Shelf Life

June had rehearsed how to drag her suitcase down the narrow sidewalk and through the shop’s bell twice on the bus ride in, imagining a grateful squeeze of her aunt’s hand and a soft landing back into a life she had left in stages: first weekends, then months, then entire years. The reality of the bell’s chime—a bright, slightly chipped thing Rosa had hung the first winter the shop opened—felt like a small, private punctuation. The air inside was warmer than the street: coffee and old paper, lemon oil and the faint, sweet pick of a citrus cleaner that never quite masked dust. Stacks leaned like tired people; a ladder rested against the poetry wall like a patient friend. Mismatched chairs sat in clutches under low lamps, and a hand-lettered menu leaned against the pastry case, smudged at the edges where hands had rested.

Rosa was in the back room, smaller in the face than June remembered but with the same quick, steady hands. She waved June toward the counter without fuss. "You’ll be fine. Just don’t overdo the foam. People keep their secrets in the saucers here—don’t stir them up." She smiled, which in Rosa’s case was mostly a closing of the eyes and a slackening of shoulders, and then she coughed once and turned away to a step she sat to take.

June set her bag on a chair that had a nickname—"the nurse’s chair," someone had told her once—because it had an indentation where a hundred people had leaned back and exhaled. She felt absurdly young, like an actor in someone else’s memory. She had learned to run marketing campaigns with spreadsheets and pitch decks, to hide exhaustion beneath layered words and crisp evenings, but there was a kind of clarity to the ritual Rosa trusted her with. She wiped the counter, arranged the little stack of used cards by the register, and ran a finger along a spine, feeling the place vibrate under her skin with small histories.

The espresso machine, a veteran with flaking chrome, took a while to forgive her. Its portafilter required a twist she could never remember; steam escaped in a bad-tempered hiss and the first puck came out uneven enough that June chided herself aloud. "Of course you do that when I’m here," she muttered to the machine. The first customer of the morning—Mrs. Patel, who had lived down the block since before June’s birth and who always ordered the same tea and sat in the same seat—smiled like she’d been waiting for a performance and, without a word, offered June a small tin of jaggery she kept for emergency sweetness. Mrs. Patel’s hands were paper-thin and steady. She didn’t comment on June’s fumbling; she just slid the tin across and tapped the laminated menu where the chai was listed. There was a softness to the way the regulars pieced June back into the room, as if the shop rearranged itself around her presence.

Sam arrived with a guitar slung in a soft case, the kind of case that had collected dents like memories. He leaned on the doorway and grinned, the grin that remembered being friends without cataloguing it. "Look at you—back in the wild." He set his case down, pushed open a window that lent the afternoon a clean seam of light, and took in the room like someone pleased to see familiar furniture. "Coffee? I’ll get the first round. Don’t let Rosa talk you into changing anything." He moved around her with an ease that felt like an invitation rather than an obligation.

June answered carefully. She had told herself this trip would be temporary—two weeks, maybe a month—and yet the cadence of the shop was already pressing its own claims on her schedule. A small bell chimed as customers came and went, conversations spooling into one another: a teacher talking about a canceled field trip, a man arguing softly into a handset, the low rumble of a toddler who preferred climbing to sitting. June found herself listening more than speaking, calibrating how the shop thought about time. The city in her phone buzzed with messages she had ignored in the bus, holdovers of the life she’d left; she tucked it away like contraband.

Rosa appeared at the counter with a thermos and two paper masks for the back room. There was no dramatics—her illness had been a quiet, practical thing, a postponement of grand statements. "If anything goes sideways, call me," she said, and June recognized that in Rosa ‘call’ was never for drama but for the simple correction of mistakes. "The landlord might be shifting things soon, by the way," Rosa added offhand, as if the fact belonged on a list somewhere. "Just keep things running and don’t sign anything." June tucked the warning into a pocket of worry that was already beginning to swell.