Page 39 of The Faceoff

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re about to say something.”

“I’m simply observing,” Mormor says, “that my grandson came to my shop for the first time in a month, and he came at four o’clock, which is precisely when Sloane starts her shift, and he brought her a chai.” She lets that sit. “From the Roastery. Which is in the opposite direction from your house.”

I drink the coffee. It’s gone lukewarm. I drink it anyway.

“It’s not what you think.” I set the cup down before she can read anything else in it.

“I think it’s wonderful.”

“It’s not — Mormor.”

“I’ve been telling you about her for two years.”

“I’m aware.”

“And now you’ve met her.”

“We met last night. Briefly.” I turn the cup a quarter-turn on the counter. “There was a thing at a party. Her ex was being a problem. I stepped in.”

Something changes in Mormor’s face. The teasing drops off it, fast, and underneath is something sharper. “Her ex,” she repeats. “The football one.”

“You know about him?”

“I know enough.” Her mouth is a thin line now. “I know she stopped walking home past Whitmore Avenue this summer. I know she takes the long way. I never asked why, because she didn’t offer, and I don’t pry.” A beat. “Much.”

This is a lie. Mormor pries constantly. But I understand what she means — there’s prying about coffee orders and there’s the other kind, the kind where you let a person keep the thing they’re not ready to hand over. Mormor knows the difference. It’s one of the things I love about her that I’ve never figured out how to say.

“He grabbed her arm last night,” I tell her. Quiet, so it stays at the counter. “At the party. Wouldn’t let go. I made him let go.”

Mormor is silent for a moment.

Then she looks across the shop at Sloane, restocking her shelf, oblivious or pretending to be, and her face does something complicated.

“Good.” Finally. Just that.

“Yeah.”

“Good,” she says again, and picks up a stack of receipts, and starts going through them with more force than receipts require.

I end up staying.

I don’t plan to stay. I planned to see Mormor, finish the coffee, manage the matchmaking, and head back to the house. But a delivery shows up at four-thirty — three boxes of stock, dropped at the curb by a guy who clearly has somewhere better to be — and Mormor looks at the boxes and then looks at me, and I’m not going to make my eighty-two-year-old grandmother haul boxes while I sit on a stool, so.

“Where do you want them?” I ask.

“Back room. Sloane will⁠—”

“I know where the back room is Mormor. I practically grew up in this shop, remember?”

Sloane straightens up from her shelf. The look she gives Mormor is a specific look, and the look Mormor gives back is an even more specific look, and there’s an entire conversation in it that I’m not part of, conducted in the silent language of two people who know each other well.

“This way,” Sloane says.

I pick up two of the boxes. They’re heavier than they look — books always are, which is the kind of thing you don’t think about until you’ve moved enough of them — and I follow her through a narrow gap in the shelves toward the back of the shop.