They’re reading the opening, then take turns reading the steps. As I hear the familiar words, something in me lets go. It’s a motley crew, from the very well-tended mom-type with her fancy manicure and yoga pants to a ragged girl next to me with unwashed hair who is chewing on her fingernails and doesn’t look old enough to be in the meeting. She stares at me for a long moment when I come in, and I give her a lift of my chin. “Hey.”
She turns back to the meeting. The speaker is a beanpole, and tall, with the serious, but shimmery and natural, face of an academic. Her story is one of high functioning that ended in a DUI where she blew a .34 BAC, which is pretty close to dead if you don’t know.
She finishes and people speak, including the girl next to me, who is five days sober today.
“Good job,” I say when she sits down again.
“Thanks.” There’s something so haunted about her, the circles under her eyes, the jutting of her collarbones, that I am transported to the face I saw in the mirror three days after I arrived at rehab. Scared, skinny, lost.
When the meeting ends, I give her my phone number. “Call or text if you need to talk.”
“Yeah, thanks,” she says, and stuffs it in her pocket.
“My name is Maya,” I offer.
“Sunny,” she says, looking over my shoulder toward the door.
“See ya,” I say and step aside.
A handful of women greet me, offer the slogans that seem so corny unless you need them: keep coming back; it works if you work it; easy does it.
As I leave my shoulders are looser. My head is higher. It’s like working out. Getting to the gym is sometimes hard, but it feels so good when you’ve done it.
The Brewed Bean Café is a bit off the beaten track, too far from the university to appeal to students and far enough from the tourist track to get only a few stragglers. It’s a local joint that’s established a very good reputation over the past eight years. I’ve been in only a couple of times—let’s be honest: I’d never have chosen coffee if beer were available—but the minute I walk in, that annoyance I’ve been carrying along the back of my neck drops away. It smells deeply, richly, intensely of freshly roasted coffee. Small tables line the big windows that face both toward the bluffs to the south and the ocean to the west, though there isn’t really an ocean view, at least from this level. There’s a sidewalk, then a street, and then a row of palm trees and scraggly oleander bushes.
Inside the floors are warm, worn wood, and the bar looks like it spent a few centuries in a pub, carved of more of the same shade of wood. Industrial-style cage chandeliers fitted with old-school light bulbs hang from the ceiling. At this in-between hour, there are few customers—a pair of businessmen in the corner; a woman about my age with fabulous long, shiny hair hunched over a laptop; a weary-looking man by the window who makes me think of Irrfan Khan, a Bollywood actor I love.
“Hi!” A woman in her forties, with short dark hair and a turquoise apron over her jeans and T-shirt, greets me. “What can I get you?”
“Hi. My name is Maya Beauvais. I’m here about the job?”
“Oh sure! I’m Jessica. I’m the manager—and Jacob’s wife. We’ve both known Nate since kindergarten.” She waves for me to follow her through a doorway.
“You must know my sister, too, then. Rory.”
She looks over her shoulder, startled. “You really don’t look like sisters.”
“No.”
We move through a small kitchen, which I notice with approval is fantastically clean. A girl wearing a hairnet and plastic gloves is portioning salad into what look like earth-friendly containers. “Renee, this is Maya. She’s starting on second shift this week, front of the house.”
She nods at me, and I think she might be stoned, or maybe just into the task. “Hi.”
I wave, hurrying to catch up with Jessica. She leads me up a set of old wooden stairs to a small office outside a big open room with windows looking toward the alley. Burlap bags of what I assume are coffee beans are stacked on shelves. A big metal machine that makes me think of a still dominates the room. I breathe in the heady, thick scent of coffee. “This is where you roast?”
“Yeah. It’s pretty cool. Have you ever done it?”
“No. Looks intriguing.”
“I’ll have Jacob pull you up here the next time. I don’t have the knack, but he can always use a spare pair of hands.”
“Cool.”
“Have a seat,” she says, and pulls out some paperwork from a file cabinet. “I just need you to sign a W-2.”