Page 6 of The Fall Classic

The sun set over an hour ago, but the metal handle of the front door is still warm. The AC hits me the second I pull the door open, blowing hair into my face along with the smell of the place—dark roast and old wood, mingled with the floral, honey-sweet scent of the sweet alyssum in the window boxes at the front of the shop.

I smile at the pair of customers sitting, but they’re too busy looking at their phones to notice me.

“What are you smiling at?” my godmother, Alma, asks from behind the counter. She learned English watching action movies in Mexico in the eighties—Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone fighting bad guys—and it shows. Everything she says sounds like it should be followed by an explosion.

I walk over to the counter, pulling my paperback copy of Robert Frost poems from my back pocket and dropping it at my favorite booth while I go.

I smile bigger at Alma. “I think you mean, ‘what has you in such a good mood?’”

Alma shrugs, but I see her eyes crinkle. “That’s what I said.”

Alma’s warmer in Spanish, but I’ve never told her I understand as well as I do, because then she’d make me practice actually speaking.

I don’t mind hard work, but I draw the line at hard work that makes me look so silly.

I’m lying. I don’t draw any lines. Avoidance is so much easier!

“Come on, Alma,” I tell her. “You know my philosophy on smiling.”

“Yes, yes. ‘People should need a reason to be in a bad mood, not a good mood.’”

“Exactly.” I’m about to plant my hands on the counter between us when I remember that that will make her have to clean it. The shop doesn’t close for another twenty minutes, but no one needs extra work before closing. “Why don’t I grab a bucket and start cleaning the bathrooms?” I ask.

“Abby is already cleaning them,” she says, running a cloth along the espresso machine. A moment later, the door chimes, and I turn to see that the last two customers have left.

Alma rounds the counter and starts cleaning the table they vacated before I can step in to help.

“Okay, I’ll mop,” I say.

“I mopped before those two came in.”

“Then I’ll do dishes.”

“You’ll rest,” Alma says, putting a hand on her generous hip. “You work too hard all day by yourself on that coffee truck.”

I try to give her a level look, but it never delivers like hers does. “That truck was my idea.”

“Try telling your stepmother that.”

“Marlowe didn’t take credit for it,” I say, walking around the counter and lifting the chairs from the nearest table one by one, flipping them upside down onto the tabletop.

“Right. It was your stepsister.”

“Nicolette wasn’t trying to steal my idea. She told Marlowe she got the idea from me.”

“I was here, mija. You took Lulabelle to that food truck night at Sugar Maple Farms, and you came back saying Meant to Bean should have a coffee truck in Sugar Maple. And what did Nicolette do when her mother came by the next day?”

I move to the next table, flipping chairs. “She presented a plan for a mobile coffee shop,” I admit sheepishly.

Her eyebrows rise high enough to put all other eyebrow raises to shame.

“But that’s the difference: She actually made the proposal. I just said it out loud.”

“Because you were too scared to present it to Marlowe and just let it happen. Tell me I’m wrong.”

She’s not wrong, so I don’t tell her. Nicolette’s plan was good, but she put the truck on Maple Street—Sugar Maple’s Main Street—right next to the diner and the food truck at the end of the street. The truck was invisible.

What I knew after touring both Sugar Maple Farms and its canning facility with Lulabelle on field trips was that the famous farm and factory had no legitimate coffee options for visitors or employees. A few thousand employees, plus the tourists who come for the jam, the u-pick strawberries, and the fall festival. A captive audience with plenty of places to eat, but nowhere to get a good cup of coffee.