Below is an excerpt from the story.

By Greg Halpin

"Please don't die. Oh, God, please don't die," I thought over and over again. "Please be okay. He can't die."

I waited on a customer as the man sat ten feet away dying, or at the very least doing a pretty good imitation of a dying man. His friend tended to him as we waited for the ambulance. I continued to serve customers to avoid looking at the man. I didn't know what else to do. There was nothing I could do except wait for the ambulance.

The day started ordinarily enough, an uneventful Scranton morning, hot as hell in the middle of August. Then, without any warning, a regular customer decided to have a heart attack in my business, Café del Sol.

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A few hours before, I was bored out of my mind, wishing something exciting or stimulating would happen. I was the one dying, dying for a cigarette. I quit smoking two weeks before. Mark Twain was right--quitting is easy. Staying OFF the smokes, however, was the tough part, even with the nicotine patch stuck to my shoulder. I impulsively tapped it every few minutes, to make sure the patch released the drug into my system as the urges struck.        

Business was slow and had been all summer. Of course, it was. Café del Sol was a gourmet coffee shop in Scranton in the 1990s, after all. Many Scrantonians still balked at paying a buck for a cup of java. The University of Scranton had been out of session, except for a small number of summer students. In another week, however, all of the students would return, and business would triple. Autumn would arrive a few weeks later and business would pick up even more. As the temperature cooled people would want steaming cups of coffee. The café would resume its place as the social center for many customers. Life would get more interesting and exciting again . In the meantime, summer dragged on. Every day was like the day before.

John the tailor from a few doors up stopped in for his coffee before anyone else that morning, like always. He opened his shop at 7, while I didn't open the café until 7:30. I sometimes found John waiting at the door for me before I unlocked it.

"Morning, John."

"Give me a large one, doc," he said as he entered. I hated that he called me doc, but I didn't have the heart tell him. He was a nice old guy.

Barry, the disgraced former English teacher turned Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor and vitamin seller, arrived a few minutes after the tailor.

"How's it going, Barry?"

"Not great, but my worst day sober is better than my best day drunk ," Barry said. He had a different AA phrase for me every day.

"Good to hear," I said as I handed him his coffee.

The nearby lawyers and office workers began to arrive next, ordering their usual coffees, lattes, muffins, and bagels. University staff trickled in for their usual caffeine fix over the next hour or so.

Will, the owner of the dead head shop next door, rolled in around 10. "Give me a regular diesel ," he would say as if he was ordering fuel for a truck. I never understood that one, but didn't bother to ask him about it.

Reggie, the owner of the used CD shop two doors up, strolled in for his coffee and bagel. "What's the flavor of the day?"

"Cinnamon Hazelnut."

"Ah, give me a house blend."

"You got it," I said. I poured him a cup.

"I got a CD in you're gonna love," Reggie said as he added sugar to his coffee. "'Study in Brown' by Clifford Brown. Great stuff."

"Don't know that album. I'll stop up after lunch and give it a listen."

It was the same old routine. You could set a clock to these people and their orders. You could even set a clock to me.

Jake Piazza, my best friend since the first grade, stopped by in the late morning on his way to open his jewelry store a few blocks away. Jake's visit was the highlight of my day. I lived vicariously through him. 

"How was Tink's last night?" I said. Tink's was the big nightclub in Scranton at the time.

"You should have gone, bro," he said. "It was great, but I'm so fucking hungover and dehydrated. Give me a large house blend and a plain bagel with cream cheese."

Jake grabbed a large bottle of spring water from the Snapple cooler. He opened it up and gulped down half of it while we waited for his bagel to toast.

"I met a girl, Leticia, a Spanish chick. She could really dance. We went back to my place, but she only let me play with her boobies. I got tired of that after a while. By that point, we were both starved, so we went to the Glider Diner. I didn't get to sleep until four. I'm going out again tonight, though. You should go with me."

"Maybe I will," I said. "I need to do something different."

"Now you're talking. We gotta hit the clubs while we're still in our twenties. The girls at Tink's won't look at us after we turn thirty."

God help us if we're going to Tink's when we're thirty," I said.

"Yeah, you don't be the old guy at the club, looking pathetic and desperate. Look at the time. I'm late. I gotta open my store." Jake threw a five dollar bill on the counter and left .

