Chai a Serial by Melissa A. Bartell
The thing about working in a café is that you have the opportunity to meet all sorts of people, fall in love with them in the space of five minutes, live out entire love affairs during a single conversation while you take an order, brew a drink, make a perfect crown of foamed milk. The regulars become friends of a sort - the kind of people to whom you might casually mention that you’re singing with the band at the neighborhood pub on Friday night, if they’d like to come, but not the kind you’d go out and do things with, but the others, the folks who come in for a drink and leave with your heart, you never see again, and even though there’s a pang, you let it happen over and over.
It’s the men that really do it for me: the homeless guy with the world’s troubles in his eyes and the voice that sounds like old paper and bad jazz, the art student with his bright-hued blue hair and matching sketchbook who pays in paint-stained bills, the endless assortment of musicians and crafters who wander over from the park across the street where there is some kind of faire or celebration, with their vintage clothes and battered knapsacks, the engineering students who are attractive behind their shiny calculators, geeky glasses, and expensive laptop screens. All have their charms. In any given week, I’ll meet the eyes of five or six different guys across the counter, touch their fingers as I take their money, and give back a tiny piece of my heart with their change.
And then I met her.
It was during an afternoon lull, of the kind we always have around three in the afternoon, when the office-y types had gone back to their cubicles, and the students weren’t yet finished with classes. I was alone behind the bar, enjoying an ancient Enigma CD playing over the sound system, and cleaning the copper of the espresso machine in time with the beat, when the bell on the green front door jingled, and she came in.
If I’d had a camera I’d have snapped her picture. Instead, I have her image engraved on my soul: Her long golden-brown hair was left loose, sun-dried and crackling with static electricity, the ends swishing against the bare skin of her tanned shoulders, and bits of it getting caught in the spaghetti straps of her yellow and orange tank top. Her skirts swirled in a blur of red and orange, the bells on the drawstring waistband jingling softly as she moved. Her feet were wrapped in brown leather, chunky sandals with sturdy rubber soles. A person could do serious walking in those shoes, and from the dust on them, it was obvious that she didn’t wear them just for show. The Mala beads on her right wrist exuded the faintest scent of patchouli, or maybe it was her skin that smelled of it.
She ordered chai, the spiced sweetened tea that I’d come to prefer over espresso myself. We blend our own, every morning, and keep it in a big glass cider jug with cinnamon sticks and cardamom heads floating in it.
“Do you want regular milk in that, or would you prefer soy?” I asked, both as a service and as a test. Her bright clothing marked her as someone like me - someone who belonged among the street gypsies who liked people but were content to be alone among crowds if the mood fit.
“Soy, if you have it,” she said. Her voice had the telltale rasp of a smoker, or rather, the beginning of one. Most people would never have noticed, but I’m a singer, and I hear what other people don’t.
I nodded. “Chai tastes smoother that way, don’t you think?”
She smiled. “Truly.”
I moved behind the tall copper espresso machine to steam the tea and froth the soymilk to blend with it. “Is this for here, or to go?” I asked, as the pitch changed in the frothing pitcher. Other people watch the thermometers we place in each of the metal containers, but I can tell by the pitch if the milk is “done.”
“I heard you sing at the Beat the other night,” she informs me, instead of answering the question.
I’m not sure how to respond to that, exactly, so I just say, “Oh?”
“You were good. I could see the story in your head, when you were singing. I came to find out what it was.” I wanted to blush, and shuffle my feet and stammer like a thirteen-year-old girl on her first date, but I was holding a pitcher of hot soymilk. I opened my mouth to offer some other one-syllable comment, but she spoke again. “If I have my drink here, will you tell me?”
I poured the chai and hot milk into one of our ceramic mugs and set it on the counter, with the handle facing out. “Three dollars,” I told her. “I have to watch the door.”
She bent her head to look inside the leather satchel she was carrying - one of those teardrop duffle-type bags on a leather thong that hippies carry in movies, even though they cost a couple hundred dollars in real life. I was jarred from a moment of bag-lust by her scent, still patchouli, but now there were cloves and ash as well, probably from the cigarettes she smoked. I remembered smoking cloves with my best girlfriends on the beach the summer before, and smiled at the memory and the woman across the counter.
She pressed four rumpled dollar bills into my hand, and my skin tingled. “Keep the change,” she said. She settled herself at the table directly across from the door then glanced back at me. “I’m not leaving,” she said, “until I hear your story.”
It was a hot day. Unseasonably warm for October, even in
The conversation was awkward, at first. She asked me if I liked working in the café, and I answered that I did, and then we were quiet. I looked into my cup as if the foam would give me a clue what to say, and when it didn’t I looked up again, and met her eyes. They were the color of bittersweet chocolate, and they compelled me to open up.
