The thing about a problem you can't name is that it follows you around the shop all morning like a dog that isn't yours, and you can't make coffee with a dog underfoot, metaphorically speaking, although I have also literally made coffee with a dog underfoot — Brittany's corgi mix, the one with the fourteen-hundred-dollar teeth — and let me tell you, the metaphor holds up better than the floor did.

By the time I'd done Walter's drip and Lou's quarter-Tuesday black and survived the 7:15 crush — which is when the church-run crowd and the early walkers and the man who only wants hot water for his own teabag[^1] all arrive in a single weather system — I had a feeling lodged under my sternum that I'd been ignoring for weeks, and it had nothing to do with the espresso machine, which was for once behaving. It had to do with the regulars. Something about the way Walter's whole face does a small reset every morning when he sees me reach for the drip, like he's surprised, like he's pleased to be surprised, and how I'd started, lately, to feel that surprise as a tiny daily failure I couldn't explain — as though being expected was a thing I owed people and kept almost giving them and never quite did.

I went and sat on the floor in front of the deep freeze for four minutes, which is my version of a chapel, and then I did something I have done approximately never. I closed the shop at two. Flipped the sign. Got in my car. And drove the twenty minutes to Jennifer's, because the only thing worse than a problem you can't name is being alone in your apartment with it at nine p.m., and because Jennifer — and this is the part that took me a year to understand — is correct about people in a way that has nothing to do with whether she's correct about anything else.

Here is what I expected: a clipboard. A plan. Sub-bullets with sub-bullets, color-coded, possibly laminated, definitely accompanied by the sentence "Okay so I made a little system." This is the Jennifer I have braced against since the day she helped me write a business plan with holes you could drive a delivery van through.[^2]

Here is what I got: Jennifer in an apartment I'd somehow never been inside, on her knees on a spread-out garbage bag, elbow-deep in potting soil, surrounded by what I can only describe as a plant emergency. She lives alone, it turns out, in a one-bedroom that smells like a candle called something like "Linen Embrace," and she had a pothos the size of a small child half-wrenched out of its pot when she opened the door, dirt to the wrist, blonde highlights escaping their clip, and she said, "Oh thank GOD, hold this," and handed me the plant.

I held the plant.

"It's root-bound," she said, the way other people say it's terminal. "Look at it. It's been in this pot for two years and the roots have just — they've gone in circles. Around and around. There's no room left so they just keep wrapping around themselves." She was loosening them with her thumbs, gently, this woman I have watched be wrong about flat whites with total confidence, and she was not wrong about this at all. "You can't just put it in dirt. You have to actually break the shape a little or it'll keep growing like it's still in the small pot even when it's not. Plants are dumb like that. They remember the old container."

And I stood there holding a pothos, and I did not say anything, because something had gone very quiet in my chest.

I told her about the regulars while she repotted — Walter's reset face, the church crush, the feeling of owing people something I kept not delivering — and I expected her to reach for a notebook, and she didn't. She just kept working soil around roots and listening in that scattered half-attention way that I would have found insulting from anyone who wasn't actually absorbing every word, and then she said, not looking up, "You think you're supposed to surprise them. Make it special every time. Fresh. Like if you ever just had it ready you'd be phoning it in." I said yes, that, exactly that, how did she — and she shrugged, patting down the new soil, and said the thing.

"Rena. Nobody wants to be a surprise every day. That's exhausting for everybody. People want to be expected. That's the whole — that's the nicest thing you can do for a person, is have their thing ready before they ask, so they walk in and they're already accounted for." She wiped her hands on her jeans. "I do it with church people. I learn the coffee order and the kid's name and the surgery their mom had, and then next time they don't have to perform being known, they just — they're known. It's not a surprise. It's better than a surprise."

I have a Master's-level understanding of coffee. I can tell you what altitude does to a Kenyan bean's acidity. Jennifer has never extracted anything in her life, and she was kneeling in potting soil telling me something true about my own shop that I'd had two years and a counter full of regulars to figure out and hadn't.

"You should pre-build the standing orders," she added, almost as an afterthought, jamming the pothos into a pot two sizes up. "Walter's drip, the four regulars, before you open. Not because you're lazy. Because they're not a surprise. They're yours."

I knocked over the watering can. I want to be clear that this was inevitable — I was in an unfamiliar kitchen holding nothing but the weight of being seen, and there was a watering can, and physics is physics. Water went across Jennifer's floor in a sheet, and I was standing in it before I registered it was happening, soaking my left sock in a stranger's apartment that was no longer a stranger's, and Jennifer looked at the flood and looked at me and started laughing, that big unembarrassed laugh, and said, "There she is," and threw me a dish towel, and I missed it, because of course I did.

We mopped it up together. She made me coffee, by which I mean she put a pod in a Keurig and pressed a button, and I drank it, and it was an affront to everything I have built my life around, and I drank all of it, because she made it for me, in her kitchen, with her dirt-stained hands, and some things are not about the coffee.

I drove home in the early-evening light with my sock still damp, past the cemetery, and let myself into the dark shop, and stood there a minute in the quiet. Then I did the thing I'd resisted for weeks. I set out Walter's mug. Lined up the four standing orders in my head, the way you'd set a table for people you're expecting — because you are. The roots had gone in circles in me too, I think. I'd been so afraid of phoning it in that I'd never let anyone be expected, and there's a kind of love that only fits in a bigger pot.

In the morning Walter came in and his drip was already pulling, and his face did the reset, the small surprised pleasure — except this time it wasn't surprise. It was the other thing. The better-than-surprise. He sat one stool over from the wobbly one and said, "You're getting the hang of this," and I didn't knock anything over for a full eleven minutes, which is, for me, basically a miracle, and which I'm choosing not to examine too closely in case examining it breaks the spell.

[^1]: He brings his own teabag. To a coffee shop. I have made my peace with this. Mostly.

[^2]: In my defense, I didn't see the holes either. In Jennifer's defense, she has never once pretended the plan was the point. The pizza was the point. The showing up was the point.