After Jake's exit, the café was quiet for the rest of the morning. Other than a few customers here and there, it would stay quiet until lunch time. As if the boredom wasn't bad enough, it was getting hotter outside. It had been sweltering all week. Scranton is a horrible place in August even if it is, as they say, a good place to raise a family. The sun blazes in the sky, baking the city. There's no relief from it. With the heat from the concrete and exhaust from the passing vehicles, it was stifling outside. Inside the café, the air conditioner whirred and the ceiling fans sounded like helicopters as their blades cut through the thick, humid air.

My employee, Courtney Davidson, arrived for work shortly before 11 AM. She and I began to prepare for lunch, though there wasn't much to do as I didn't expect it to be busy. Courtney resumed work at the café after having the summer off. It wasn't busy enough to need a second person in the summer. But with University of Scranton students returning, I wanted Courtney to get back into the groove of working and be ready for the next week when things would start getting busy again. The previous year, my new employees weren't ready for the back-to-school rush. It took two weeks to get everyone up to speed.

After we finished prepping, I sent Courtney up to the loft to stock up on paper cups, napkins, and go over the inventory of supplies, that sort of stuff. That took a whole ten minutes, after which I asked her to update the menu on the computer.

"Change the prices based on what I wrote on the note. Add the new coffee flavors and print it out so I can take it to PDQ Printing tomorrow and get have copies made."  

"You got it, captain." Courtney started calling me captain as a joke because we were both Star Trek fans. Eventually, it stuck. She called me "captain" as often as she called me Hank.

I read the Wall Street Journal while waiting for the lunch crowd . Shortly before noon, I looked up from the paper and saw scores of people leaving the Houlihan-McLean Center across the street. They must have had an event there that morning, though I didn't notice anyone enter the building.

"Hey Courtney, it looks like it's going to be busier than we thought. C'mon down."

"Be right there. Just printing the menu now," she said. A minute later she came down from the loft.

"Here's it is," she said, handing me the menu.  

"Thanks," I said. I took a quick look at the menu. It didn't look right. "What's this . . . and this?" I said pointing to different areas of the menu.

Courtney gave me a questioning glance. 

"You changed the font," I said.

"I thought I would just spice it up a bit."

"I asked you to update the prices, not spice it up."

"Hank, you've been using the same font on the menu since you opened the café. It needed a new look."

"No it didn't ."

"The old menu had that boring font."

"It's not boring. It's classic. It's a menu, Courtney, not a poster for a movie. People just need to read it with ease. You've got three or four different fonts and sizes. It looks like a ransom note for Christ's sake," I said and laughed. The door opened. We both turned to look. Several people entered. A dozen others were standing in front of the café talking. 

"Alright, here they come," I said. "We'll talk about the menu later."

The first rush of about forty people I had never seen before began flowing into the café from across the street--a lot for a place that only had seating for twenty. It would be more than enough to make up for a slow day. Some people only wanted bottles of spring water, Snapple, or soda to cool off and immediately left, but others wanted iced coffee or lattes. Many wanted sandwiches and sat at tables. More people were leaving the building across the street and making their way into the café.

Courtney and I worked as quickly as we could. It was great to be busy, but the heat made it difficult to keep up with the customers. People just kept coming in and ordering.   

Among the crowd of new customers, regular customers like Tim and Kevin, limped their way into the café. Tim and Kevin worked for Pennsylvania Gas and Water, PG&W as everyone called it, reading water meters. They stopped in for lunch several days a week. Their shirts were soaked from sweat around their collars and underarms. Walking for miles in these temperatures couldn't be easy, especially for guys in their forties.

Invariably, Tim and Kevin asked me if I watched whatever game was on TV the night before. It didn't matter the season or the sport, Tim and Kevin watched it. I always told them I missed the game. Though I can still tell you the Yankees lineup from when I was a ten years old , I stopped following sports as a teenager. At thirteen, I realized girls were more interesting. Tim and Kevin knew I didn't watch sports but they always asked if I watched the game the night before. It was like a running joke. They liked busting my chops.

The previous winter, Tim asked "Who you rooting for in the Super Bowl?"

"That depends," I said.

"On what?" Kevin said.

"On whose playing." I said.

"I've got a hundred bucks on the game," Tim said "and you don't even know whose playing. Stop listening to National People's Radio and turn on ESPN."

"National Public Radio," I said, correcting Tim.

"Same thing," Tim said. "Bunch a pinko commies."

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Copyright © Greg Halpin, 2010 All Rights Reserved