‘It will be excellent visibility, I believe, for anyone involved,’ Antonio said.
There he had a point.
I’d attended my first Java Ho last year, when my partners and I began toying with the idea of opening a coffeehouse. Intent on learning the trade and networking, I’d visited all the booths, OD’d on free lattes and smoothies and completely ignored the hoots and hollers coming from the barista competition in the next hall.
Ignored, that is, until the last day, when I wandered into the finals and promptly got hooked on the caffeine-hyped atmosphere. It was like the World Series, except with frothing wands instead of bats.
While making specialty coffee drinks might seem simple – throw some ground beans in a filter, push a button, steam some milk – it really can be an art in the right hands. Mine, sadly, are the wrong ones.
A good espresso starts with the proper grind: not too fine and not too coarse. Then just the right amount of pressure applied when tamping, or pressing down the espresso. And a properly timed shot, with the hot water passing through the fine grounds at exactly the right pace and temperature.
Then there was Antonio’s department: the dairy products. Whole milk, skim or two-percent. Cream, half and half, soymilk, even eggnog for the holidays. All of them are steamed to varying degrees of both heat and frothiness and combined with espresso to make cappuccinos, lattes and other specialty drinks.
The froth itself is important, too. Good froth is almost silky and creative baristas use it and the crema – that’s the brown foam that comes from brewing espresso – to make intricate, two-tone ‘latte art’ on top of the drinks.
The key word, of course, being creative. The best I’d ever been able to summon up was something that looked like a half-baked version of Princess Leia’s hologram in the first Star Wars movie. Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi . . .
‘It’s really nice of you to donate, Antonio,’ Caron was saying, having abandoned the cone grinder to watch him heft six gallons of skim milk, four of whole, and six quarts of half and half into our refrigerator.
‘There is nothing nice about it,’ The Milkman said, straightening up and flashing Caron a smile. ‘Specialty coffee is of importance to the dairy industry.’
Caron giggled, the trollop.
As Antonio backed into the hall, I dodged out of the way before he could flatten me against the opposite wall. Guys as ripped as Antonio should come equipped with back-up beepers and warning lights.
‘Can you imagine how much milk a national chain such as Starbucks purchases each year?’ Antonio continued.
I couldn’t, but it had to be significant. Uncommon Grounds used a lot of milk and we sure weren’t Starbucks, or even LaRoche’s HotWired. What Antonio had just loaded into our refrigerator would last us three or four days. We didn’t have enough room to stock a full week’s supply, so The Milkman delivered on Tuesdays and again Fridays.
‘So, what you’re saying,’ Caron said, wrinkling her pert little nose at Antonio, while simultaneously quirking an eyebrow at me, ‘is that you value the exposure.’
The wrinkling-nose/quirking-eyebrow thing seemed physically impossible to me, but then Caron could also touch her nose with her tongue. Eat crackers and whistle. Wiggle her ears. She was a facial Harry Houdini.
‘The Java Ho attendees might be potential customers for Antonio,’ I pointed out to Caron, ‘but they’re our competitors. Other coffeehouse owners. Why do we need exposure to them?’
‘Two thousand coffeehouse owners.’ Antonio was obviously delighted at the thought. ‘To know who is who and to work into the . . . how they say it? Rotation of suppliers? Three years to learn this. It will be worth it, though, if I have one more chain like HotWired as my customer.’
‘Marvin LaRoche buys milk from you?’ I asked. Five years ago, LaRoche had been a barista at Janalee’s Place, a small coffeehouse on the northern fringe of Brookhills. Since LaRoche and Janalee had married, the operation had grown to twenty stores.
In fact, the newest HotWired had just opened a bare half-mile from Uncommon Grounds. Of all the joe joints in all the towns, in all the world . . .
‘He does,’ Antonio was saying. ‘And the larger HotWired grows, the more . . .’ He stopped, catching sight of the look on my face.
Caron jumped in. ‘Would you like a latte or cappuccino to take along, Antonio?’
‘I cannot drink lattes or cappuccinos – thank you.’
‘No? Why?’ Caron seemed determined to move the subject off HotWired and on to anything else, including Antonio’s beverage of choice, apparently.
The Milkman put his hand on his rock-hard abs. Or so I imagined them to be. ‘I do not drink the dairy.’
‘Wait a second,’ I said, being drawn in against my will. ‘The Milkman doesn’t drink milk?’
Antonio got an embarrassed grin on his face. ‘It gives me the stomach ache.’
