Chapter 30: The Coffee Date Panic
The morning sun cut through the kitchen windows in long, golden shafts, catching the dust motes that hung lazily in the air. I had my hands buried in warm suds, scrubbing the breakfast dishes at a pace that was more meditation than chore. The house was quiet in that particular way it only ever was when Allan was on an early shift and Margaret had not yet called to remind me about Sunday dinner. Two days had passed since the bonfire, since Dana had fallen asleep on my shoulder, since the movie had made my skin prickle in ways I had not fully processed.
I was still thinking about it, about the way that fictional woman had looked at her new town with the same suspicion I had once worn like armor. I had almost laughed at the irony. Almost.
The screen door slammed open with a crack that sent a plate nearly flying from my hand. Dana stood in the doorway, windbreaker half-zipped, auburn hair wild around her face like she had run the whole way from town. Her chest heaved.
"He said yes," she gasped.
I set the plate down carefully, my heart still hammering from the shock. "Who said yes?"
"Ellis." She took two stumbling steps into the kitchen and grabbed my hands, pulling me away from the sink. "I asked him. At the station, right before his shift ended. I walked right up to his desk and I said, Ellis, there's this coffee shop on Maple Street, and I was wondering if you would want to go with me, maybe this week, and he looked at me for like ten whole seconds without saying anything and I almost died right there, but then he said yes. He said yes, Sabrina."
Her grip tightened and she spun me in a clumsy circle, her boots scuffing against the worn kitchen floor. I stumbled, laughed despite myself, and let her whirl me around until the room was a blur of honey light and red hair. When she finally released me, she collapsed into the chair at the kitchen table, the windbreaker pooling around her like she had deflated.
"Oh God," she said, the euphoria draining out of her voice. "Oh God, what do I wear?"
I leaned against the counter, drying my hands on a dish towel. "I thought you'd be happy."
"I am happy. I'm terrified. There's a difference." She looked up at me with wide eyes. "I've been waiting three years for this. Three years. And now that it's happening, I don't remember how to be a person. I don't remember how to talk. What do people talk about at coffee? The weather? I don't care about the weather. I care about him. What do I say?"
I crossed the kitchen and sat across from her, the chair's wooden legs scraping against the floor. "You say what you always say. You two talk all the time at the station."
"That's different. That's dispatch duty, that's stolen glances across the bullpen. That's him coming by my desk to drop off paperwork and me forgetting how to breathe. This is real. This is a date." She said the word like it was a foreign object. "What if I'm boring? What if I run out of things to say? What if he realizes I'm just some girl who sits in a room full of radios all day?"
"He already knows you're that girl," I said. "He's known you for three years. He said yes because he wants to spend time with you, not because he thinks you're someone else."
Dana slumped deeper into her chair, her shoulders folding in with a vulnerability that made something twist in my chest. I knew that feeling. The terror of being seen, truly seen, and found wanting. I had worn that feeling like a second skin when I first arrived in this town, when Allan had looked at me across a carburetor and I had wondered how long it would take him to figure out that I was not who I said I was.
But he had never figured it out. He had never even looked for cracks.
"What if I say something stupid?" Dana asked quietly.
"Then he'll laugh. And you'll laugh. And you'll have something to tell me about afterwards." I leaned forward, catching her eyes. "You're not going to say something stupid. You're going to say something real. Because that's who you are. You showed up at a bonfire and asked to see my truck. You're not someone who plays games."
She was quiet for a moment, chewing her lower lip. Then, slowly, a smile crept back onto her face. "We're going to the coffee shop on Maple. The one with the blue awning."
"I know it."
"I'm going to wear my green sweater. The one with the buttons." She sat up a little straighter. "Do you think that's too much? It's a nice sweater. It's not fancy, but it's nice."
I stood and poured her a cup of coffee from the pot, setting it in front of her. "It's perfect."
"You haven't seen it."
"I don't need to. It's the sweater you picked, which means it's the one that makes you feel like you. And that's the one to wear."
Dana wrapped her hands around the mug, letting the warmth seep into her palms. She looked at me with something like wonder. "How do you always know what to say?"
I shrugged, the lie settling easily into my shoulders. "I've had practice."
"With Allan?"
"Something like that."
She laughed, the sound bright and unburdened, and I felt the tension in the room ease. I sat back down, cradling my own coffee, and let the silence stretch comfortably between us.
"What time is the date?" I asked.
"Tomorrow. Eleven. I have the whole afternoon planned in my head and then I forget all of it the second I'm in the same room as him."
"I don't think that's a problem."
"It is if I forget my own name." She took a long sip of coffee, then set the mug down with a decisive clink. "Okay. Okay. I can do this. I can go on a coffee date with Ellis and act like a normal human being. I've handled worse. I once talked a hunter through applying a tourniquet over the radio while he was bleeding out in the woods. I can handle a cup of coffee."
"That's the spirit."
She grinned at me, the wild energy returning to her eyes. "Thank you, Sabrina. For listening. For the encouragement. For not laughing at me when I burst through your door like a lunatic."
"Anytime." I meant it. There was something grounding about being the person someone else could fall apart in front of. I had spent so many months being the one who needed to stay composed, to hold my secrets close and manage the story I told. But Dana had never once made me feel like I was performing. She had shown up with her heart open and expected the same from me.
