The Best Cup of Coffee at the Edge of the World
A story about coffee and conversations
They’d been driving for three days when they came to the small stand by the edge of the beach. An old man sat outside it in a weathered deckchair beside a sign advertising iced coffee and Italian ices.
They spilled out of their van, laughing, jostling each other, taking surf boards down. Alice went over to the old man, ordered two coffees and a bottle of water.
“You get much custom out here?” she said while he rattled about with the ice machine.
“Not much.”
“Odd place to have a stand.”
The old man shrugged.
“Not much overhead, I suppose,” she said to make conversation.
“I get by,” the old man told her. “People wash up here from time to time.”
“You ever get lonely?” she asked him.
But he was done with the coffees, and she got caught up in the dance of correct change, and he never answered her.
That night, the old man watched from his deck chair as Alice and her friends drove off into the night.
#
Three weeks later, when the old man was opening the stand for the day, he noticed a man in a suit lying face down on the beach. He went down, and roused the dazed man, and brought him back to the stand. He let the man in the suit sit in the deck chair and sip iced coffee for a while.
“I was a priest once,” the man said finally. “But I lost my faith. Then I was a store manager. And then I drove a taxi for a while.”
“What do you do now?” the old man asked.
“I took a desk job, but I don’t understand it,” the man said. He sipped his coffee. “I don’t know how you lose your faith when you don’t believe in anything,” he said, but I think I’ve done that.”
The old man thought about that. “Maybe it means you started to believe in something again,” he said finally, straightening the napkins on the stand.
The man in the suit looked thoughtful at that, and sipped his coffee, and didn’t say anything else. An hour later he stood, and something had stiffened his spine. He smiled at the old man. “Thank you,” he said, and headed off down the road.
#
Two weeks later, the old man found a woman sitting on the beach with a vacant expression. Her summer dress was covered in sand. She didn’t want an iced coffee, but she ate the iced bun he offered her greedily.
“I just needed to get away for a little bit,” she told him as she licked her fingers. “A break, you know?” She looked around. “Or maybe you don’t,” she said, “living out here.”
The old man shrugged.
“It gets so much back home with the kids, and my husband, and work, and my parents, and cousins, and…” She shook her head.
“Do they ever say they’re grateful?” the old man asked.
The woman paused, rubbed her chin. “Yeah,” she said. “All the time, actually.”
“Well that’s something,” the old man said.
They watched the tide roll in for a while. Then the old man went back to the stand and his deckchair. When he looked back, she was gone.
#
Nearly a month, he found two teenagers on the beach. They were soaked, out of breath, and held hands tightly. He coaxed them up to the roadside, and they sat at the foot of his deckchair, refusing to let go of each other.
“Run away from something?” The old man knew that was a safe guess.
The girl nodded.
“That’s hard,” the old man said. “Sorry.”
The boy looked up at the apology, like he didn’t fully recognize the word, or had never heard it out loud before.
“I promise it’s not all like that out there,” the old man said. “And you have each other.”
He fed them, and gave them something to drink, and when they finally walked away down the road, they were still holding hands.
#
Three days later, the old man was startled to see a familiar face at his stand.
“I just couldn’t stop thinking about that iced coffee,” Alice told him. “You really do make it nice.”
“Practice,” he said, and started fixing her a cup.
“How long you been out here?” she asked.
He shrugged, but she waited. “Maybe thirty years,” the man said, putting her coffee down on the counter.
She nodded and got herself a paper straw. “You never did answer me before,” she said.
He cocked an eyebrow.
“You ever get lonely out here?”
He didn’t answer straight away, but instead, turned and made a drink. When he was done, he went a stood out beside the road with her, and sipped it.
“When I came out here,” he said eventually, “it was me and my wife. She was the one who wanted to have this stand. Reminded her of something she’d seen back when she was a kid.”
“Oh,” Alice said. “And she…?”
“Cancer,” the man said, and there was a whole history in that one word.
“And you stayed here?”
“I know this place,” the old man said. “It’s always the same.” He finished his coffee. “I don’t get hurt.”
Alice thought about that. She took their two empty coffee cups and put them in the trash.
“When I go surfing,” Alice she said when she came back, “there’s the chance I’ll wipe out, and get hurt. But there’s also the chance I’ll ride right on the crest of my joy.” She put a hand on his arm. “I think that’s worth it.”
He didn’t reply to that, just went into his stand. Alice sat in the deckchair. They waited for customers. None came. The sky grew dark.
“Time for me to head back,” Alice said finally.
The old man wiped the counter.
“Well,” she said. “You coming?”
And when Alice started heading back to the world, she wasn’t alone.
Thank you for reading Something’s a Little Off. If you’re interested in sampling a few other stories, and reading an excerpt of my upcoming novella, why not check out the sampler linked to here?