This was just too good.
Leave it to Caron to ruin it for me. ‘I understand L’Café is lending the competition three new espresso machines,’ she said, back on the attack. ‘Everyone sees the potential, Maggy. Even Sarah. She’s been coordinating the exhibit hall.’
Sarah Kingston was Brookhills’ top real estate agent, and about as unBrookhillian as one could get. She wore baggy jackets on her lean frame, sensible shoes on her oversized feet, and a Virginia Slims Menthol between her tobacco-stained fingers.
In other words, Sarah chain-smoked. Except in her own house, since she was now the guardian of two children. Sarah was considerate of their lungs, but hers – and the rest of ours – didn’t seem to matter very much.
While Caron might be both my business partner and my oldest friend, Sarah was probably my closest. Caron, despite being a terrible flirt, had that happy-marriage vibe going with her husband, Bernie. While I loved both Caron and Bernie, these days they made me want to hurl – as my son Eric would say.
Yeah, I know. Sour grapes. Or, in my case, crushed, fermented and bottled. The only relationship in my life right now was with red wine. Red didn’t mind if I got home at eight thirty or nine at night and cried over a juicy old movie until I fell asleep on the couch. While wine might be impudent, it was seldom snarky or demanding. A little spice, a fair amount of oak and the best of them get better with age. What more could a woman want from a beau?
Except maybe to get corked occasionally.
I’d been hoping for a more . . . animate lover when I’d met Brookhills County Sheriff Jake Pavlik. Currently, though, we were facing date-us interruptus, a condition brought on by fifteen-hour days on my part and an unpredictable schedule on Pavlik’s. The fact that I still call him by his last name is an indication of the level of intimacy we’ve achieved.
Which was yet another reason I couldn’t, wouldn’t devote time to Java Ho. Any free moment I had, I planned to devote to becoming a ho myself.
Antonio slipped out the backdoor with a ‘ciao’ as the bell on the front chimed. Anxious to avoid further nagging from Caron, I fled out into the store to greet the customer, who apparently was hacking up a lung.
I had the cough pegged before I rounded the corner. ‘Sarah, you sound awful.’ I waved at the cigarette in her hand. ‘And put that thing away. You know you can’t smoke in here.’
Uncharacteristically, Sarah did exactly what I said. Mid-drag, she took the cigarette out of her mouth and plopped it in her jacket pocket.
‘Are you crazy?’ I tried to pat her pocket down.
Sarah laughed, which was even more frightening than the spontaneous human combustion I feared. My friend has huge teeth, but not the big ‘look-at-me’ choppers of actresses and actors. Unless the actor was Mr Ed.
‘Gotcha,’ she said, pulling the cigarette out and waving it under my nose.
I sniffed. ‘It’s not lighted. But I could have sworn you were inhaling.’
‘Who do you think I am, Bill Clinton? Of course, I inhaled.’
I grabbed the cigarette. ‘Hey, this isn’t a . . .’ I stopped as a thought struck me. ‘This is one of those nicotine inhalers, isn’t it? Are you quitting?’ I didn’t add the word ‘again’. It seemed petty. God forbid I should be petty.
‘Again?’ Caron called from the back.
Ahh. All the satisfaction with none of the guilt.
‘Yup.’ Sarah pulled a chair away from one of the café tables and turned it around to straddle it. ‘But this baby is going to do the trick.’
I examined the white plastic cylinder. ‘So, how does it work?’ I asked. ‘Is it different from the nicotine patch or the gum?’
Sarah took it from me. ‘This end of the puffer is really a nicotine cartridge. I inhale nicotine, but much less than I would smoking a cigarette.’
‘And “less” is enough to keep you sane?’ I was trying not to sound skeptical, but I’d already seen Sarah through four hours of cold turkey, three days of the patch, two weeks of the gum and one really embarrassing hour of hypnotic suggestion.
She took a drag. ‘Are you kidding? They want me to use sixteen cartridges a day to start out and each cartridge lasts twenty minutes. That’s over five hours of puffing, which pretty much gives me all the oral fix that I need.’ She bared her teeth and snickered.
There was some sense to what she was saying, though.
I’d smoked for a short time in my early twenties and, when I’d quit, I’d missed the ‘act’ of smoking even more than those tasty toxic chemicals. Smoking gives you something to do when your dinner date stands you up, or arrives half an hour late, or picks his nose. Plus, if worst came to worst, you could set him on fire.
