Jennifer doesn't bring a clipboard.

That's how I know something's wrong. Jennifer always has a clipboard, or a notebook, or at the very least a phone with seventeen open tabs of ideas she wants to "run by me real quick." Jennifer arrives with plans. Jennifer arrives with energy. Jennifer arrives with the particular enthusiasm of someone who has never met a situation she couldn't improve with organization and positive thinking.

Today Jennifer arrives with nothing. Just herself. Just the bell ringing at 3:47 PM on a Thursday, and her walking through my door like she's not entirely sure why she's here.

"Hey," she says.

"Hey."

She looks at the menu board like she's never seen it before. Like she didn't help me paint it. Like she hasn't ordered the same vanilla latte approximately two hundred times since I opened.

"Can I get a..." She trails off. Stares at the board. "A latte. Just. Regular."

No vanilla. No modifications. No "extra hot but not too hot, you know what I mean."

I make the latte. My hands know what to do even when my brain is busy cataloging all the ways Jennifer looks wrong right now—the slump in her shoulders, the way she's not making eye contact, the absence of the phrase "So I was thinking" which usually appears within thirty seconds of her walking through any door I'm behind.

"Three fifty," I say, and then, "On the house," because she's already reaching for her wallet and I can't watch her dig for exact change right now.

"Rena, you don't have to—"

"House rules."

She almost smiles. Almost. Takes the latte. Sits at the counter instead of her usual table by the window, which is another wrong thing, another sign that the Jennifer in front of me is not operating according to normal Jennifer parameters.

I wipe down the espresso machine. Check the pastry case. Do all the things I do when I'm pretending not to watch someone fall apart in slow motion.

Four minutes. That's how long she sits there, both hands wrapped around the mug, not drinking, before she says anything.

"Do you ever feel like you're too much?"

The question lands in my chest like a punch I wasn't braced for. "What?"

"Too much. Too loud. Too—" She waves a hand vaguely. "Too enthusiastic. Too helpful. Too... Jennifer."

I set down the rag. "What happened?"

"Nothing."

"Jennifer."

She takes a breath. Lets it out. Still doesn't look at me.

"There was a customer today. At work. She was having a bad day, and I was trying to help, you know? Trying to make her drink right, trying to cheer her up, and she just—" Jennifer stops. Swallows. "She said I was exhausting. That she just wanted her coffee, not a—a performance. That some people don't want to be cheered up by a stranger who won't stop talking."

I don't say anything. I'm not sure what to say. The urge to fix it is enormous—to tell her the customer was wrong, to list all the ways Jennifer's enthusiasm has saved me, to info-dump reassurance until she feels better.

But that's not what she needs right now. I know that because I know what it feels like to have someone try to fix you when you just need them to sit with you.

So I pour myself a cup of the cold drip coffee I've been ignoring for two hours. I come around the counter—knocking my hip on the corner, because of course I do, because even emotional moments require a sacrifice to the clumsiness gods—and I sit on the stool next to her.

We sit there.

The shop is quiet. Patricia left an hour ago. Walter won't come until Tuesday. The afternoon light is doing that golden thing through the front window, and somewhere outside a car drives past, and Jennifer is crying now, quietly, in the way of someone who didn't want to cry but couldn't hold it anymore.

"She wasn't wrong," Jennifer whispers. "I am a lot. I know I'm a lot. I just thought—I thought if I was helpful enough, if I was positive enough, people would—"

"Would what?"

"Would want me around."

I don't have a verse for this. I don't have a perfect thing to say. All I have is the truth, which is messier than a verse, which doesn't fit on a bulletin board.

"I want you around," I say. "Not because you're helpful. Not because you're positive. Because you're Jennifer. Because you showed up at my Starbucks and invited me to church seven times even when I kept saying no. Because you brought pizza when I was painting and didn't make fun of me when I got it in my hair. Because—"

I stop. Jennifer is looking at me now, really looking, tears still on her face but something else there too.

"Because you're my best friend," I finish. "And I need you to be a lot. I need all of it. Even when it's inconvenient. Especially when it's inconvenient."

She laughs. It's wet and shaky and sounds like relief.

"I got paint in your hair?"

"So much paint. You said it looked 'artistic.'"

"It did look artistic."

"It looked like a bird attacked me, Jennifer."

She laughs again, realer this time, and I laugh too, and somehow we're both laughing and she's still crying a little and I knock over the sugar caddy reaching for a napkin because apparently today's theme is sugar-related disasters.

She helps me clean it up. We don't talk about anything important. She finishes her latte—actually drinks it, all of it—and when she leaves an hour later, she hugs me at the door.

"Thank you," she says. "For not trying to fix it."

"I wanted to."

"I know." She squeezes tighter. "That's why it mattered that you didn't."

The bell rings. She's gone. I'm standing in my shop with sugar on my shoes and the particular fullness that comes from being needed by someone who's usually the one doing the needing.

I didn't fix anything today.

Maybe that was the whole point.