Jeremy blinked. Those were not words he expected to hear at his grand opening.
The older man looked around the store, his face pursed as if Jeremy’s beans had burned or pulled sour and were stinking up the place. “What was wrong with the Daily Brew? I liked it just fine. What have they done to the place? It doesn’t feel like home anymore.”
Jeremy looked around the coffee shop, frantic to find something good to counteract the clench in his chest. He’d studied, dreamed, and planned for this moment for twenty years. Five minutes ago he’d been fired up, still nervous enough to throw up in the tiny back bathroom, but satisfied with the remodel and confident in his decision to move across the country to Winsome and open it. He then thought about all that came with both the shop and the move. He now lived near his daughter. She knew his name and his face. She called him “Daddy.” He had an apartment she could stay in, one with two bedrooms and a view of Winsome’s Centennial Park. No . . . no way could he have afforded any of this in Seattle. This was the life and the home he wanted and there was no room for regret, doubt, or naysayers. It worked. It all worked. Yet even as he cycled through all the good to reassure himself, he watched the man move through the line, eager for confirmation.
When Jeremy had unlocked the coffee shop’s alley door at four o’clock that morning, it was because he was too excited to stay in that apartment-with-a-view a single minute longer. 4:02 found him reorganizing the baked goods he and his assistant, Ryan, had made into the wee hours of the morning, whipping up batch after batch of blueberry muffins—hoping no one would suspect they came from a mix. At 5:15 he was rubbing a final coat of oil into the wood counters and every table in the seating area until they felt like velvet. He had then flipped on the lights at 6:25 and stood marveling at his own shop for a full five minutes before he twisted the front door’s deadbolt at precisely 6:30 and flipped the custom-painted sign. Open for Business.
Now Jeremy’s gaze trailed the old man’s movements as he turned his head this way and that, taking in every detail. He wondered what the man saw and how it could possibly displease him. It was a little coffee shop bathed in the warm light of vintage bulbs. It featured thick unfinished wood tables with every chair tucked perfectly beneath. It boasted exposed brick walls interlaced with plastered sections just waiting to display good art. And the showpiece—a glass-encased gas fireplace—sat situated between two buttery leather armchairs. How could anyone not love this place?
Jeremy looked to each customer standing in line for approval. No one held that look of awe-tipped admiration he’d anticipated. In fact, in the few hours since he’d opened, he noticed more than a few people looking sour, questioning, and discontent. And far fewer customers than expected had wandered through the doors.
In the two months after he bought the place, right before he closed it for renovations, he’d experienced a greater draw than this. The previous owner certainly had. He’d checked her numbers again and again, and once he took over, his observations and daily take mirrored her reports. Eighty percent of the day’s revenue came in from 6:30 to 10:00 a.m., caffeinating the commuter crowd on their way to the train station across the street. And that 80 percent alone brought in enough revenue to keep the shop healthy and vibrant. That’s how he knew he had a little leverage for the renovations. The math was in his favor—especially as he planned to bolster the numbers a little later in the day by drawing people back to sip his organic single-origin loose teas and munch on a shortbread cookie with their friends in the afternoon.
He looked at his watch: 9:00 a.m. Where was the commuter crowd this morning? He quickly walked the L from the side counter to the back one and the register, next to Ryan, as the older man and his friend shuffled forward to order.
Jeremy felt his smile waver before he set it fully. “Andante is a musical term. It means ‘a walking pace.’ I wanted to convey that the coffee shop is a part of life as you walk through your day.”
“Didn’t a shop named the Daily Brew imply the same thing? And besides, where are we supposed to sit? I sat in the corner of my couch for over thirty years, right by that window. You don’t even have a couch anymore.” The man pointed a gnarled finger, the middle one—perhaps only because his pointer didn’t straighten?—toward the corner featuring the fireplace and two armchairs. He gasped. “The pillows . . . What have you done with our pillows?”
The man’s friend put a steadying hand on his forearm. “George.”
George didn’t shrug from the touch or snap back. Instead he gave an almost imperceptible sigh and looked up to the chalk menu board.
Jeremy tapped Ryan’s shoulder to bring his attention to their conversation. “While Ryan takes your order, let me go save the two armchairs by the fire for you. I’ll put magazines in them so you’ll know.”
George’s friend nodded thanks. George stared straight ahead.
The Daily Brew. Jeremy chewed on the name and the comment as he crossed the room. He had never considered the name in that light, or given it any thought at all. He’d only seen what the space could become, not what it was . . .
What it was was a mess, he reminded himself. It was, to use an expression favored by one foster mom, “used hard and hung up wet.” It was a worn linoleum floor, mismatched chairs, antique espresso machines that produced one good shot in three, and over a hundred shabby pillows strewn over every horizontal surface. And the smell—a mixture of lard, dust, burnt coffee, and Pledge.
Jeremy grabbed two of his precisely positioned cutting-edge magazines, Cereal and Mood, and dropped them into the chairs. Even these early days of June held a morning chill. He turned the knob on the fire to raise the blue flames another inch.
Without willing it, his gaze then landed on Ryan, who stood pulling shots from the temperamental espresso machines. He had been the one to voice caution. “Let’s get to know the town first, settle in. We should renovate after we understand the feel of it all and build up more capital.”
It was the we that had chafed from the get-go. Ryan wasn’t a part owner, he was an employee. Ryan hadn’t imagined this shop or the ideal life that came with the dream since he was fifteen years old. Heck, Ryan had spent from fifteen to twenty-five in a drug-induced haze and was only just clear of that. Sure, he’d moved to Winsome from Seattle to help Jeremy out, but he’d needed a new start just as much as Jeremy had needed the help.
Jeremy checked himself. Stress was making him unfair, ungenerous, and just plain wrong. When Ryan had walked through the doors of Seattle Roasters two years ago, days after his release from a six-month residential program, he’d laid out his full story with hesitancy, yes, but with courage and honesty too. At that moment, sealed with a firm handshake across a counter, Jeremy had sensed that the younger man had character and would keep his word. Not only that, he’d given up a lot to follow Jeremy across the country.
But no one likes to be wrong . . .
Jeremy thought back to the day they’d both walked into the shop for the first time. He’d already agreed to the sale, but had not actually seen it or his new hometown. His eyes widened when he saw Winsome. He hadn’t expected the town, sitting just north of Chicago, to feel so small, even insular. As for the shop, his jaw dropped. He hated every threadbare inch of it. It was everything he wanted to leave behind, and nothing he ever wanted to come home to.