The Girl’s Latte
By Shawn Gaines

 

There was a bar counter at one of the thousands of Chicago Starbucks, the one where Ted took the kids every Sunday. The cashier didn’t stand behind it—it was detached and stranded at the west end with stools for patrons, as if the building was once a pub or a reception hall. Ted’s kids would order hot chocolate or berry tea and then run over to sit there. Except one time the five-year-old wanted “latte!” and yelled it until she finally had the opportunity to take her first sip of espresso, which sent her into a rich anti-coffee frenzy ignited as she shoved the latte off the faux bar, where it splashed behind the counter beside stockpiled boxes of unsold whole bean coffee. “Latte!” she yelled again, and Ted half-smiled and quipped back, “Yeah, that’s a latte a mess.”

The girl began pouting as Ted retrieved six napkins and the store manager. It took about 3.5 minutes to clean the wet boxes as they began crumbling like Parkinson’s Jenga night. Ted apologized to the manager, and again, and again, but the manager just nodded, assured Ted all would be well and continued slopping his mop across the rock tile floor. Ted stood up as the manager left and now the girl was trying to steal the hot chocolate from her 12-year-old half-brother, who was really only holding on to it out of principle.

Ted’s yells were unbecoming of a Starbucks patron. Maybe it would’ve gone over well at Caribou or Dunkin’ Donuts or a discarded refrigerator box in an alley, but at Starbucks whiplash-happy heads turned, sighing, mumbling, complaining under their breath with audacity. Ted knew they were watching and only minded a little. He’d been guilty of raising an eyebrow at the spanking mother in the grocery store. But he didn’t even yell much, just a simple, “Stop it!” and a lurch forward, but enough that it took about ten seconds for normal conversations to resume around him.

He wanted the one or two stragglers who were still stealing glances to stop, but they wouldn’t. He wanted to scream again, telling them he hardly ever raises his voice at the children—even the girl—and has never touched them in that way, never hit them, never called them fat or ugly or anything but perfect, but he knew that would just make everyone assume the opposite.

And as the patrons imagined Ted going home, beating his fat, ugly children, Ted quickly leaned across the counter to the children on the other side and pretended to chew gum. “Um, yeah,” he said, faking some kind of dialect that was a mix of Valley boy and greaser, “What do you have to do to get some service around here?”

The children knew the drill, laughed and ran to the other side of the bar. As Ted sat at the booth, his son leaned forward like a bartender. “Sorry, sir, can I start you off with a drink?”

“What is this? McDonald’s?” Ted asked, the dialect still half there. “Bring me some water and where is my waitress?”

The girl jumped up and down, raising her hand in the air, flinging hope against the walls of Starbucks. “Ah, yes,” Ted addressed her. “What are your specials tonight?”

She licked her upper lip and stared straight up, her normal thought process, and smiled, “Hot dogs.”

“The meat of kings!” responded Ted. “May I have some with a fine white wine cream sauce and a side of asparagus?”

“Ketchup?” she asked.

“Yeah,” responded Ted. “Just ketchup.” And Ted turned to his son. “And maitre’d, might I say you have the most beautiful waitress I have ever seen.”

The girl giggled and covered her face.

Ted returned to Starbucks the next day, alone, after work while his ex-wife had the kids, to grab a quick hot chocolate, mostly to make himself feel like the kids were still around on weekdays. He gently removed the steaming cup from the barista’s hand and raised it and nodded. Ted often wondered why he did that, as if he was praising the barista’s handiness with a toast. “To the frappuccino!” he oft wanted to pronounce, as he’d ask the barista to drink with him.

As he turned, Ted nearly smashed into an empty-handed woman with a black satchel-like purse strapped over her swollen shoulder. It was summer and it looked like she had just left softball practice. Her blonde hair was tied back, greased to the side and her filthy gray t-shirt had a crooked number 9 on the stomach, clearly ironed on, like some kind of math-addicted Care Bear. Her eyes were small and three zits ran down the side of her cheek, but in a strikingly charming arrangement, like they were painted by numbers. She looked young and her smile looked fresh.

“Excuse me,” she said, and Ted toasted her as well before beginning a side step around her, his 6’2” dark, weathered demeanor like a branch growing past a bird’s nest.

“Your children are adorable,” she said.

Ted froze and turned to the woman, bringing his cup down, the anti-toast. “I’m sorry?”

“I don’t mean to be personal,” she said. “But I see you here every Sun…this is weird. This is personal and this is weird. Sorry.” She turned back to the counter without even an awkward giggle.

“No, no,” said Ted. “Sorry, no. That was surprising.”

“Don’t you think they’re adorable?” she asked, without turning.

