I drive twenty minutes to bring my father coffee beans he could buy himself, and I do it on a Tuesday because Tuesdays feel like neutral territory — not a weekend visit that means something, not a weekday evening that suggests I'm lonely. Just a Tuesday. Just beans. Just a daughter who happens to be passing through a town she has no other reason to pass through, which is a lie I've gotten comfortable telling myself because the alternative is admitting I drove here on purpose, with a bag of Brazilian medium roast on the passenger seat like some kind of caffeinated peace offering.

The bag is from Riverside. Marcus roasted it last week — a natural process Brazilian from Minas Gerais, nutty and sweet, low acid, the kind of coffee that doesn't demand anything from you. It just sits there being good. I made Dad a cup once, when he came to help with the shelving, and he held it for a long time and said, "That's not bad," which in Champion-speak is basically a standing ovation. He's never asked for it again. He wouldn't.

Because David Champion drinks whatever's on sale at the grocery store — always has, always will — and that is a crime I've decided not to prosecute because you can't fix everything at once and also he's my father and there are limits to what a daughter can say about a man's grocery store coffee without the conversation becoming about something else entirely.

I pull into the driveway at 4:15. Their house looks the same — white siding, green shutters, the porch light on even though it's still technically daylight, because David Champion has never met a porch light he didn't turn on by 3 PM. The truck is in the driveway. Linda's car is in the garage, which I know because the garage door is half-open the way it always is when she's home, like the house itself can't decide whether to let people in or keep them out.[^1]

I text him: Outside. Brought you something.

Forty-five seconds. The front door opens. He's wearing his work jacket — the brown canvas one that's been "almost worn out" for six years — and he walks to my car with the kind of deliberate pace that means he saw me pull in before I texted.

He doesn't come to the passenger side. He goes around to his truck, opens the driver's door, and looks at me through my windshield.

I grab the beans. Get out. Get in his truck. This is how we do this — not inside, not standing in the cold, but in the cab of a 2009 Ford that smells like sawdust and the ghost of every fast-food sandwich he's eaten on his lunch break since I was in middle school.

"Hey," I say.

"Hey."

He doesn't ask why I'm here. I don't explain. The truck ticks as the engine cools — he must have just gotten home — and the heater is off but the cab still holds warmth the way old trucks do, like the metal remembers.

I hand him the bag. "Brazilian. The one you like."

"You didn't have to do that."

"I know."

He takes it, and this is when I manage to — because of course I do, because I am constitutionally incapable of handing someone a bag of coffee beans without incident — catch the corner of the bag on the gearshift, which tears a small hole, which sends approximately forty beans cascading across the bench seat and onto the floorboard of his truck with a sound like very tiny, very expensive hail.

I close my eyes.

"Sorry. I'm — let me —"

But he's already picking them up. One by one. No sigh. No hurry. Just his hands — wide, calloused, patient — collecting beans from the floorboard mat like he's got all evening and this is a perfectly normal thing that happens to people.

I help. Our hands bump once. Neither of us mentions it.

"Still got most of them," he says, holding the bag closed around the tear.

"I'll bring you another one."

"This one's fine."

He sets the bag between us on the seat. Through the windshield, I can see their kitchen window. The light is on. Yellow. Warm. I can see the edge of the curtain Linda made three years ago — the ones with the small blue flowers — and I think I see movement, but I'm not sure, and I don't look long enough to find out.

Dad sees me looking. He doesn't say anything about it.

"How's the shop?" he asks.

"Good. Busy. Lou came in last week with something for me — a newspaper clipping from 1987, the woman who ran the shop before me."

"Miriam."

I look at him. "You knew her?"

"Everybody knew Miriam." He says this the way he says most things — like the fact has always existed and he's just been waiting for me to arrive at it. "Good baker. Better listener. Jack used to take me there after work sometimes."

