“Red Eye, then?” Erica started, gently pumping the milk up and down the steam spout. This way of a customer ordering a Red Eye, or Double Espresso, was new to Erica. She decided to roll with it. Plus it would give her an opportunity to offer a pairing suggestion. Before she could add that it went exceptionally well with an Espresso Brownie, the woman seemed to inflate with fury. She threw back one arm, placed it on her hip, and with her other arm braced herself against the counter. She looked like a lawyer honing in on a hostile witness. Her stance revealed a six-month pregnant belly. Erica pushed the tin of milk too deep into the spout. Immediately, the steam shrieked against the bottom of the tin. She pulled it out quickly and grabbed a wet hand towel and wrapped the steam spout to prevent the burned milk from drying out on it. She kept her hand there, feeling the heat faintly through the layers of moist fabric.
She could be a lawyer, Erica thought, the store is under multiple levels of lawyers here at Osgoode and University Court Of Appeals. She felt thankful for the shield of the barista station and the number of items within reach that could be self-defense weapons: steam spout, thermometer spike, even the coffee grinder – if Erica could fit her in.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” The woman hissed, as the espresso drink line snaked out longer with each new person that shuffled over from the cash register. Erica dumped the burned milk – still good by her personal standards – into a sink and ran the tap over it to soak.
“I’m sorry.” Erica said, over the hiss of new milk in a new tin frothing to exactly 110 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Tell that to my baby. I specifically asked for decaf yesterday,” the woman snapped, cupping her hand over her taut belly. She was smooth and sharp and clean, like an expensive glossy black and white photo. Her hair was a creamy blond, professionally blown out, with the edges as straight as razors. Not a speck of lint in sight. “Do you have any idea the kind of world of pain, the shit, you are in if anything happens to –” her voice sagged, “my baby?”
“I’m sorry,” she said again, then remembered a good line, “But I have no recollection.”
“I do. Give me the manager.”
The counter space beside the Barista! station was getting cluttered with all the empty cups that the runners had been coding and labeling with customers’ names. The other Barista! Mark’s face was like that of a demon – one half murder for Erica and one half sweetness for the customers for whom he’d soon have to read and re-read and re-call out whatever would already be getting cold by the time it was claimed.
Erica stepped back from the counter to head to the back of the store. The woman mirrored her action on the other side, crossing her arms above her belly as a signal that Erica ain’t seen nothing yet. The rigidity of body, which Erica the wench had taught herself to protect her body while carrying trays of food and pitchers at Medieval ShowTimes, came in handy. Stiff as a statue, Erica marched to the back and disappeared behind the swinging doors.
“What the fuck is her problem, a pregnant woman can have little coffee is no problem. What exactly did she order yesterday?” Cheung, the store manager, said. It was the worst time of day to come to him with stuff. He was leaning back in his chair with his feet up on the desk, in the middle of his lunch and status updates. He gnawed messily at the last bites of a Spicy Tuna Wrap.
“I can’t recollect,” Erica said. She felt half hot and half cold from the sanitizer on her right and the fridge on her left. The brushed steel fridge door reminded her of a grimy mirror in a certain rest stop toilet.
I hadn’t planned on relieving myself. I was never even going to get off the bus. I was going to hold it in, just hold it in, until I reached the clinic. But the bus made a rest stop, and the other passengers got out, some of them to just walk circles in the equatorial red dust as if they were obligated, and others to buy snacks, and others to relieve themselves. I joined the last group, thinking that perhaps I could use the time to throw up since I hadn’t thrown up since that morning, which was a small mercy.
People never trust the rest stop toilets, so I had found it empty as expected, after the few who did dare venture in had finished and left. When I left the stall, having failed to vomit, a teenage girl walked in. She was doubly alive for the baby she straddled on her hip. She said she really needed to go, bad bad, even though she knew better than to use a rest stop toilet. And since she saw me come in she thought I would help her by holding the baby for a minute. She didn’t wait for my answer, she shoved the baby into my arms, facing it toward her, and backed into a stained stall, never breaking eye contact with the baby, chorusing, “Mummy’s here, mummy’s right here baby.” She half-closed the door for my benefit.
The baby became intensely focused on listening to the sounds of its mother coming through the half-closed door. It was poised to plunge into a tantrum at any break in her singsong trickle, so I didn’t move a centimeter. I stood facing the stall door, listening to her sing and pee nonstop.
The baby was slipping, so I shifted it higher up on my chest. In the cloudy full-length mirror beside us, I saw the two of us in profile. Black Madonna and Unwanted Child: halfway away from home, to an end unknown. The baby sensed my reflected gaze. Keeping its ears focused on the mother’s song, it sent its eyes roving in search of the power that held it afloat. Eventually, it found me in the mirror. I tried to hold its gaze, but lost. I turned my head and stared forward at the stall door, and then stole another sideways glance at the mirror. The child was still giving me its reassurance. I smiled at it, but it wasn’t fooled, continuing to look right into me, at its unborn playmate inside of me. I dropped the smile and turned my attention back to the stall door and the two kinds of music coming from behind it. We stayed like that, chest to back, breathing in sync, until the mother flushed and swung the door open and thanked me and took her baby back and dashed out – still singing, all in one fluid sequence of movement.
Without washing her hands. I noted that. The thought doubled me over into a dry, empty heave. I heard the bus start outside. The driver revved the engine and honked the horn. I ran out into the night, startling the fireflies, and boarded the bus as the last and therefore universally disliked person.
