Seven oh eight
Dennis's hand was on the door handle before he thought to check his watch, and the watch said 7:08, same as yesterday, same as most of the mornings behind it. The newspaper under his arm still wore its rubber band. Through the fogged glass he could see a white mug already steaming at the fourth stool from the left, nobody in the seat yet.
Nobody had ever discussed this. That was the part he would have found hardest to explain, if anyone had asked, which nobody did. There had been no morning when Carla said, I'll have your coffee poured at eight past seven, and no morning when he said, I'll want it. Some arrangements are built the way a path gets worn across a lawn, one crossing at a time, until one day there is simply a path, and everyone walks on it.
He settled onto the fourth stool and the strip of electrical tape on the seat caught his coat where it always caught. Carla set the mug the last half inch down without looking, said, "Roy burned the rye again, so," and was gone before the sentence needed finishing. Dennis unfolded the paper and smoothed the crease flat against the counter. The laminated menu stayed where it had lived since March, behind the napkin holder, pushed there by Carla the last time she'd bothered asking him about eggs.
His coat went on the third hook, the one with the crack in the plastic where somebody had once hung something too heavy. The ticket Carla wrote said the usual and nothing else, and she slid it face-down under the sugar caddy where Roy wouldn't see that she hadn't written a price.
The seventh stool
One Thursday he came in at 7:11, three minutes late by the private clock neither of them mentioned, and the mug wasn't at the fourth stool. It was three seats down, where the winter sun came through the window in a wide bar and lay on the counter like a warm hand. He stopped. He looked at her. Carla shrugged one shoulder toward the glass and said, "Sun."
He moved without a word, settled onto the seventh stool, and the light fell across the backs of his hands while he read, and he left it there. The next cloudy day the mug was back at the fourth stool and no one said anything about that either. It became one more clause in the contract nobody had signed: sun, seventh; otherwise, fourth.
He came in on a Friday once with two fingers taped together in the white medical way and his left hand held a little apart from his body, and he sat down without offering a story. Carla set the mug down and then set a straw beside it, still in its paper sleeve, without looking at his hand or at his face. The straw sat between them like a question asked quietly enough that it could be ignored. He picked it up, turned it end over end, put it back. She went to check on the kid in the corner booth, and that was the entire conversation, and it had said everything it needed to.
A haircut, a second paper
Carla came in one Tuesday with her hair cut short, the kind of short that changes a face. Dennis looked up from the sports page, looked back down, and after a moment said, "Hm," the way a man says it about a headline. She touched the back of her neck where the weight used to be and said, "Roy didn't notice either," and went for the bread. But he saw her catch her reflection in the pie case on the way, and stand a half second straighter, and he understood that Hm had been received in the spirit it was sent.
Another morning he arrived carrying two newspapers and laid the second one flat on the stool beside him, no explanation offered. At 7:22 a young woman in a green coat came through the door the way she had every day that week, hesitating, scanning the counter for a place that wouldn't require deciding anything. Carla tilted her head toward the spare paper. The woman sat down next to it like someone who had been expected, because by then she was.
The morning after the ice storm he came in with his shoulders dark from standing outside the hardware store, and the mug was waiting, and under it she had folded a paper towel to catch the ring, because the counter had gone soft in that spot from thirty years of heat. Beside the mug lay a rubber band, the one he'd slipped off Wednesday's paper and abandoned. She had taken to leaving it where he set his keys. He looked at it a moment. He didn't pick it up. He smoothed the paper towel flat with two fingers, straightening a thing that was already straight, and left it under the mug like the idea had been his.
The relief man
Then came the Thursday Carla was out sick, and the man filling in had a mustache and an apron that still held its store creases, and he knew nothing. Not the fourth stool, not the seventh, not the sugar caddy, none of it. He set a mug down at the far end near the register and called out, "Anywhere you like."
Dennis stood just inside the door with his coat still on and his newspaper still banded. Anywhere you like is what they say to strangers. He looked at the empty fourth stool, at the tape, at the spot on the counter that had gone pale and soft under a decade of his coffee. Then he crossed the room, sat down at the fourth stool anyway, and left the mug where the relief man had put it, cooling by the register like a letter delivered to the wrong house.
The relief man watched him a while, baffled, then brought the pot over because the customer plainly wasn't coming to the mug. Dennis nodded his thanks. It wasn't the same, and he hadn't expected it to be. A path across a lawn doesn't transfer. You can tell someone where it runs, you can even draw them a map, and they will still walk you across the grass, because the path was never the dirt. The path was the walking.
Friday the flu had passed. At 7:08 his hand was on the handle, and through the fogged glass the white mug stood steaming at the fourth stool, a folded paper towel underneath it, and behind the counter Carla was writing a ticket she didn't need to write. He came in, hung his coat on the third hook, and sat. She said, "Roy's rye survived today, so don't get used to it." He smoothed his crease. Somewhere in the kitchen the radio gave the weather. Nobody said anything else, and both of them heard all of it.
