The Second Cup

Every Sunday at nine, Michael Moreno ordered two coffees.

He took the chair facing the door, even in winter, when the draft came in hard from the harbour and made his hands ache. He drank the first coffee slowly. The second he left on the other side of the table, where the sun reached it in a narrow gold strip from the window. At ten, when the café became busy with families in clean shoes and men still smelling of engine oil, Nia took the untouched cup away.

“Same again next week?” she would ask.

“Unless you find a better customer.”

“People who buy coffee and don't drink it are my favourite kind.”

He would tip her too much and leave.

There was nothing especially dramatic about the arrangement. No candle burning in an empty room. No photograph propped against the sugar jar. A cup of coffee cost three euros and a little shame. Michael could afford both.

On the Sunday Ada returned, he was wearing a shirt with the wrong button done up.

Nia noticed at once. She noticed everything in her café: the woman who pretended not to check her phone, the boy who always ordered a croissant and brought half home, the man who came alone and asked for a table for two. She pointed at Michael's shirt.

“You're coming undone.”

“I've been doing that for years.”

“Very funny. Fix it.”

Michael looked down, struggled briefly with the buttons, and gave up. He had hurt his hand at work the previous Thursday. There was a greenish bruise under the skin of his thumb.

Nia reached across the table and fixed the shirt without asking. She had known him long enough that neither of them made a fuss about the intimacy.

“You get a message?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“Then stop staring at the door as though you can pull someone through it.”

He lowered his eyes to his coffee. Nia went back behind the counter. The second cup cooled.

At 9:41, the bell over the café door rang.

A woman entered carrying a dark blue suitcase. Rain shone on the shoulders of her coat. She paused to close her umbrella, shook out the water, and looked around with an expression that made Michael forget how to breathe.

He knew her immediately. The shape of her face had changed, of course. She was thirty-four now. There were little lines beside her eyes when she looked into the light. Her hair had been cut to her chin. But when she saw him, she tipped her head a fraction to the left, exactly as she had done at fourteen whenever she was bracing herself for an argument.

“Ada,” he said.

She stood still.

It was not the reunion he had rehearsed. In his mind he had stood, walked to her, said something ordinary, and left room for whatever she wanted. Instead he sat there like an old man whose body had forgotten the next instruction.

“Hello, Dad.”

They had not been in the same room for six years.

There had been Christmas messages. An envelope on her twenty-ninth birthday that she had returned unopened. Once, when his neighbour died, a brief call in which she had said she was sorry and he had mistaken the kindness for an invitation to keep talking. But six years had passed since he had seen the way she moved through a room.

Michael began to rise. Ada lifted a hand, not quite stopping him.

“Please,” she said. “Don't make it strange.”

He sat.

She looked at the second cup.

“Expecting someone?”

The question was a small door. He could have told her the truth. He could have said that every Sunday for thirteen years, when work allowed, he had bought a coffee for a daughter who wasn't there. That he had tried once to stop and found the empty hour waiting for him at home. That he knew it was a foolish ritual and kept doing it anyway.

Instead he said, “I thought you might want one.”

Her eyes went to his face. “You didn't know I was coming.”

“No.”

“Then that's an odd thing to say.”

Nia appeared at the table with a clean cloth and the kind of smile she reserved for people standing at the edge of a difficult conversation.

“Ada. You grew up.”

“Most people do, Nia.”

“Some of us make a terrible job of it. Can I get you something fresh?”

“A black coffee, please.”

Michael glanced at the cup on the table. It had been black too. Ada used to take milk in hers, then decided at twenty that drinking coffee without it was more adult. He knew because she'd once said it on a telephone call. It was a stupid detail to remember. He remembered it anyway.

“Sit,” Nia said, pulling out the chair opposite Michael. “You can quarrel after you've had something hot.”

Ada gave a reluctant, almost invisible smile. She sat, but left her suitcase close enough to touch.

“Did you get my message?” Michael asked.

“I got the letter from the solicitor.”

He looked down.

“You're selling the workshop.”

“I'm thinking about it.”

“The letter said the property was being prepared for sale.”

“Then I suppose I've thought about it.”

Her jaw moved. “You could've called me.”

“I have called you.”

“Not like that. You know what I mean.”

He did. Calling was easy compared with saying anything that might matter. For years, whenever he managed to reach her, he asked about the weather or whether her school was keeping her busy. He did not say: I am lonely. He did not say: I have been unwell. He did not say: I cannot keep the workshop running because climbing the stairs now makes my chest hurt. He asked whether the rain had stopped in the city where she lived, then listened to her answer as though it were enough.

Nia brought the fresh coffee. Ada wrapped both hands around the cup.

“I've got four days,” she said. “I can help sort things. There are things in the house I need to collect.”

Michael nodded, too quickly.

“And I don't want a fight.”

“Neither do I.”

She gave him a tired look. “We've never needed to want one.”

Beyond the window, the harbour cranes were beginning their slow movements against a sky still heavy with rain. Michael used to take Ada down to watch the ships when she was little. He could explain the workings of an engine for an hour, but the simplest words to his own daughter always seemed to jam somewhere behind his teeth.

“Are you well?” he asked.

“I'm fine.”

“Still teaching?”

“Still teaching.”

“Good.”

She stared at him. “Is that all you've got?”

He could have said, I'm frightened. He could have said, I don't know which question will send you away. He could have said, You have her eyes when you're angry and I miss her so much that sometimes I can't stand to look at you.

“It's good to see you,” he said.

Ada looked at the table between them. The sugar bowl was cracked. Somebody had folded a napkin into a little white boat. The other cup stood untouched.

When she spoke again, her voice had softened, and the softness hurt him more than her anger.

“I wish you knew how to say more than that.”

At ten, Nia came to clear the table. Michael had finished his coffee. Ada had drunk half of hers. The second cup, the one that had been waiting when she arrived, was still full.

Nia lifted it carefully.

“Cold,” she said.

Michael watched her carry it away.

“Yes,” he answered. “I know.”