Coffee Stained Heart

The woman at the booth sat with her plate. A short stack of pancakes. No butter. No syrup. A tall cup of coffee. No milk. No sugar. Every day at the end of my shift, as I was untying the printed bunny apron native to the small coffee shop, she would walk in. She would let in the hot summer air that whispered of the promise of outside while chimes at the door would sing her arrival. She would make her way, briskly, to the same booth. She always clutched her dingy brown purse close to her chest as if wandering lost in the dark shadow streets of downtown Philly.

Without fail she would be there. Even when I stayed home – sick, tired, with my boyfriend, or just bored of redundancy – I knew I could count on her being the constant. We waitresses would make bets and stories. We tallied and marked. That summer, the woman came in for exactly two months for exactly an hour.

Marie insisted she was waiting for a husband or a son. Maybe this was their favorite coffee shop and she was merely waiting for chance/fate/destiny to align and reunite her estranged loved one. Jenny didn’t think so. She reasoned that the woman obviously was divorced or a widow who must be so sad about the drastic lifestyle change that she needed some sort of consistency. I guess there was something consistent about coffee.

They told me she never touched her pancakes but drank all her coffee. They told me she always left a faint red lip print on the white cup. They told me no one ever showed up to sit with her and yet she continued to sit in the only booth made for six. One time – Marie said – there had been a sudden rush of customers entering the coffee shop. No one, however, dared sit next to her or ask her to move. Instead a group of teenage girls squeezed an additional three into their smaller booth. That day – again according to Marie – the coffee shop would have been filled to capacity if not for the lonely woman and her booth. This woman all summer bled red onto the white cup.

All summer long I had a boyfriend but at the end of those two months he broke up with me. I only deserved – I guess – text message heartbreak for a relationship of two years. I got the message at the end of my shift just as the woman was walking in. As my phone buzzed foreshadowing my heart cells’ death, the door chimes sang her arrival. Immediately her short stack of pancakes – no butter or syrup – and her tall cup of coffee – no milk or sugar – were placed in front of her. By now it had become clockwork. I untied my bunny printed apron native to the corner store coffee shop, slid in across from her, and ordered the same.

That day we both bled red onto white coffee cups and used the pancakes –untouched– to soak up the tears and pain. That day I realized the woman was waiting for someone. She was waiting for me.

She said her name was Maya too – only it wasn’t spelled the same. I didn’t bother to ask how. It seemed vaguely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. I wanted to know why she had been waiting for me.

“I saw you the first day I moved into town,” she said after a long sip of coffee. “I knew I had to meet you, you know? It was like a magnetic pull.”

I stifled my cough with a napkin. It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that I should be wary of this woman who shared my name. I looked up from my coffee and stared the odd woman down. Her brown purse sat on the table by her left hand, ready to be grabbed at any time. She also wore a brown button down collared blouse. It was sheer enough to make out a matching but ill fitting brown bra. By my reasoning she could not have been more than thirty but her dressing and pulled back – brown – hair and glasses gave her an aged veneer. The woman seemed harmless enough; however, most strangers tend to be at first.

“What do you want,” I questioned after the initial shock of her weird statement.

“This coffee is the best around. I think. It’s rich. Goes down well,” she mused as though conversing with heiresses about fine wines. She sat her coffee cup down and played with her pancakes, cutting them into halves, then fourths, and eights and whatever came next until they were tiny squares. She pushed her cup around and together we watched the dark smooth liquid wiggle and wobble around in the cup.

“I think you and I are similar,” she said while still caught in the coffee’s strong hypnotic caffeine grip. She finally looked up at me. “I see you and I see myself. And it’s not simply sharing the same name.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. Honestly I sat down here because I thought… I mean… you seemed lonely. And I know what lonely is because I was lonely. But then I found this beautiful guy-"

“Tate.”

“Yes! Tate… but how could you-”. I refused to finish my sentence, realizing my mistake. Obviously this woman had been following me. I grabbed my car keys from the counter and ran out of the shop. Only when I was seated in my car – locked – did I look back at the coffee shop. She sat there. And sat there. I waited to see if she would follow me but only when the hour had ended did she get up and leave. She didn’t, however, approach me in my car. Instead she turned in the other direction and in a matter of minutes she had disappeared around the corner.