Ted wiped his wand.
Michelle had been very clear about this point in training. "No muck on the wands! Customers don't want to see muck on the wands! Wipe your wand every time!"
Ted had snickered and looked to the group of Queequeg's trainees around him, looking for somebody else who might be amused, somebody else to whom he might say, "That's actually a high quality piece of advice in other aspects of life as well!" but he had only found the blank stares of the artists and students ten years younger than him and the earnest, attentive stares of the immigrants looking for the bottom step of the American Dream ladder.
So he'd kept his joke to himself and tried to pay attention as Michelle went on about how you can't just leave a pitcher of steamed milk sitting there and keep reheating it—you have to get fresh milk, and if it took longer to move the customers through, well, they'd thank you when their espresso drink didn't have that weird, thrice-steamed milk taste. And he pretty much kept to himself during his shifts at Queequeg's; of course he still had enough hush money from the university that he didn't need this job, at least from a financial standpoint, but once, in a former life, he had been a good student, and in this life, he still had enough desire to please the teacher that he wanted to avoid Michelle's wrath. The best way to do that was to keep your head down and your wand clean.
The customers in this particular Queequeg's location—across from the Suffolk County Courthouse in downtown Boston—were not chatty: they were on their way to the office, or to court, they were already late, maybe they were hung over from trying to drink away the emptiness of their lives last night, and they wanted their lattes five minutes ago, goddammit, and they were always on their cell phones anyway, talking to real people while barely making eye contact with their caffeine-pushing servants.
But this was, except for the ten o'clock lull, a busy location, which gave him less time to think, which was good. He'd spent a lot of time over the past ten years thinking, and it was an activity he really didn't enjoy. Because what was there to think about? The Omega house, and the blood, and the way the axe had resisted slightly when it hit their necks? Or the unfairness of the fact that he was the one who'd had to deal with the vampire problem, that there were plenty of other people, bad people, stupid people, mean people who'd been on the same campus and were now happily cranking out babies and pumping money into retirement accounts, while he, who'd never so much as been in a fight, had to become a killer and wake up screaming every night. Well, no. He didn't have to. He could have wasted a lot of time running around trying to convince other people that what he'd found out was real, and then Steve would have been turned and Laura would have been turned, and it wouldn't have been long before they came for him and either turned him or drained him. So he'd been the one with the axe and the gas can and the Zippo. And for what? To save a bunch of people who would think he was insane if he ever told them that he'd saved them?
Still, it had been a decade. Why couldn't he put anything like a life together? It's not like he could go to therapy or a support group for traumatized vampire slayers or anything, but he doubted that would help anyway.
So he pulled lattes at Queequeg's and woke up screaming every night at three, and on the nights when he couldn't go back to sleep, he made a pot of coffee he got at a somewhat stingy employee discount.
Ted checked his watch. Laura was due at ten, and it was only nine-forty. Norah Jones blared from the speaker above his head, wondering why she didn't call for the fourth time that morning. Ted was wondering why she didn't just shut the hell up. The lights above the small, uncomfortable blonde wood tables gave off a feeble glow. The two comfy chairs next to the front windows were occupied by bald, bespectacled men typing on their laptops. Everything in here was muted—the music, the décor, everything but Michelle, a six-foot-tall, pear-shaped abusive whirlwind of stress who belied the fake serenity of her surroundings.
Right now Michelle was in the back, and Ted realized he should just sit back and enjoy the fact that the ten o'clock lull had come early today.
But all he could do was watch the seconds tick by on the timers on the coffee urns. He couldn't wait, and he hated himself some more for having only one friend. Ted thought that many guys would be happy to have a beautiful woman they'd known since college in their lives, a woman to whom they could tell anything, a woman who knew the very worst thing they had ever done and loved them not in spite of it but because of it.
Actually, he knew most guys would love to have Laura in their lives, because every time he'd ever been around her and other men, he saw the envy in their eyes as they looked from the raven-haired petite professional with the killer rack to his gangly, goofy self. If they only knew.
Ted was happy to have Laura in his life. It's just that she would never be in his life like those envious guys thought she was, not unless he became a woman, and probably not even then.
Ted sighed and glanced at the urn timers again. In twelve minutes he'd have to dump the Yirgacheffe, and, two minutes later, the Columbia.
"Ted!" Jean-Marie yelled. "Large skim latte!"
