Coffee (due South)
When Ray Vecchio got divorced (for the second time), he drove all the way up to Chicago from Miami and parked in the street outside his family’s house. He sat there for half an hour, thinking about getting out of the car and opening the front door and talking to Frannie and Maria and Tony and his mother, and after the sun had gone down and it had gotten cold, he turned the engine back on and drove to Ray Kowalski’s place. He couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.
Kowalski opened the door almost before he’d finished knocking, and Ray had to wonder who he’d been waiting for, but he didn’t look surprised when he saw Ray there, didn’t say anything. Neither of them did. They stood, and looked at each other – the bond of men who’d divorced the incomparable Stella – and then Kowalski stepped aside, and Ray came in. He made a bed on the ratty old couch, and slept better than he had in weeks.
Ray was woken in the morning, not by the smell of breakfast or the familiar whirr of Chicago in the distance, but by the sound of Kowalski stubbing his toe on the breakfast bar and swearing a blue streak. He propped himself up on his elbows, and decided that he was clearly having a nightmare, because the alternative was that Kowalski was actually making instant coffee with lukewarm tap water sweetened with Smarties that had to be at least a week old. And then, for the love of God, drinking it. Ray collapsed back onto the couch and pulled the blanket over his head.
Kowalski’s footsteps thunked heavy on the floorboards in his boots, and then stopped near Ray’s head. “Uh,” Kowalski said, the first real words he’d directed at Ray at all, “You want me to tell Welsh you’re back?”
“I’ll call him when I wake up,” Ray said, loud enough to be heard from under the blanket. There was a long pause.
“Sure,” Kowalski said, and the footsteps thunked to the door, locks undone, door opened, door slammed, more swearing, locks redone. It was probably safe to come out.
Ray sat up again and looked around the living room. A turtle in a plexiglass aquarium watched him solemnly from a nearby table. “How do you live with this guy?” Ray asked, but the turtle just waved his head back and forth a little as if to say, Hey, buddy, I didn’t have a choice. “Fair enough,” Ray muttered, and got up.
When he came home that evening, Ray Kowalski found on his table – in an empty space where all the other crap had been shoved aside – a bag of whole coffee beans, an electric grinder, a pint of cream, a French press, and a brand new copper kettle. “What the hell is this?” he asked the kitchen table as a whole.
“Coffee,” said Vecchio, coming up behind him and looking smug.
Ray narrowed his eyes at him. “I have coffee. Unless you drank it all, in which case you should buy me more coffee, not…” He waved his hands expressively at the pile on the table. “Appliances! You are not moving in here,” he added quickly.
Vecchio rolled his eyes. “First of all, I wouldn’t touch that crap you call coffee if I was dying and the only thing that would save me was an emergency caffeine injection. Second of all, of course I am not moving in here, I am doing you a favor. You could at least appreciate it.”
“Thanks,” Kowalski said, more than a little sarcastic. The next morning, when Vecchio had made the coffee, he said thanks again, and maybe it was a little less sarcastic this time.
He still put Smarties in it, though. Smarties were damn delicious in coffee. Besides, watching Vecchio twitch was worth it.