I looked at her across the table, at the flush still high on her cheeks, and I thought about how strange it was that this was my life now. That I had a friend who needed advice about a boy. That I had a kitchen full of morning light and the smell of coffee. That I had a ring on my finger and a man who loved me and a future that stretched out like a promise I had never expected to receive.
I was still holding secrets. I would always be holding secrets. But maybe the girl sitting across from me, with her wild hair and even wilder hopes, was worth keeping them for.
I watched her take another sip of coffee, the tension in her shoulders finally easing into something like hope. And on impulse, before I could second-guess myself, I said, "Do you want help picking out the outfit?"
Dana's eyes went wide. "You would do that?"
"Sure. I've got the morning free."
She set the mug down so fast it rattled against the wood. "Yes. Absolutely yes. Come on." She was out of the chair and at my side in a single motion, grabbing my hand and pulling me toward the door before I could even stand. "We have to go now. Before I talk myself out of it. Or before I change my mind and wear a burlap sack."
"Burlap sack would be memorable," I said, stumbling after her.
"Not the kind of memorable I'm going for."
She dragged me through the screen door and across the porch, her grip fierce and insistent. The morning air hit my face, cool and clean, and I laughed as she pulled me down the steps toward the battered sedan parked in the gravel drive. It was a faded blue thing with a dent in the passenger door and a bumper sticker that read, I'm a dispatcher, I talk to strangers for a living.
"That's your car?" I asked.
"That's my car. Get in. We're on a timeline."
She yanked open the driver's door and slid behind the wheel while I circled to the passenger side, still laughing. The seatbelt clicked into place and she was already backing out of the drive, gravel spraying, before I had my door fully shut.
"You know," I said, gripping the door handle, "I think I liked it better when you were terrified. You're a hazard when you're excited."
"Terror and excitement are the same thing," she said, her eyes fixed on the road ahead. "I'm just expressing it differently now. Faster."
We bumped down the farm road, past the fields still wet with morning dew, past the mailbox at the end of the lane that I had painted last month with Allan. The town appeared in the distance, a cluster of rooftops and church steeples against the green hills. Dana drove with the kind of focused intensity I associated with someone who had never quite gotten comfortable behind the wheel, hands at ten and two, leaning slightly forward.
"Tell me about the sweater," I said.
"It's green. A nice green. Not forest, not emerald. Somewhere in between. It has these little buttons down the front, pearl colored. I bought it two years ago for a Christmas party at the station and I've never worn it since because there was never an occasion good enough."
"Until now."
"Until now." She shot me a quick glance. "Is that crazy? Wearing something I've been saving?"
"No. It's not crazy. It's the opposite of crazy. You're giving it a moment it deserves."
She smiled at that, a soft, private thing, and turned the car down Maple Street. The town woke around us, shopkeepers rolling up awnings, a man on the sidewalk walking a golden retriever. We passed the coffee shop with the blue awning, and Dana's eyes flicked to it for a second before she looked away, her knuckles whitening on the wheel.
"Tomorrow at eleven," she said, more to herself than to me.
"Tomorrow at eleven."
She pulled into the driveway of a small bungalow on a side street, the kind of house that had a porch swing and flower boxes that needed repainting. She killed the engine and sat there for a moment, breathing.
"Okay," I said. "Show me the sweater."
We went inside through the front door, which she didn't bother locking, and the house smelled like cinnamon and old wood. The living room was neat in the way of someone who didn't have much time to make it messy, a stack of magazines on the coffee table, a throw blanket folded over the arm of the couch. She led me down a short hallway to her bedroom, where the bed was made and a pile of clothes sat on a chair in the corner like a monument to indecision.
"The sweater's in the closet," she said, pointing.
I pulled open the closet door and there it was, hanging between a flannel shirt and a denim jacket. It was a soft sage green, the buttons exactly as she'd described, pearl colored and delicate. I touched the fabric. Cashmere, or something close to it.
"This is nice," I said. "This is really nice."
"I know. That's the problem."
I lifted it off the hanger and held it up. "What's the problem?"
"What if it's too nice? What if he thinks I'm trying too hard?"
I turned to look at her. She stood in the middle of her bedroom, arms crossed, auburn hair a mess, wearing the same windbreaker she had burst through my door in. She looked like someone who had spent three years hoping and done absolutely nothing about it, and now the hoping was about to collide with reality.
"Listen to me," I said. "You're going to wear the sweater. You're going to wear it with jeans, or a skirt, or whatever makes you feel like yourself. And when you walk into that coffee shop, Ellis is going to see you, and he's going to be happy. Not because of the sweater. Because of you."
She uncrossed her arms slowly. "You really think so?"
"I know so."
She took the sweater from me and held it against her chest, looking down at it like it might give her an answer. Then she looked up, and something in her face settled.
"Okay," she said. "I'm wearing the sweater."
"Good."
"But you have to help me with the rest. The whole outfit. From the ground up."
I smiled. "That's why I'm here."
She grabbed my hand again and pulled me toward the pile of clothes on the chair, and I let myself be pulled, let myself be part of this small, bright thing. Tomorrow she would sit across from Ellis in a coffee shop with a blue awning, and she would talk and laugh and forget to be scared. And I would be here, in this small town, with this strange new life that kept giving me reasons to stay.