The Co-op

Chapter Twenty-Three

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

L A RYNN

When I open the coffee shop the following morning, it’s quiet and clean. I flip on the lights and push down on the steam wands an extra time for good measure, even though I know they were cleared during closing the evening before. That whooshing noise tickles some part of my brain, so I like to indulge myself with it regularly. I leave the closed sign on, but crack the door open with a cute doorstop I found in a boutique so I can let in the fresh air. It’s a bronze sea lion with a smile. I hear a bark from the pier in the distance and feel like one of them approves.

I wish I could encapsulate the soundtrack of this place and play it like a song. The sea lions, the yodeling seagulls, the bell tolls from the buoys, and the sporadic horn from a ship. Those ever-steady waves.

I take all the woven seagrass stools off the counter and line them up along the breakfast bar. Do the same to the tables and chairs before I spot Elyse’s note on the counter with what she has planned for today’s drink special. A frozen blended matcha drink with toasted coconut on top. After I fill the pastry case with the early delivery from a local bakery, I decide to draw out the sidewalk sign for her since I still have the time before we open. And it’s such a small thing, but even creating a welcoming picture and coloring it in… It’s silly how it makes me smile to think someone might walk past and think “Wow, that looks good, I want one,” or even just the first part, that small bit of admiration for something I’ve done. I can already hear Elyse’s quip about me healing my inner child.

This leads to me rewriting all the little signs for the pastry display to match, which then carries into me straightening up the menu board, drawing some sand dollars all around the border. I check our stock on cups, napkins, utensils, and cleaning supplies everywhere else. I find an empty clipboard by the walk-in fridge and create a checklist, make a mental note to see if Elyse might want me to create a formal template later. When I finish with that and still have twenty minutes to spare, I hop over to the corner market and buy some chamomile flowers to put in all the old antique tins around the place—on the counters and tables next to the napkin holders and small baskets with individual jams. The tins are decorative on their own, collected over the years by Elyse’s family, but now they feel purposeful and cheery.

It never occurs to me that I might be going overboard until the bell chimes over the door and Elyse herself walks in. She pauses and looks around, her hands stilling in the air for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” I blurt out. “I should’ve asked before I drew out things, right? I totally should have. I’m sorry. And don’t worry about the flowers. I bought them myself, I just thought they were really cute, but again, I absolutely should have asked first—”

“LaRynn,” she cuts me off as she puts a palm to her chest, tears filling her eyes. “I’m having a hard time not tearing up and dramatically blubbering all over you because this is the nicest my shop has looked in a year. Thank you for this.” She smiles and continues looking at everything with watery eyes.

“You are tearing up, though,” I point out.

“No I’m not,” she sniffs.

“I thought I was the emotionally repressed one,” I say.

“You are!” she squeals.

“Whatever you say,” I say. I’m tearing up too though because apparently this is contagious now? And it’s clear that something else is going on because she starts crying into her hands. “What happened? Everything okay with Jensen?” I ask, moving aside André the seal and letting the door shut behind her. I pull her to the nearest table and she fingers a chamomile petal. I’ve been so caught up in the house and everything with Deacon that maybe I haven’t been available enough for Elyse.

“Things are fine,” she says. “I think maybe we’re both just trying to keep our stress away from each other, though, so between that and his fucked-up schedule right now we do feel a little distant, but we’ve been together long enough that I know that’s just part of the ebb and flow.” She laughs wetly, brushing her hand through the air. “We’re back to fucking, like, every day lately though, so hey.” She shrugs.

I force a laugh even though I blink a little at that. “But you still feel distant?” I ask.

“I think the sex is us trying not to,” she says, and some part of me files this away. A reminder that sex is only one part of a connection, and it can’t gloss over everything.

“I’m bleeding money,” she says, voice shaky. “I worked my ass off to buy this place, and I’m worried I’m gonna lose it. My lease is up in November and rent is going up even more, even though it’s already, like, doubled in the last five years. And every single thing in here has gone up in cost. I’ve raised prices where I can, but I won’t charge nine bucks for a cappuccino, LaRynn. I couldn’t sleep at night if I did that.” She sniffles again.

This incredible friend of mine. She got her first job here when she was fifteen and knew right away what she loved. She finished out school and got a business degree, then hustled and saved, taking out a loan on the rest until she could purchase it and everything here from the previous owners. I’m so fucking proud that she’s my friend. It makes me feel more… worthy. Of what precisely, I’m not sure, but having a friend like her must mean I’m not totally hopeless.

