or just Mr. Chicken Soup for the Coffee Drinker’s Soul?”
“Hey, Heathen,” he turned on her, and his voice got suddenly much sharper than she’d ever heard it. “Thanks for dropping in from your other career, but right now, I’ve only got this one thing to do. And I will not be continually crapped on just for amusing myself in a menial job, okay?”
That took Heathen so much by surprise that she actually found herself going out of her way to be nicer to him for the rest of the shift. “Nicer” meaning that she didn’t deliberately hassle him about anything, or hang back and give him all the crap tasks, like cleaning the bathroom, or slide out for more than one cigarette break an hour. And “rest of the shift” being only about another two hours, anyway. Because Heathen liked to think she was a reasonable, considerate person after all, and not one simply motivated by the pointed reference to her skiing, sitting there like a veiled threat not to swap or take shifts for her in the future. No, it certainly wasn’t that.
Four
Two days later, in the middle of the morning rush, Dag, on cash, nudged Heathen, who was plating pastries. He indicated a woman in the lineup. “I’ll bet she doesn’t remember me,” he said. “This’ll be fun.” On her turn, he took her order, then said, “Wait a sec. I’ve got your favourite cup set aside.” Both Heathen and the woman goggled as he made a show of leaving the cash to retrieve it from the high shelf before passing it on to Mohammed at the bar.
By the time Mohammed handed it over, full, the customer was grinning like a kid, taking her special cup, with her coworkers looking on in amazement.
Within a week, Heathen was once again utterly irritated and reluctantly impressed at the same time. The whole damn group was eating out of his hand, and now he had a shelf of five identical “favourite” BlackArts cups put aside for the lot of them. The travel mugs were pushed to the dusty back recesses of the shelf. Dag, for his part, insisted to Heathen and the customers that he knew which of the clone cups “belonged” to each of the women and never, ever mixed them up. He too, seemed pretty impressed with what had escalated out of one day’s idle amusement.
Heathen, who was out for a few days training and competing, heard the rest from other baristas who were on with him the rest of the week. The woman, now introduced as Bonita, had some fun with him, too. At the start of the next work week, she showed up in line again. “That’s not my favourite cup,” she said when Dag passed over her latte. It was “no, no, no,” as Dag hastily cycled through the five special cups. “This is my favourite,” she said and pulled a yellow stoneware mug out of her purse.
“Right on!” Dag said, poured her latte into it and added an extra dollop of foam for putting one over on him.
So there was one yellow mug on the shelf along with the identical white BlackArts cups. Heathen didn’t have a shift until the end of the week, by which time the rest of the bunch had brought their own mugs in, and there was this shelf, now, of people’s own favourite mugs to use when they came to BlackArts, and the women were chorusing, “Hi, Dag!” at the first sight of him.
“Jesus, Dag,” Heathen said without a trace of irony and with more than a hint of awe, the first time she saw it, “you’ve become a god to them.”
• • •
Seriously.
• • •
It was one of the rare occasions when all the baristas were there at once: Tim, Maria, KateLynn, Derek, Ashley, Ginette and Dag. Heathen bounded in, late for Mohammed’s staff meeting. “Check it out!” she crowed. “I’m famous!” She dropped a magazine into the middle of the table on which Mohammed had spread the new product cards, nearly sending them to the floor. She picked it up again and showed it around.
From behind the counter, Mohammed caught the title, Canadian Freestyler, a glossy magazine. “Aw, shit,” he heard quietly behind him. He looked over his shoulder. Dag turned quickly back to the beans he was grinding from the new Rwandan blend the staff were all here to try.
Mohammed turned back to Heathen’s wonderful news. “That’s excellent, Heather!” He could never call her Heathen like the others. He would not label her an infidel, as if it were a joke. He came around and gathered with the others. “I’m in the up-and-comer profiles,” she said. She hadn’t even stopped to take off her jacket. “Look!” She leafed through, murmuring the page number, “thirty-two, thirty-two”, which she had obviously memorized. “Here I am!”
Mohammed was impressed. There she was, holding herself up. He crowded in closer to see. “It’s a regular feature,” Heathen said. “They do a profile every month on four hot prospects.” Indeed, there was a full page for each skier, with a big action photo and one much smaller head shot inset. About two paragraphs of information. Name, age, hometown, how long she’d been at it, future plans, best trick, favourite tunes and websites, craziest day on the slopes, etc.
“This is wonderful,” he said. The other baristas were offering up similar awe and peppering her with questions. Mohammed was as pleased and proud as if it had been his own accomplishment. He liked to see Heathen do well. He went back behind the bar to get some plates. The occasion deserved biscotti to go with the coffee. “Did you see it, Dag?” Mohammed asked.
They’d been gawking at the magazine so long, the coffee was already brewed, and Dag had started to pour cups for everybody. He hadn’t been around the table with the others. “I’ll let those guys get a closer look first,” Dag said. “I can see it from here.”
“You can?” Mohammed said. Heathen was holding it up now. Well, maybe. Even ten feet away, looking at a three-inch airborne figure against a blue sky, one could make out Heathen’s neon orange helmet in the photo. Pointing down, of course, having been caught in mid-trick.
Dag and Mohammed loaded up a tray and brought the coffee and biscotti to the table. Heathen looked up at them. “See, Dag!”
“That’s real cool, Heathen,” Dag said. “Way to go.” He sounded less than completely enthusiastic.
She bubbled over with the details. “Their guy only said it might run, not that it would. I nearly forgot about it till they sent me a copy. I’ve got about ten more in the car. What do you guys think of that picture? Do I look dumb?” Everyone jumped in to reassure her that no, she did not.
Except Dag. He broke in with something smart-alecky. “Heathen,” he said over the chorus of oohing, “of course you look dumb. You’re wearing your ASS-hat.”
“I meant the inset photo, goofus,” she said and swatted him with the magazine. She was clearly in too fine a mood to get pissed at being teased.
Dag took the magazine and looked at it quickly. “That inset looks like a mug shot,” he said. “Did your comb fall out of your pocket when you went off the kicker?”
Heathen was a good sport and laughed at that.
“Can we take this one to put up in here?” Mohammed said. “We’ve never had a celebrity barista before.”
“You mean like on the bulletin board in the locker area?” Heathen said.
“No, I mean out here,” Mohammed waved at the main counter. “Frame it and put it on the wall.”
“Yeah!” Ginette said. “That way all the customers will see it, too! I’ll go to the photo store tomorrow and pick up one of those stand-up holders for it. I pass it on my way in.”
“You guys are too sweet,” Heathen said.