“No, they are,” he said. “Phenomenal genes. It’s just strange to hear that out of nowhere. Especially when I’m alone.” Ted looked around quickly. “Yes, alone.”

“This is weird.”

“My name’s Ted,” he said. She turned. “I’m sorry. It’s nice to meet you.” Ted held out his hand. She shook. “I’m sure we’ll be back Sunday if you ever want to tell them yourself.”

Ted almost swallowed those words, not even sure if he was being hit on, stalked or possibly having his wallet stolen as he spoke.

“You’re good with them,” she said, blinking maybe 20, 30 times while the green Starbucks walls blasted sunlight past her, but with enough Nerf-ball force to make her shift. “Lita. I’m Lita.”

Ted nodded and almost brought his cup high enough to assume friendship, but with skepticism he turned back toward the door. As his gray coat squatted away, he heard Lita in the distance say “thank you” to the barista and then hurl “wait!” at him. Ted faced Lita, her overflowing venti-something probably burning her hands as she gritted her chiclet teeth. Ted’s ex-wife gritted her teeth a lot, during sex, angrily, and he wondered again why he didn’t see the divorce coming. His wife should have come with a GPS system, or at least better directions than “do it better”. Ted may or may not have been thinking about sex when he saw Lita’s teeth, but he was definitely thinking about how lost he always was when he needed to guess what women were thinking. From the girl’s latte to his ex’s first, third and fifth anniversary presents (socks, a book and a raised middle finger, respectively), Ted may have discovered some form of anti-clairvoyance. He was outuitive.

She asked Ted to stay and he conceded, as the two took adjacent seats at the detached bar, the hidden boxes still stained by immature latte drinking.

“What are their names?” Lita asked.

“Alana and Bryce,” he responded.

“They’re always named Bryce,” she said.

“What?”

“You mid-30s men and your sons, always named Bryce,” she continued. “I used to date a Bryce, but every time I heard that name I thought ‘10-year-old boy’ and it just culminated this one time when we were…intimate and I was all, ‘Oh, Bryce!’ and at that moment I might as well have been watching 20/20 because I was not going to finis…”

Lita stopped herself. A moment passed and she sighed, starting to rise.

“Sorry,” she said.

Ted didn’t know why Lita’s awkward story encouraged him to open up—maybe an empathetic desire—but he stumbled forward with his words.

“She’s not mine,” he said. “Alana. She’s my wife…ex-wife’s from her second marriage. But Alana and Bryce are inseparable and she—my ex—trusts me so I watch them both while her and her husband go off and get dinner or fuck or whatever you do on Sundays when you’re not cleaning up lattes behind the Starbucks bar.”

“Why don’t you tell her you can only watch Bryce?” Lita asked, and then answered herself. “Yeah, that wouldn’t make either of them think too highly of you, huh?”

“Not really,” he said, realizing he actually finished a flavored hot chocolate whose flavor still evades him.

“I’m divorced,” she said.

“No you’re not,” he said. “You’re 14.”

“I’m not 14,” she said. “And I’m divorced.”

“Did he cheat?” he asked, not out of a desire to bring up sexuality, but out of experience when his college girlfriend revealed a series of STDs she contracted from Ted, even though she was his only.

“I was young,” she said.

“You still are.”

“So we have a black President, huh?” she said.

Ted laughed at their entire inability to carry on a conversation and simultaneously at his ability to be entirely engrossed by it. Lita had the same feeling, but it was through gritted teeth, like how she smiled and how she drank her caffeine-free tea. The two would bump into each other again over the next several weeks, sometimes talking, sometimes simply standing close to each other. They wouldn’t fuck, but he would think about it when he’d accidentally think of his ex-wife and then forget about it when he bought hot chocolate for the kids.

“It’s a big step for America,” Ted responded, almost laughing at the contrivance of his response and wanting to stay there forever talking about nothing.

“I went to Grant Park,” she said. “On election night. That was the last day I spent with him. The divorce papers were served like a week later, but we were still mostly in love. We made it to the crowds and big screen right when they announced Virginia. He wrapped his arm around me, around my shoulders, from behind, he was tall, and we watched him win and everyone screamed and we just smiled. I didn’t cry. The white people who cried were faking it. Well, in the sense that it came from themselves. It came from the vibe. It all came from the vibe. And…and we watched and they played Signed, Sealed, Delivered and everyone started dancing. Like some kind of great wave, but a better metaphor, and bouncing up and down with some energy that could only come from vibe, especially since you couldn’t smell any drugs. I’ve never seen so many people without drugs. And then he came out to speak, to give his acceptance speech, and the crowd fell silent and I leaned back into his arms and he copped a feel. When the speech began, he copped a feel.”

Ted nodded and took a sip from his empty cup.