Before the Coffee Gets Cold

For eighty-three mornings, Leo ordered the same coffee and said almost nothing. Mara knew the number because she had opened the café eighty-three days earlier, and he had been her first customer.

He arrived at seven fifteen. He paid with a card he kept loose in his coat pocket. He sat by the window for nine minutes, occasionally eleven, then crossed the street carrying whatever remained in his cup.

On the eighty-fourth morning, he ordered tea.

Mara looked up from the till.

“Should I call someone?”

He blinked, then laughed. It was a much younger sound than she expected from a man who approached breakfast like a legal obligation.

“I'm trying to become less predictable.”

“Ambitious. Any particular tea?”

“The ordinary kind.”

She reached for a cup. “A radical departure, then.”

He stayed twelve minutes. Before leaving he asked her name, although it was written on the small licence displayed beside the counter. She told him anyway.

“I'm Leo.”

“I know. It's on your loyalty card.”

“I wondered whether that was cheating.”

“Only if you use somebody else's.”

After he left, she wrote his name on the paper bag containing her breakfast. It was a habit she had developed while trying to keep track of the café's early days: dates, things that broke, things that went well. The bags were folded in a drawer beside invoices she understood much less readily.

Opening the café had been the boldest decision of Mara's life. People reminded her of this whenever she admitted to being tired. As though choosing the difficult thing removed the right to complain about it.

Her father had helped with the deposit. Her sister had painted the back room. Mara had promised both of them that she knew what she was doing. She knew how to make coffee, how to remember orders and how to persuade a delivery driver to carry boxes through a door he insisted was too narrow. The rest she learned after closing, under the light above the sink.

The next morning Leo ordered coffee again.

“The experiment?” she asked.

“Inconclusive. I missed coffee.”

He was carrying a long black case. She nodded toward it.

“Musician?”

“Repairer. My workshop's two streets away.”

“What do you repair?”

“Violins, mostly. Sometimes their owners.”

She told him she used to play. The admission surprised her; she had not mentioned it to anyone in years. School orchestra, lessons paid for by a father who quietly took extra shifts, a violin that had moved with her through three flats and stayed in its case throughout all of them.

“Do you miss it?”

“I miss being someone who might play it.”

He considered that.

“Those aren't very far apart.”

A customer arrived before she could decide whether this was encouraging or irritating. Leo took his coffee to the window. When he left, she noticed him glance toward the small speaker above the counter, where a string quartet was playing too softly to compete with the milk steamer.

Two days later he brought a leaflet. An amateur orchestra rehearsed at the community hall on Wednesday evenings. New players welcome. No audition required.

“I know the conductor,” he said. “She likes enthusiasm.”

“How does she feel about wrong notes?”

“They come attached.”

Mara put the leaflet beside the till. For a week she pretended it was there for customers. Then she carried it home, set it on the kitchen table and opened the violin case.

The bow hair had gone slack. One string was broken. Beneath the instrument was a folded concert programme from when she was seventeen, her name printed in a column so small she had once complained about it for an entire evening.

She took the violin to Leo's workshop during her afternoon break.

He looked different there. Without his coat, sleeves rolled to the elbow, he seemed more solid than the quiet man at the window. The room smelled of wood and varnish. A radio played a programme about gardening that neither appeared to understand.

He inspected the bridge, turned a peg and plucked a string.

“It's been waiting,” he said.

“Do you say that to everyone who neglects their instrument?”

“Only the ones who look guilty.”

He gave her a price she could afford and refused to pretend the work was free. She liked him for that. It allowed her to come back without feeling she owed him a better version of herself.

At Wednesday's rehearsal her bow shook. She lost her place twice before the first break. A woman beside her quietly pointed to the bar number each time.

“First evening?” the woman asked.

“Is it that obvious?”

“I did exactly the same thing at mine. Nineteen years ago.”

By the second half Mara stopped apologising after every mistake. For a few bars she was simply playing, held in a sound too large to depend on whether she got every note right.

She walked home with the case in her hand and called her father from outside her flat.

“Did you know I still had it?” she asked.

“I hoped.”

The next morning she gave Leo a coffee on the house.

“That bad?” he asked.

“That good.”

