The Moment of Everything by Shelly King Page B

him, his breaths coming out in short puffs, the fingers of his pinched hands wiggling like they were playing scales on an invisible keyboard. He was already feeling bits of his fiefdom slipping away. And me? What was I going to do here? I was already having a hard enough time finding a job between romance novels. When was I going to find time to do any work?
    “Look, you’re around all the time anyway,” Hugo said. “I’d say you’ve completed our training program. Next thing you know you’ll be on the fast track to serious screwing around like Jason.” He wrapped his arm around my shoulders and squeezed me against him as if he understood what a consolation prize my life had become. “Nobody panic. It’s just until Maggie finds a new job.”
    Jason looked back and forth between Hugo and me in disbelief. He walked up to Hugo, lifted the spoon out of his mug, sucked on it like a lollipop, then plunked it back in the tea. Then he slammed the recipe box on the counter and disappeared into the stacks.
    “That boy’s not wrapped too tight,” Robert said.
    “He’ll come around,” Hugo said, looking forlornly at his mug. He paced back and forth in front of the counter, unsure of what to do with the germ-infected thing.
    “I won’t take handouts,” I said, “If you’re paying me, I mean to work.”
    “That’ll be a change around here,” Robert said.
    “Fine. Do whatever you think ten dollars an hour requires,” Hugo said. “I trust your judgment. Just don’t sit on the floor. Jason’s bare feet have been there.”
    *  *  *
    With two hours of work already under my belt, I treated myself to a coffee break. Next door at Cuppa Joe, a lanky teenager pulled himself away from the Overly Tattooed & Pierced around the outside tables to come inside and take my order.
    I knew the chalkboard menu at Cuppa Joe by heart. The four-dollar drink names were straight out of a witch’s book of spells.
    “Savage Hammerhead Mocha?” the kid asked.
    I never gave my usual order a second thought. I’d given up just about everything from my working life except this. But at $10 an hour before taxes, how long was I working for a Savage Hammerhead Mocha?
    “Small coffee with room.”
    “Nifty,” he said, looking at the cash register as if he couldn’t decide which one of the poles on a car battery to attach the jumper cable. Squeezing his eyes halfway shut and rubbing one hand over his shaved head, he poked at the keys and looked relieved when it rang up the right amount. I didn’t blame him. Mrs. Callahn, the owner of Cuppa Joe, was beyond particular about how things ran in her shop. While Hugo’s management style was a laughing brook, Mrs. Callahn’s was a full-force fire hose.
    I handed over a buck fifty plus a quarter to the tip jar, which was papered over with cartoons enticing you to give money to the underpaid. The kid handed me my coffee, which I milked up before settling in with the recipe box at the large round table in the middle of Cuppa Joe. Around me, at the smaller tables, several coders on laptops sat with headphones to save them from music that sounded like grumpy mating wildebeests. A group of medical residents pored over big three-ring binders, ignoring the two clean-cut khaki-clad guys next to them discussing “new paradigms.” In the corner, a middle-aged couple was fighting. Not yelling fighting. Leaning in and whispering fighting, which is actually worse.
    A familiar pickup pulled up to the curb. Years ago, it must have been white, but now the orange rust stains gave it the look of a wild Pinto. Mrs. Callahn had arrived, her truck stacked with bags of beans from an organic supplier up in the Santa Cruz Mountains that only she seemed to have ever heard of. Petite and willowy with a marine buzz cut, she wore an orange broomstick skirt with a tank top, denim vest, and turquoise earrings large enough to eat dinner off of. Mrs. Callahn always looked like she should be running the gift shop of the