school’s Writing Center. She also serves as an editor for the Capstone Journal of Law and Public Policy and volunteers on the Design and Production team for UA’s Red Rook Press. She loves Jane Austen, C.S. Lewis, and reading about World War II.