And Monday morning, three weeks later, somebody knocked on my door with an offer, and it was Nadine Kozel standing on my step in her late husband’s rain jacket with a manila envelope under one arm and a thermos in her other hand, because Nadine is a fisherman’s widow and believes seven o’clock is the middle of the day.
Here is what Chelsea never saw coming, and I want to be honest, nobody planned it. There was no boycott. That is the part her investment group could not process afterward, because a boycott would have been something they could answer.
The fishermen simply stopped turning in at five, on account of the door being locked until six-thirty now. Chelsea did not believe in five. The Boeing early shift went over to the Chevron with the good thermoses and never came back. Big Mike sat in the lot the first Monday with his engine running, and the second Monday he did not sit in the lot.
Nineteen years of opening at five is not a vibe. It is eighty men who arrange an entire morning around one lit window on a dark corner, and when the window goes dark they rearrange, and they do not rearrange back.
Receipts, I heard later, fell better than half in fourteen days. That showed up in numbers even the investment group could read.
Nadine owns the building. She has owned that block since 1981 and she leases the corner unit to them, and she had come to tell me that the narrow storefront two doors down, Kozel Shoe Repair until 1996 and a storage room ever since, had a mop sink, a hood, and my name on a lease if I wanted it. Fourteen hundred a month, five years, and one clause she had typed herself with two fingers: the rent does not go up so long as the lights come on before six.
I had exactly one asset in this world and it was in my tote bag. A spiral notebook, the fourth one, running back to 2011. Eighty-some names in my own handwriting with what each man drinks, what he switched to after his bypass, which ones take it black through Lent, which one asks about your knee before he orders. Delia started the first notebook in 1974 and left it to me along with the grouphead. It is not a customer list. The investment group has a customer list, and it is a spreadsheet of card numbers. Mine has Bill Hovda’s daughter’s name written in the margin, because he will ask you if you asked.
Inside the back cover of Delia’s original, in slanted pencil that has gone silver with age: The coffee is not the product, honey. The coffee is the excuse people need to come sit near somebody.
We opened on a Tuesday in October at five sharp. Big Mike came through the door at 5:04 and stood there with his hat in his hands until I slid his usual across, and then he went and sat by the window like nineteen years had never been interrupted.
Chelsea came in the second week of December. Her group had let her go in November, which I had heard and had not enjoyed hearing. She stood in the doorway like the floor might be wired.
I poured her a cup and told her the grouphead likes to be talked to. She works Thursdays now, and she opens.