“The thing about working here,” I said, “is that I get to see into people’s lives the way hair stylists do, but without the ammonia and aerosol.”
“Do you fall in love with your customers?” she asked.
“Only all the time,” I answered with a grin. She returned the gesture but waited silently, while I sorted out what to say next. “There’s this man who comes in every morning.” I began. “He has a five-year-old daughter, and she skips beside him, and he holds her hand.”
“Go on,” she prompted.
“He’s divorced. About forty. Way too old for me.”
“But you want him.” She grinned when she said it.
“I can’t help it,” I admitted. “His hands are strong, and warm, but rough, as if he does woodwork or something. He always wears chambray shirts on Fridays, and the blue matches his eyes exactly. He drinks double cappuccinos, very dry, dash of cinnamon, and has a plain croissant. His daughter has a slice of banana bread and a cup of hot chocolate, even in summer.”
“What’s his name?”
I blinked at her, feeling suddenly stupid. “I have no idea,” I confessed. I didn’t know any of their names, but I knew their usual drinks, and whether they preferred paperback novels, magazines or the morning paper, and what colors made them happiest.
“But you like his hands,” she prompted.
I blushed but responded to the prompting. “I do. I pay a lot of attention to hands. Hands and eyes.”
“What’s special about hands?”
“They tell stories,” I said. Our eyes met across the table as the connection was made, and we both laughed. She arched her brows at me and I expanded my statement. “You can mask your feelings by schooling your face, keeping your expression neutral, but your hands give you away. Calluses, manicures, they all betray your truth. Lawyers never have particularly strong hands, for example, but construction workers do.”
“And writers’ hands are stained with ink?” She said it with humor in her eyes and voice.
“Actually no,” I replied. “Most of them use computers these days. I suppose they might have flattened finger-tips, but it makes them indistinguishable from secretaries, for the most part.”
“Good point,” she agreed. She picked up her mug, swirling the liquid inside it before taking a sip, then set it down, and spread both of her hands on the table, palms down.
“And my hands?” she asked.
I blushed faintly, but turned my attention to her hands. They were feminine, with neat oval nails - buffed, not polished - but also strong, and tanned from the sun. I reached out and rested my hands on top of hers, meeting her eyes. Then I pulled back a little, and turned her hands over on the table, to study her palms.
“Are you going to read my fortune?” she asked, only half-teasing.
“You will meet a woman who smells of coffee and cloves…” I intoned in a fake-Gypsy accent, but then I rested my hands atop hers again, palm to palm, with my fingers curving over her wrists, settling over the pulse points. “You’re a creative spirit,” I said softly. “An artist, inside if not in fact.”
I looked up again and found that she was staring at me very intently. In that moment I knew I wanted to kiss her, and that she wanted the same, but as we were both stretching our bodies upward the door opened and one of the professors from the university came in for her half-calf cappuccino to go (no surprise that she was from the business school) and the mood was broken.
After serving my customer I returned to the table, but this time we spoke of inconsequential things: music we both liked, chocolate recipes that ought to be illegal, favorite elementary school teachers. I never gave her a linear version of my history, but I think she got the overall picture of who I was: barista, singer, wannabe street gypsy who kept letting her sensible side hold her back.
We talked until Raul and Charlie - the evening crew - arrived to relieve me, and then the awkwardness was back. “I should go…” I began, standing up. “My shift is over…”
“It’s no problem,” she told me, standing up as well. “Good chai,” she said. “Good story. I’ll be at the Beat when you sing there next week.”
I leaned forward to pick up our mugs, but her hand stilled mine. “What?” I looked up, and our eyes met again, and I suddenly wondered if she tasted like cloves, as well as smelling like them.
Our kiss was intense, but too brief, though her thumb caressed the back of my hand, and her soft hair whispered promises against my cheek. The jingling of the front door broke the moment, and the mood, and she stepped away from me with a wry smile on her face.
Raul handled the new customer while Charlie put new votives in the candle holders on every table. When he got to the one where I was still standing, he tapped me on the shoulder. “I thought you drove stick,” he said.
I rolled my eyes at him. “You’re still jealous because I danced with Raul and not you at the beach party last month,” I said.
“Maybe,” he agreed cheerfully. “What’s her name?”
I picked up the mugs that were still on the table, and turned hers to see the faint trace of bronze lipstick on the rim. “I have no idea,” I said, as I walked toward the kitchen, smiling. I made a note to ask her the next time I saw her. In the meantime, it was enough that I knew her drink.
Freelance writer, blogger, improv comedian, and caffeine addict, Melissa A.Bartell writes in her pajamas most of the time. Her previous incarnations include amateur cellist, mortgage underwriter, and cafe barista. She shares her home with her husband and two dogs, and likes froufrou pink drinks, dark chocolate, and microbrew beer. Her website is www.melissabartell.com.