I try to imagine my father in my shop thirty years before it was my shop, eating something Miriam Okonkwo baked, sitting at a counter that would eventually become the counter where I stand every morning pouring drinks for people whose stories I'm only beginning to learn. The thought does something to my chest that I don't have a name for.

"How's your back?" I ask, because the alternative is crying in his truck over a woman I never met, and I'd like to maintain some dignity for at least another ten minutes.

"Fine."

"Dad."

"It's fine. I'm stretching." He pauses. "Becky Coleman gave me a sheet of exercises. From the internet."

"Are you doing them?"

Another pause, longer. "Some of them look made up."

"They're not made up."

"One of them wants me to lay on the floor and hug my knees. That's not exercise. That's what you do when you've given up."

I do laugh, then, and it fogs the windshield a little, and for a second the kitchen light blurs into a smear of gold. He smiles. Not a big smile — David Champion doesn't traffic in big smiles — but the corners of his mouth move and his eyes do something warm and I think: this is enough.

Not everything. But enough.

We sit for another twenty minutes. He tells me about a project at work — something with Jack Coleman and a storage shed that isn't level and refuses to become level despite what he describes as "aggressive persuasion." I tell him about Betsy's latest mood, the valve Todd replaced, the cold brew I'm experimenting with for when the weather turns. Surface things. Easy things. The kind of conversation that sounds like nothing but feels like a rope stretched across a canyon — thin, maybe, but held at both ends.

The kitchen light stays on. The curtain doesn't move again. Or maybe it does and I've stopped watching.

"I should head back," I say, eventually, because the light is going gray-blue the way February light does when it gives up, and I have beans to prep for tomorrow and Mabel is probably standing on the cozy chair staring at the door like I've abandoned her forever, which, in cat time, I have.

"Drive safe," he says. "Roads might be slick."

"I know."

"And Rena."

I'm halfway out of the truck. I stop.

He's looking at the bag of coffee beans on the seat between where we were sitting. The torn bag, held shut by the fold of his hand, beans still scattered in places neither of us reached. He doesn't look up.

"Tuesday works," he says. "If you wanted to make it a thing."

I stand there in his driveway with the cold coming through my jacket and the porch light on and the kitchen window still glowing and I don't say anything for a moment because my throat is doing the thing it does when someone offers me something I didn't know I was asking for.

"Tuesday works," I say.

He nods. Gets out of the truck on his side. Walks back to the house with the torn bag of Brazilian beans held carefully against his chest, the way you carry something that matters.

I sit in my car for two full minutes before I start it. The heater kicks on. My cortado, in the travel mug I brought from the shop, is completely cold. I drink it anyway.

The drive home takes twenty minutes. Isaiah says something about waiting and strength being renewed, and I've always read that verse like it was about endurance — white-knuckling your way through the hard season, holding on until God shows up.

But maybe waiting looks like this. A driveway. A torn bag. A truck that holds warmth.

Showing up on a Tuesday with something someone could buy for themselves, and both of you pretending that's all it is, and both of you knowing it isn't.[^2]

I pull into my spot behind the shop. The block is quiet. Lou's closed up. Jamie's lights are off. The street lamps are doing their old-fashioned thing, glowing orange against the early dark.

Upstairs, Mabel is on the chair. She blinks at me once — slow, deliberate, the cat equivalent of you were gone for two hours and I have opinions about that.

"I know," I tell her. "I'm back."

I make myself a pour-over. Guatemalan, because it's February and I want something that tastes like chocolate and being warm and not having to explain yourself. The water hits the grounds. Steam rises. The apartment smells like coffee and old wood and the lavender thing Jennifer left here that I pretend I don't like.

Tuesday works.

I can wait.

[^1]: I've been told this is a metaphor. I've been told most things about that house are metaphors. I just thought the garage door was broken.

[^2]: Champion family emotional vocabulary, for reference: biscuit photos = I love you. Coffee beans on the seat = I miss you. "Tuesday works" = please come back.