This Place of Wonder (15)

She turns back to the meeting. The speaker is a beanpole, and tall, with the serious, but shimmery and natural, face of an academic. Her story is one of high functioning that ended in a DUI where she blew a .34 BAC, which is pretty close to dead if you don’t know.

She finishes and people speak, including the girl next to me, who is five days sober today.

“Good job,” I say when she sits down again.

“Thanks.” There’s something so haunted about her, the circles under her eyes, the jutting of her collarbones, that I am transported to the face I saw in the mirror three days after I arrived at rehab. Scared, skinny, lost.

When the meeting ends, I give her my phone number. “Call or text if you need to talk.”

“Yeah, thanks,” she says, and stuffs it in her pocket.

“My name is Maya,” I offer.

“Sunny,” she says, looking over my shoulder toward the door.

“See ya,” I say and step aside.

A handful of women greet me, offer the slogans that seem so corny unless you need them: keep coming back; it works if you work it; easy does it.

As I leave my shoulders are looser. My head is higher. It’s like working out. Getting to the gym is sometimes hard, but it feels so good when you’ve done it.



The Brewed Bean Café is a bit off the beaten track, too far from the university to appeal to students and far enough from the tourist track to get only a few stragglers. It’s a local joint that’s established a very good reputation over the past eight years. I’ve been in only a couple of times—let’s be honest: I’d never have chosen coffee if beer were available—but the minute I walk in, that annoyance I’ve been carrying along the back of my neck drops away. It smells deeply, richly, intensely of freshly roasted coffee. Small tables line the big windows that face both toward the bluffs to the south and the ocean to the west, though there isn’t really an ocean view, at least from this level. There’s a sidewalk, then a street, and then a row of palm trees and scraggly oleander bushes.

Inside the floors are warm, worn wood, and the bar looks like it spent a few centuries in a pub, carved of more of the same shade of wood. Industrial-style cage chandeliers fitted with old-school light bulbs hang from the ceiling. At this in-between hour, there are few customers—a pair of businessmen in the corner; a woman about my age with fabulous long, shiny hair hunched over a laptop; a weary-looking man by the window who makes me think of Irrfan Khan, a Bollywood actor I love.

“Hi!” A woman in her forties, with short dark hair and a turquoise apron over her jeans and T-shirt, greets me. “What can I get you?”

“Hi. My name is Maya Beauvais. I’m here about the job?”

“Oh sure! I’m Jessica. I’m the manager—and Jacob’s wife. We’ve both known Nate since kindergarten.” She waves for me to follow her through a doorway.

“You must know my sister, too, then. Rory.”

She looks over her shoulder, startled. “You really don’t look like sisters.”

“No.”

We move through a small kitchen, which I notice with approval is fantastically clean. A girl wearing a hairnet and plastic gloves is portioning salad into what look like earth-friendly containers. “Renee, this is Maya. She’s starting on second shift this week, front of the house.”

She nods at me, and I think she might be stoned, or maybe just into the task. “Hi.”

I wave, hurrying to catch up with Jessica. She leads me up a set of old wooden stairs to a small office outside a big open room with windows looking toward the alley. Burlap bags of what I assume are coffee beans are stacked on shelves. A big metal machine that makes me think of a still dominates the room. I breathe in the heady, thick scent of coffee. “This is where you roast?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty cool. Have you ever done it?”

“No. Looks intriguing.”

“I’ll have Jacob pull you up here the next time. I don’t have the knack, but he can always use a spare pair of hands.”

“Cool.”

“Have a seat,” she says, and pulls out some paperwork from a file cabinet. “I just need you to sign a W-2.”

It’s weird, becoming an employee again, but it also feels like something I can manage. Making lattes. Clearing tables. A J-O-B, they call it in recovery lingo. I scribble my name on the form and pass it back.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” she says.

“Thanks.”

“He was quite a character. So charming and good looking.”

“Yep.” I wonder if I should seem more distressed, but I can’t start with lies. “We weren’t actually that close the past decade or so, honestly.”

“I get it. I worked at Peaches and Pork for a while in high school.”

I give a half laugh. “Yeah, me too.”

She smiles. “Well, we’re not quite the operation it is, but we’re proud of what we’ve built here. The café is on the main level, which is where you’ll be working, as a barista. This is the roasting area, obviously.”

Eyeing the bags, I ask, “Do you sell a lot of your own beans?”

“We do. It’s our main source of income, actually. We use the coffee in the café, but we also sell it in bags, half pound, one pound, more by special order. Several restaurants in the area have standing orders for their own roasts.”