Of Literature and Lattes Read online

  My mom died early of Korsakoff syndrome, a form of dementia, and that shouldn’t happen. We can know what’s in our genes, and that means what might be in our futures. But now we can and will make our futures better. I will never stop loving my mom or feeling fury at her loss, and I will give everything I have to stop this epidemic of chronic disease and illness from engulfing generations.

  He had spun heartwarming stories of reading, fishing, building forts, and hiking with this gorgeous, almost mythical-sounding mother. By the end Alyssa had wanted to trade her mom for his, despite her early death.

  And that’s what bothered Alyssa the most. She hadn’t done her due diligence—fleeing Chicago and joining Vita XGC had been a hasty and emotional decision.

  Homes and moms were very emotional topics.

  The woman finally stopped chortling and scrolled across her tablet to resume the interview. “Let’s track back through your experience. You left ‘XGC’”—she made air quotes with her free hand—“in December last year.”

  “Yes.” Alyssa didn’t add that everyone left XGC that day, under federal escort.

  “Describe your responsibilities there.”

  “I worked on a team of eight that built the company’s predictive algorithms.”

  “You managed the data?”

  “No. We worked with scrubbed data. All departments worked that way because the amount of information made the data incredibly powerful. They were very protective about that.”

  “Sure they were,” the woman scoffed. “So basically, you were responsible for all those people thinking they were headed to Alzheimer’s, lupus, MS, diabetes, or whatever else was going to kill them. Tomorrow. How convenient—can’t get sued for something that might happen.”

  That sentence wasn’t a question, but the woman’s sneer demanded an answer.

  “So it seems.” Alyssa tried to bank her bitterness, which had crept in at interview number ten. While she knew it was off-putting and unlikely to land her a job, she found that her anger—at the company, at the lies, even at herself—kept her from crying, which was how she’d answered that line of questioning during interviews one, two, and three. Because it always came up.

  During interview number four, she’d tried for honesty . . .

  “Everything that happened is being unraveled, and it was horrible. But I do think my team’s algorithms worked. Through three testing rounds we matched perfectly the reconstructed data sets . . . I don’t know what went wrong, and if our work unwittingly harmed someone, my hope is they can be notified. Some customers . . . I can’t imagine their questions and concerns. It was big stuff we were looking toward, but it was always years ahead. People can be notified, and the worry can stop. It was all predictive, not diagnostic—”

  “Stop!” the interviewer had shot back. “Stop justifying yourself. No one had anything! You were playing God, for profit, and you have no idea what that lie could do to someone, to whole families.” He escorted her out of his office within thirty seconds, and she stood throwing up in the parking lot within sixty.

  The underlying questions in each interview had boiled down to a caustic mix of How could you be so stupid? and Are you really that greedy and cruel? One interviewer actually used those words, and Alyssa couldn’t blame him. They were the million-dollar questions. Or in XGC’s case—the 1.2-billion-dollar questions. Everyone in Silicon Valley wanted the answers, as did the federal agents working the case. And those questions were the reason why Alyssa, and everyone else involved, remained the subject of multiple investigations, gossip, and speculation—and unhirable until answers were found.

  The questions haunted Alyssa in her quieter moments as well. She tossed and turned most nights, stomach on fire with the ulcers that simmered during her final months at XGC and flamed higher during the last six unemployed.

  Looking back, she could see last fall more clearly now. Tag had taken XGC’s frenzy to a whole new level.

  Always cavalier and charismatic, he showed signs of cracking. At the time she believed him—it was because they were close. Now she knew the truth . . .

  We are at the end. All our hard work is paying off, and testing shows that we did it. We have rolled out results from our first live test. That’s thirty thousand clients, and another boy won’t lose his mom to dementia because she’ll know in her teens how to stay healthy. A young girl, knowing MS is thirty years down the road, will take proper care of her health and happily hold her grandchildren someday. But we’ve got to push harder. The establishment doesn’t want to put healthcare and vitality in the hands of the everyday common person, so we’ve got to get out there before it can stop us. This is all hands on deck. We’re fighting for the future.

  Even now, remembering that day, Alyssa felt the flush of energy that had filled her that afternoon. It was consuming and invigorating to be pursuing something pure and true and honest. And, from Alyssa’s perspective, it was the first true and honest thing she had known. The light after her own lie.

  Then it all came crashing down.

  That’s wrong, Alyssa reminded herself in the still darkness every night and now as she slammed the back door of her blue CRV. It never existed in the first place. In fact, if the rumors proved true, the only real business that had occurred at XGC came from Tag selling their data to pharmaceutical companies overseas.

