Page 32 of The Lone Wolf Café
I gestured for Rowena to move aside, set the instructions back on the counter, and surveyed the mess before me. The inner filter for the percolator was pulled apart and dripping wet, with faintly brown-tinged water staining the countertop.
“Where are the coffee grounds?” I asked Rowena.
“Grounds?”
“Yes. The coffee. You’re supposed to put it in this little basket,” I plucked a cylindrical metal device full of holes off the counter. “Where is the coffee you just used?”
Rowena clenched her bottom lip between her teeth. I could tell that in her head, she was piecing together how she may have messed up making the coffee.
“Trash can,” she pointed to the corner of the café, next to the kitchen door.
I lifted the lid off the plastic trash can, and sure enough, a pile of wet, clumpy coffee beans sat on the very top of the garbage mound.
Veryintactcoffee beans.
Despite my best efforts, a burst of giggles escaped me as I placed the lid back on the trash can. I saw Rowena’s brows furrow even deeper as I descended into full-on cackling.
“What’s so funny?” she grumbled.
I looked up, my face burning red from laughing, and a tingling sensation crept down my throat and into my belly. Rowena looked adorable when she was mad.
“The coffee beans,” I pointed to the trash can, still catching my breath from laughing so hard. “You have to grind them first, silly.”
Rowena’s frustration deflated like a popped balloon, and her cheeks flushed with embarrassment.
“Oh” was all she could utter.
I spent a few minutes reassuring Rowena it was an easy mistake to make, and she was not, in her words, “a stupendously idiotic witch”. She returned to her tea-making, and I fumbled through the cabinets, trying to find a solution to the un-ground coffee beans.
Rowena didn’t have a coffee grinder, so I resorted to a mortar and pestle. I scooted next to Rowena, and the two of us worked side by side: her boiling her morning cup of Earl Grey, and me pushing the weight of my upper body into the pestle.
After five minutes, I was breaking a sweat.This is way harder than a coffee grinder.
“Where did you get this stuff anyway?” I asked Rowena, pointing to the coffee bags and the percolator.
“The general store,” she replied casually, still focused on her boiling teapot.
Realization snapped in my mind.She was the one who bought the last of the coffee supplies yesterday.
“But why?” I asked, grunting as I shoved the pestle against the coffee beans. “Change your mind about coffee?”
“No,” Rowena replied flatly. “We’re not selling this to the public. This is just for you.”
I froze, the pestle in my hand hovering over the barely-crushed coffee grounds.
“M-me?”
“Yes. You don’t like tea. You prefer coffee. So, I got you coffee.”
My cheeks prickled with warmth. I couldn’t believe Rowena had done something so generous.
“You got coffee just for me?”
Rowena shrugged. The entire time we’d been conversing, her eyes never met mine. She was intensely focused on her teapot, which was now off the boiling hot plate and hovering over one of the ceramic teacups that had little forest creatures painted on its side. Almost as if she couldn’t bear to make eye contact.
“Yes.”
“What happened to ‘unpleasant bean water’? You swore you’d never allow coffee in this place.”