“People would pay nine bucks for your cappuccinos, friend.”

“I know, ” she wails. “That’s why I can’t do it!”

“What if… what if you moved locations? You don’t have to close completely, right? All of this in here is yours .” I wonder if I could call the company that owns this strip of buildings, maybe give them a piece of my mind over raising their rents on local, small, women- owned businesses run by tiny, tenacious blondes.

She swallows, nodding, wiping her tears with the back of her wrists. “That’s the plan.” She forces a smile. “It’ll be alright. Businesses move. The loyal regulars will still come even if I’m in another part of town.” She gets up and wipes her palms on her thighs, shaking out her wavy blonde bob. “But we open in like five minutes and I want to see everything else you did.” She smiles brightly. “I like what you did with the mugs, by the way.”

It’s clear she wants to carry on, so I follow her lead, dedicated to making sure she knows she has my support. I take her through all the tiny things I did, still feeling strangely shy about it all for a bit, but she compliments every small touch and asks me about my ideas—like why I moved the toaster oven. I explain my thought process on the efficiency of its location and how the crumbs always mixed with the inevitable spills before. I offer to create those stock sheet lists and she tells me she’d love it.

“I just set out to have a place with good, local coffee and good, local bites,” she says. “The jams, the pastries, even the mugs all made locally. I wanted it to be a place you could stroll into almost any time of day and either see someone you know or meet someone new, but…” She flaps her hand again, moving past the very obvious melancholy she feels. And I get what she means. Santa Cruz is by no means a small town, but parts of it can feel that way. Especially for the businesses, I gather. “But these are all things that are helpful and lovely, Rynn. Thank you.”

I truly give it a Herculean effort to keep the whole thing in perspective. It’s probably a job any sixteen-year-old off the street could do, with no education and hardly any specialty skills. But to me… to me, her gratitude feels like I’ve been handed a plaque with my name on it.

Every customer that comes in this morning seems to smile, even when it’s wall-to-wall busy, doors propped open so the line can weave out onto the street. More of the regulars have started to introduce themselves to me, like I’m one of them, and today I meet one of the daily customers, Glenda, who is also the bike taxi driver who took me home from the brewery that first night, and has just informed me that she runs a street vendor cart during the day.

“What do you sell?” I ask.

“Oh, this and that,” she says. “I try not to get too attached to a brand. I don’t know that I’ll ever want to stick to one thing in life to define myself by, you know?” she tells me with a smile. She’s got red, crimped hair jutting out in every direction, giant opal earrings, and glitter up to her eyebrows. It is impossible not to smile back. “Last month I went through a jewelry-making phase. This week I’m selling sage bundles and crystals. Next week, who knows.”

“I’ll make sure I come by sometime,” I say.

She hesitates a moment at the counter then, before she angles herself back to me. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

I feel my brows come together and scramble for a memory.

“I wasn’t doing well for a time, but this corner of town sort of took me in,” she says. “It started when you were smaller. You and your grandmother and her friend would bring me meals sometimes.” Realization dawns on me and my breathing goes shallow. “Then you’d all do it separately as you got older.” She laughs a dry rattling sound. “All three of you would come at different times on the same day sometimes and it felt like I was living large. And then your other grandma started to, too.” I can picture this so vividly, Sal and Helena and Grandma checking in on this woman and making sure she was fed. I feel my breath saw through my chest. “Then even that boy would come by.” My throat goes instantly, impossibly taut. “Deacon’s a very good man. You did good for yourself.” She beams fondly at me.

I’m a little bit stunned, like I’m too full of something, or maybe too hollow. I guess she placed Deacon and me together from that night she brought me home, but… but I have no idea what to say and I can’t quite decode each of my feelings or why this is impacting me so heavily. It’s as if, for as happy as I am for her, I also feel like she’s given me something more somehow, to know that there’s someplace and someone I’ve left a mark on. Someone here still. Another thread connecting me to the grands. Something else that connects me to Deacon, too, but I don’t know how that particular aspect makes me feel.

“I just wanted to say thank you,” Glenda says.

“You’re welcome,” is all I can come up with.

Then she scoops her latte from the counter, with a fern poured into the foam that I made, and takes it to a table of people waiting for her.