He started staying five minutes longer. Not every day; she would have noticed the calculation. Sometimes he brought a book and forgot to open it. Sometimes they spoke while she wiped the counter between customers.

She learned that his sister lived abroad and received terrible photographs of his dinners to prove he was eating. That he had been married once, that it had ended without a villain, and that he still disliked describing it because everyone seemed disappointed by the lack of one.

He learned that she phoned her father on Sundays, hated coriander and rehearsed difficult conversations while cleaning the espresso machine. He overheard part of one and asked whether he should come back when the coffee grinder had been forgiven.

One morning he did not come.

Mara told herself this was normal. He was a customer. Customers missed mornings. By eight thirty she had checked the window often enough that her sister, helping before her own shift, asked whether they were expecting a royal visit.

He returned the next day with a bandage around two fingers. A workshop mishap, minor but badly timed. She was so relieved that she became brisk.

“Your usual?”

“Yes, please.”

She made it without another word. When he left, he looked back, puzzled.

Her sister leaned against the counter.

“Excellent technique. Very welcoming.”

“I was busy.”

“You steamed an empty jug.”

Mara put it down.

At rehearsal that evening she played with unnecessary force. The woman beside her raised an eyebrow and moved her chair a few inches away.

The following morning Mara apologised.

“I was worried when you didn't come. Then I felt stupid about being worried, which apparently became your fault.”

Leo was quiet long enough for her to regret saying anything.

“I thought you might have been cross because I stay too long.”

“You buy one coffee and occupy a table for a full quarter of an hour. We're investigating the financial damage.”

He smiled. Then he said, “Would you tell me if I made you uncomfortable?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

It was not a declaration. It was better: a small piece of uncertainty placed on the counter where they could both see it.

That Friday he left an envelope beneath his cup. Mara discovered it after the queue had gone. Inside were two tickets to a chamber concert and a note written on workshop paper.

I would like this to be a date. I thought I should be clear. If you'd rather keep it to coffee, I will still need coffee.

She read it twice, smiling at the unnecessary precision she had come to like.

She nearly wrote her answer on a receipt. Instead she went to his workshop after closing. He opened the door with a pencil behind his ear.

“Yes,” she said.

He looked briefly toward the bench, as though she might be answering a question about the repair.

“To the date, Leo.”

“Oh. Good.”

She kissed his cheek and left before either could make the moment complicated. On the walk home she realised she was grinning at strangers.

The concert was on Saturday. Without the counter between them, both seemed temporarily unsure of their hands. Leo offered to buy a programme, then admitted he already owned one because he had come early and needed something to do.

They found their seats. During the first piece Mara recognised a passage the orchestra had been rehearsing. She knew where she usually lost her place. When the professional violinists passed through it effortlessly, she whispered a word she would not have used in the café.

Leo bent his head to hide a laugh. She liked that more than she liked the playing.

Afterwards they walked until the cafés nearby had closed. He asked about the business without offering solutions. She asked why he repaired instruments rather than performing.

“I like sending them back into other people's lives,” he said. “And I hate audiences.”

“You sat in one very well tonight.”

“Years of practice.”

At her door he asked whether she wanted breakfast the following morning.

“You know a place?”

“I do. The owner makes excellent coffee.”

“She has Sundays off.”

“Then somewhere neither of us works.”

She took his hand before he could reach for his phone to arrange it. Their first kiss was interrupted by a neighbour opening the communal door with an enormous bag of recycling. They stepped apart to let him through, then began laughing so hard that attempting another seemed impossible.

Sunday breakfast lasted until lunch. They found things they disagreed about, which reassured Mara more than discovering another favourite in common would have. Leo believed every walk needed a destination. She believed destinations were how enjoyable walks became errands. They tested this difference over three miles and two wrong turns.

On Monday he arrived at seven fifteen. The café was crowded. There was no table by the window, and Mara had spilled milk down the front of her apron.

“Your usual?” she asked.

“Please.”

She handed him the cup. Their fingers touched briefly, deliberately this time.

He did not stay. She did not mind. There was a message on her phone for later, a rehearsal on Wednesday and a dinner neither had settled on yet.

Before opening the next morning, she took out a paper bag and wrote the date. Beneath it she added: Still learning.

Then she switched on the machine, unlocked the door and let the day begin.