"Sorry, sorry. Large skim latte comin' up." Ted hadn't even noticed a customer coming in. He grabbed the cup and had no idea what name Jean-Marie had written on the side. He couldn't even guess male or female.
He made the espresso, steamed the skim milk, and mixed them perfectly, slightly off the Queequeg's approved ratio, but perfect according to the formula he'd been secretly working on for the last few months. He looked up and saw that several more customers had come in. So much for the lull. Using both hands, he reverently placed his creation on the counter. He imagined a spotlight shining down on it and a choir of angels singing. It was possibly, he reflected, the perfect latte, the very platonic ideal of a latte, the latte against which all other lattes would forever be measured. He hoped that whoever consumed it would appreciate it, would take a few minutes to savor it and not just gulp it down on their way to court.
"Uh . . . " he said to the three or four customers assembled by the counter. "I'm sorry . . . I can't read this. I'm gonna guess Rachel? Maybe Rowena? Rodney? Richard? Something that starts with an R, or possibly a K? Large skim latte?"
A tall woman with short auburn hair and a black, sleeveless shirt came to the counter. "It's actually Rhiannon," she said.
Ted looked at the cup again. "No, I'm pretty sure your name is Rodney." He braced himself for the onslaught of abuse, but instead he got a small laugh. "See, it says it right here."
She took the cup and squinted at it. "Hmm. I think it's actually Ricki. That's at least a little more unisex than Rodney. And thank you for not saying anything about Fleetwood Mac."
"I try to avoid the subject of Fleetwood Mac at all costs."
Did her eyes just sparkle? And did it just get brighter in here, or was that just her smile? "I'd love to do the same, but my parents guaranteed me a lifetime of Fleetwood Mac jokes."
"I guess it could be worse. They could have called you 'Landslide' or 'You Make Loving Fun.' Dumbass! He just made a Fleetwood Mac joke!
Rhiannon was still smiling. She took a sip of her latte and still didn't move away from the counter. "That was actually a Fleetwood Mac joke. But I forgive you, because you have made what I think is the best latte I've ever had."
She did appreciate the platonic latte! And she still wasn't running off! "Hey," he said, "I don't know if you are . . . "
Jean-Marie interrupted him. "TED! I said medium half-caf, half-soy mochachino!"
Half-soy? Who the hell wanted half-soy? Make up your mind!
"Hey, can I get my drink sometime this week?" Ted looked at the half-soy mochachino drinker. He was indistinguishable from any of the other guys in suits who came in here—white guy, medium height, medium build, look of barely suppressed rage like he'd probably once played a contact sport and now had become a lawyer so he'd have a socially acceptable place to put his aggression.
Rhiannon was now fading back from the counter. "I'll be back tomorrow," she said, and she smiled and disappeared.
Ted smiled at this little miracle. Funky, beautiful women just didn't come in to this Queequeg's unless they were on their way to their arraignment or something, and, given the fact that she'd said she'd be back tomorrow, it seemed a safe bet that Rhiannon wasn't on trial for anything. The half-soy guy was tapping his fingers on the counter, so Ted began the process of assembling the half-caf, half-soy mochachino. Half-soy. Jesus Christ. He wondered if it was even worth trying to assemble perfect proportions for this particular drink, since nobody else was ever going to order it. Dutifully he steamed the milk-soy mixture, and the guy was practically hanging over the counter, on which he was resting his big leather man-purse. "I really have an important meeting," the guy said.
"Yes sir. I am steaming with all due speed," Ted said.
"Don't be a smartass, okay, just make the fucking drink," the guy said. Ted simply wasn't feeling macho enough to counter this with anything at all, so he poured the drink and called out, loudly, "Half-caf, half-soy mochachino! And may I suggest foregoing caffeine entirely next time!"
There were snickers from the other patrons, and the guy grabbed his drink, slung his man-purse over his shoulder, and stormed out. As he swung the man-purse off the counter, a CD case fell out of it and clattered to the floor at Ted's feet. There was no way he was calling after the guy for that, and he seriously considered just crunching it under his foot, but then Jean-Marie was calling more orders.
He made five more drinks, and he kept kicking the CD case as he shuttled from fridge to steamer, so when there was a temporary lull, he reached down and picked up the CD. He considered throwing it away, but then, without really knowing why, he tucked it into the pocket of his ocean-blue apron instead.