  Alyssa dropped into the driver’s seat. It was hot enough to instantly stick her T-shirt to her back and melt the tension in her shoulders. She closed her eyes in the warm quiet—until her thoughts crowded in again.

  She tapped a button on her navigation system to head to the last place on earth she wanted to go, and the only option she had left.

  2,175 miles away . . . Winsome, Illinois.

  Home.

  Chapter 2

  “What does Andante even mean?”

  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.

  Ryan, however, had walked into the Daily Brew, dropped onto that same brown couch George mentioned and grieved, bounced on its squeaky springs, and declared, “This is it, man. It’s perfect.”

  It chafed that his assistant might have been right after all, had known something instinctively that Jeremy failed to recognize.

  “Jeremy?”

  He shook himself into the present. Janet Harrison, one of the women from the bookshop three stores down, had materialized in front of him. “Sorry. I was just thinking.”

  “I called your name twice.” She laughed. “You were daydreaming.” She shifted her gaze from him to the fireplace, then across the walls and back to the counter. “Stay awake today. This is really something.”

  Jeremy pressed his lips together to savor her compliment and the note of wonder in her voice. That’s it, he thought. “It is, isn’t it? It cost a lot, but don’t you think it’ll be a hit?” He pressed his lips tight again, this time to keep himself from saying more. He hoped she hadn’t heard that last lift of eagerness, that plea for approval, in his voice. He cleared his throat, dropping his voice at least five notes. “I mean, all the elements are in place.”

  “I feel like I’m in Streeterville or Bucktown, someplace far more hip than Winsome.”

  “The coffee is as good too.” Jeremy glanced to the counter and landed on the two ancient machines. “Or it soon will be. I’ve got a replacement for those two on the way. But even until then, you won’t find a better cup.”

  “I should go try it out then. Congratulations.”

  He stepped in front of her. “Janet . . . can you tell me who the older man in the blue windbreaker is? The one waiting at the side counter?”

  Janet leaned around him and narrowed her eyes to focus. “George Williams? You haven’t met him? You’ll love him. He’s got like six kids, some still live in town, and he used to be mayor back in the eighties. He’s standing with David Drummond, who helps us out at the bookshop.” She tugged at his elbow. “Come meet them both.”

  Jeremy lifted a hand. “Not right now. Let me get your coffees. The usuals?”

  “You remember?”

  “We weren’t closed that long. Three lattes. One coconut milk, one almond, and one regular.”

  “Please.” Janet smiled.

  Jeremy circled the counter and moved to the second espresso machine. From the corner of his eye he watched George and David collect their drinks, vacillate a minute, then head to the two chairs. He sighed, sure that given another second they’d have left Andante—for good.

  Ryan turned from the machine next to him and offered a cappuccino to a waiting customer.

  Even with so few customers, he needed more help. The old machines took too long, and customers stood unattended. He needed to hire someone else . . . He had to check the tables . . . He hadn’t thought about the need to constantly wipe them down, clear them during the morning rush . . . And what about—

  Jeremy pulled the basket from the grinder and felt his breath synchronize with his actions. The cacophony within his mind calmed. This was what worked. No matter where, when, or what was imploding in or around his life, he understood this movement and this rhythm—the science, and the art, behind a perfect shot. The rest would work itself out.

  He counted the seconds as the shot pulled. Too few. He huffed. The beans were fresh, the tamp felt firm but not tight, yet the machine pulled forty-four grams in twenty-five seconds. While some baristas believed in a one gram to one second ratio, Jeremy was a devotee of forty grams to twenty-five seconds. It produced, in his mind, an optimally balanced shot. A slow pull goes bitter. A fast one sours. Most palates couldn’t taste a four-gram deviation from ideal, but Jeremy refused to serve it. He sank the shot, tapping it out into the knock box, and began again.

  Three drinks in hand, Jeremy circled the counter to find Janet. “Sorry. Perfection took a little time this morning.”

  “No worries.” Janet stood scrolling through pictures on her phone. “Look how cute she is.” She tilted the phone to Jeremy and sped through well over twenty pictures of her granddaughter dressed in varying shades of pink.

  “Krista used to do that too—dress our daughter in so much pink she looked more like a puff of cotton candy than a kid. She basically grew up, in pink, on Instagram.”

  “This one will too. My daughter-in-law set up a dedicated account for Rosie.” She pressed the phone to her chest. “She’s pretty perfect, isn’t she?”

  Jeremy banked his chuckle too late. “Absolutely.”

  Janet snatched the carrying tray of coffees from him, laughing at herself now. “I’m fully aware I’ve become a total cliché.”