The woman orders coffee "the way my grandmother used to make it," and I know exactly what she means before she explains.

"Weak," she says, almost apologetically. "With too much sugar. I know that's not how you're supposed to drink it, but—"

"It's how she made it," I say. "So that's how it tastes right."

She looks at me like I've said something profound instead of something obvious, and I make her the coffee—watered down, three sugars, a crime against everything I believe about extraction and flavor profiles—and she takes it to the student table and I watch her drink it with her eyes closed.

And suddenly I'm not here anymore.

I'm eleven years old, and I'm sitting at my grandmother's kitchen table, and the coffee is terrible.

I know it's terrible even then, even before I've studied origins and roasts and the precise temperature at which water should meet grounds. I know it because I've been reading Dad's coffee books since I was nine—the ones he keeps in his workshop, the ones Mother doesn't know about because she thinks coffee is a worldly indulgence and Dad drinks his in the car on the way to work like a secret.[^1]

Grandmother's coffee is weak and pale and sweet enough to make my teeth ache. She drinks it from a chipped mug with faded roses, and she makes me a cup too even though Mother would have a fit if she knew, and we sit at her kitchen table in the yellow morning light while something bakes in the oven.

"You ask too many questions," Grandmother says.

I freeze. I've heard this before—from Mother, from the Sunday school teacher, from the lady at church who told me it wasn't appropriate for little girls to ask why Lot's daughters did what they did. I'm always asking too many questions. I'm always too much.

But Grandmother is smiling.

"Don't ever stop," she says.

Her kitchen smelled like weak coffee and whatever was baking—usually something with cinnamon, because Grandmother believed cinnamon could fix almost anything. The wallpaper was yellow with small flowers, peeling at the corners but cheerful anyway. She had a clock shaped like a cat with eyes that moved back and forth, and I thought it was the most wonderful and terrifying thing I'd ever seen.

I visited her once a month, when Mother needed a break from me. That's how she phrased it: "I need a break from you, Rena LeeAnn." Like I was a job. Like I was something to be endured.

Grandmother never said that. Grandmother said, "Tell me what you've been reading," and then actually listened while I explained the coffee books and the atlas I'd found at the library sale and the way I'd been trying to figure out why the sky was blue by looking at it very hard, which hadn't worked but seemed like it should.

"You're too much," Mother said, and it meant: be less.

"You're too much," Grandmother said, and it meant: don't you dare.

She died when I was fourteen. Heart attack, quick and without warning, the way she would have wanted—she always said she didn't want to linger. I didn't get to say goodbye. Mother said funerals weren't appropriate for children, so I stayed home and read the coffee books and cried into a cup of weak, too-sweet coffee I'd made myself.

That's the thing about people who see you clearly—they become part of how you see yourself, so seamlessly that you forget they were ever separate. Grandmother told me my questions were good, and somewhere in my bones I believed her, even when everyone else said otherwise. Even when I stopped asking out loud, I never stopped asking. I just got quieter about it.

She planted that. She didn't live to see it grow.

The woman at the student table has finished her coffee. She's staring into the empty cup like it contains something more than dregs.

I realize my hand is on my chest. On the necklace. Grandmother's necklace—the one Dad brought me at Christmas, the one that was hers before it was mine.[^2]

I didn't even know I was touching it.

The woman gets up, brings her cup to the counter. "Thank you," she says. "That was exactly right."

"Family recipes usually are," I say, and she smiles and leaves, and the bell rings, and I'm alone in the shop with the afternoon light and the hiss of the radiator and a sudden, strange grief for a woman who's been dead for fifteen years.

I close up at 6. I climb the stairs. I stand in my kitchen—the corner with the hot plate that Grandmother would have found hilarious—and I make myself a cup of coffee.

Weak. Three sugars. A crime against everything I know.

It's terrible. It tastes like being eleven years old and feeling, for the first time, like maybe the too-muchness wasn't a flaw. Like maybe the questions were the point.

I drink it anyway. All of it.

Mabel watches from the cozy chair, judging me silently, because cats understand that some rituals don't have to make sense. You just do them. You just remember.

The necklace is warm against my skin.

"Thanks, Grandma," I say to the empty apartment.

Somewhere, I think, she's smiling. Probably drinking terrible coffee. Probably still asking questions.

I hope wherever she is, they have good cinnamon.

[^1]: The Champion men communicate love through coffee and baked goods and things they never say out loud. This is genetic.

[^2]: Dad gave it to me at Christmas without explanation. "Your mother wanted you to have it," he said, which meant Linda had found it and given it to him to give to me because she still couldn't say the words herself. Grandmother's love, filtered through two people who don't know how to say it. Standard Champion family communication.