Of course, that was back in the days when you could smoke in restaurants. What did people do now to kill time and the occasional bad date?
Cellphones and text-messaging, naturally – at least for the first. The addictions of a new generation. But I mentally digress.
‘. . . convention center is non-smoking, so I figure this should get me through Java Ho,’ Sarah was saying.
I tried to regain the ground I’d lost. Or missed. ‘So you really are running the exhibit hall?’
Caron’s voice: ‘I told you.’
I turned to Sarah. ‘But why take on such a huge headache? The exhibit hall at a coffee convention has to have hundreds of suppliers, each one of them vying for the best space.’
‘So? Let them vie.’ Sarah took a drag and blew make-believe smoke up to the ceiling. ‘Inside or outside, it’s still real estate.’
‘Location, location, location,’ Caron offered from the back.
Shaddup, shaddup, shaddup.
‘Exactly.’ Sarah laughed. ‘Except in this case, I can tell them where to go.’
‘So you vent your nicotine rage on the Java Ho vendors, instead of your clients.’ Now that made sense, knowing Sarah.
‘If I scream obscenities at a bunch of coffee roasters and frappa-whatever-makers, it doesn’t cost me thousands in commissions,’ Sarah agreed. ‘Besides, I owe LaRoche. He’s bought a lot of property through me.’
Didn’t I know it. ‘Like the spot where the new HotWired is located?’
‘We’ve been through this, Maggy. Business is business.’ Sarah shrugged and took a deep drag, turning a little purple in the process. ‘Another real estate agent comes in here, are you telling me you won’t sell him coffee?’
‘That’s different and you know it.’
Sarah puffed again. ‘You get paid when you sell coffee. I get paid when I sell property. You tell me what’s different.’
‘Because I’m not . . .’ I started, then clamped my mouth closed. Sarah’s biggest competition, Rasmussen Realty, was one of our best corporate clients. We regularly supplied coffee for their meetings and ‘Welcome Home’ gift baskets for their clients when they moved into their new houses. Rasmussen brokers were in and out of Uncommon Grounds on a daily basis. I guess one could argue that we were fueling them to outsell Sarah.
If one were an idiot.
Caron stuck her head around the corner. ‘Sarah, can I make you the usual?’
Sarah nodded. We both kept our mouths shut as my partner positioned the basket of our long-handled porta-filter under the cone grinder. She pulled the lever twice, releasing a measured amount of espresso into the filter basket for Sarah’s latte.
‘You could have warned us at least,’ I muttered, not taking my eyes off Caron.
‘I may not be a lawyer, or a doctor, or a priest,’ Sarah said, ‘but I do have to maintain confidentiality. I couldn’t say anything until the sale of the property to LaRoche was made public. By him.’ She took a deep drag on her nicotine inhaler. Then another.
Caron had steamed the skim milk and set aside the pitcher. Now she twisted the porta-filter on to the espresso machine and pushed a button.
Yet another drag from Sarah. She was going to asphyxiate herself.
I sighed. ‘OK, so you couldn’t tell me, what with the Real Estate Brokers’ Code of Ethics and all.’ Probably right there on the shelf next to Robert’s Rules of Used Car Salesmanship.
I hesitated. ‘But how long did you know—’
‘Lay off, Thorsen,’ Sarah snarled. ‘Do you want to do this convention or not? It’ll be fun. Shit or get off the commode.’
Well, she sure was making it sound like fun.
The espresso started to gurgle down through the filter into the miniature metal pitcher Caron had positioned below it and I glanced up at the clock to time the shot. Ten seconds. Too fast.
Before Caron could pour it into Sarah’s mug, I reached over and dumped the espresso down the drain. Quality control.
‘Short shot,’ I snapped. ‘You can’t serve that.’
OK, so I was ornery. Caron, trying to coerce me into running LaRoche’s barista competition. Antonio, cozying up to LaRoche and his HotWired stores. And now Sarah, not only aiding the man’s expansion of his evil coffee empire, but running Java Ho’s exhibit hall. Was that a giant sucking-up noise I heard?
Instead of getting angry at my shot interference, Caron smiled sweetly at me. ‘See? You’re a natural espresso Nazi, no matter what you think. You have to run the barista competition.’
‘I can’t.’ Time to back-peddle. ‘You need me here.’
Sarah grinned. ‘Caron can handle it, Maggy. And Courtney and Sam will help.’
Courtney and Sam were Sarah’s teenage charges. I was being manipulated by a master, I realized. By two masters. What I didn’t know was why.