Swirling the Dregs

She said, “I like my coffee like I like my men. Late at night and a little depressed.” He was intrigued and moved one stool closer to her at the bar. He’d never seen anyone drinking black coffee with the intensity she had been doing all night. It had to be hot. The bartender continually made fresh pots. This chick didn’t wince or flinch, and although there was sugar on the bar, she hadn’t touched her spoon.

“So you’re a purist?” he asked.

“You could say that.”

“What makes coffee depressed?”

"What makes anyone depressed?” she asked.

“You tell me.”

She folded the corner of the page she’d been reading and closed her book. She eyed him in a way that felt invasive and a bit contemptuous, and he had to work not to look down. He was wearing jeans and a plaid shirt his mom had given him for Christmas. His boots were on the new side. Still a bit uncomfortable. He didn’t regularly go to bars like this one, but he’d had a day, and his brain had said: drink.

All night, he’d been nursing one beer at a time, and wondering if anyone would talk to the reader at the bar, and then finally having the balls to be that person.

After her appraisal, she said, “I appreciate men who know what it’s like to be up all night driving on a lonely highway. Stopping at dawn to get a cup of 7-11 coffee and sitting in the front seat of their truck, drinking hot Joe from styrofoam as dawn breaks. Swirling the dregs.”

He wondered if she were describing a particular man or a trope in general. He didn’t have a truck. He drove a Subaru. He hadn’t ever stayed up to see a sunrise, although he didn’t like to admit that. He’d seen plenty of pictures. Was that enough?

There was something about this woman that made him want to be the man she was looking for, so he pretended. He said he had. He said he knew what that was like. And he invented a scenario from broadcloth. Piecing together stories and images he had borrowed along the way. He could tell that she didn’t necessarily believe him.

It had been a long string of solitary nights for her. Sometimes, the emptiness didn’t matter. Sometimes the solitude stretched out in front of her like one of those highways in Montana or Utah where nothing ever changes for hundreds of miles. She had tricks to make the nights shorter, the days less gray. She had ways and means, but every so often, she was weak.

She held one of his hands in hers, and the skin of his palm was soft, no calluses, as if there was something a little too freshly laundered about him.

But she was lonely, and she took a risk. She said, “What was the code to the last combination lock you owned.”

He rattled off the numbers.

She said, “Who did you go with to your first concert.”

“My older brother.” She seemed to appreciate that answer.

She said, “If you could choose between a five-star hotel in Paris by yourself or a motel with a .25-cent slot to start the massager, an impossibly loud ice machine down the hall, and a woman who knows how to kiss, which would you choose?”

He lied and said the motel. Because who would say no to a five-star in Paris?

They went to her place. She had ropy macrame woven holders dripping spider plants from the ceiling and there was a series of framed tarot cards on the corridor leading to her bedroom. She didn’t turn on the overhead, but he sensed a mess. Clothes on the chair in the corner and some on the floor. They started to do the things that lonely strangers do in a bed that hadn’t been made.

There was a neon sign on the building next door that made her room glow red. The framed posters on her walls featured movies he’d never heard of. The posters were all in French.

She was good, and he was passable. He hoped. She was sexy in the way she took off her clothes and then reached for his, in the way she moved her body, almost as if she were a snake charmer and he the asp. His excitement made the event short. He prayed she didn’t notice. She took a shower after and didn’t invite him to join her. They slept facing away from each other on a mattress that dipped in the center. Her room smelled of essential oils and the memory of other men.

In the morning, she found him in the kitchen. He’d gone out while she was still asleep, and he’d bought sugar and cream. She appeared in the kitchen wearing nothing but a smile and a pair of satin boxers, and that smile turned into a smirk. She’d known he was a synthetic copy. A faker. A wannabe. But she’d been wistful, and she’d taken a risk. She should have guessed from his soft hands he’d drink pumpkin-spice creamer.

She went to get dressed, and when she came back into the kitchen, he’d left on his own. And he’d taken the creamer with him.

##

A man sat at her side at the bar, and he looked at her mug, and he said, “So what’s up with that? Black coffee at midnight?”

And she turned over her shoulder to gaze out the window into the parking lot and then she asked him which was his. He pointed to a white pick-up. Not white-white. Dirty. Not new either. Plates from another state. He said, “I’ve been driving for ten hours. I needed to stop and get a cup, and this was the only place open. I was dead on my feet.”

“Where are you coming from?” she asked.

“A bad break-up. God, what a break-up. She torched my life. Smell me.”

“Smell you?” He’d piqued her interest. Someone she might be able to play with.

He said, “I’m all ashes and regrets.”

She turned the corner of her page down and faced him full on. She said, “Can I hold your hand?” He put his in hers without a word, without asking why. She traced his love line with her pointer, and she reveled in the solid weight of his hand, and how the skin was rough and worn, like it was supposed to be.

“How about you?” he asked, “Why are you drinking black coffee at midnight?”

She squeezed his hand in hers and said, “Well, I like my coffee like I like my men. Late at night, and a little depressed.”